Tracy Shildrick

In Defence of Subculture: Young People, Leisure and Social Divisions

This paper represents a further contribution to recent debates in the Journal of Youth Studies about subculture theory and ‘post-subcultural studies’. Specifically, we argue that the particularised focus of the latter on youth culture in relation to music, dance and style negates a fuller, more accurate exploration of the cultural identities and experiences of the majority of young people. Celebratory and broadly postmodern theories have been utilised as a means for understanding the ‘scenes’, ‘neo-tribes’ and ‘lifestyles’ that ‘post-subcultural studies’ describe. Such studies tend to pay little attention to the importance, or otherwise, of social divisions and inequalities in contemporary youth culture. Almost unanimously, post-subcultural studies reject the previously pivotal significance of class-based subcultures, as theorised by the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at Birmingham, in their attempts to explain new forms of youth cultural identity. We argue that this critique of subculture is premised on a partial interpretation of the theoretical objectives of CCCS and that, in fact, some of the theoretical and methodological propositions of the latter remain relevant. This argument is supported by a brief review of some other, very recent youth research that demonstrates the continuing role of social divisions in the making and shaping of young peoples leisure lives and youth cultural identities and practises. In conclusion, we suggest that the ambition of the CCCS to understand not only the relationship between culture and social structure, but also the ways in which individual youth biographies evolve out of this relationship, remains a valuable one for the sociology of youth.

Young People, Illicit Drug Use and the Question of Normalization

The issues of young people and drug taking have a long history, although recently the topic has been debated more intensely than ever before. Of key importance here has been the dramatic rise in the availability, range and consumption of illicit drugs, a factor that, in part, has been linked to the popularity of dance/club cultures. These changes have been interpreted by some, both within and without academia, as being indicative of a process of the normalization of illicit drug use. This paper reports on qualitative research data that explored young peoples youth cultural identification and experiences while also enquiring into how such experiences may be related to the use of illicit drugs. This paper critically examines normalization theory and draws attention to weaknesses on both an empirical and a theoretical level. It is suggested in this paper that, as it stands, normalization theory presents an overly simplistic account of young peoples drug use. This paper argues instead for a more differentiated understanding of normalization.

Street corner society: leisure careers, youth (sub)culture and social exclusion

Abstract This paper draws upon qualitative research with ‘socially excluded’ young people in the North East of England. It proposes that the concept and study of ‘leisure careers’ is useful in understanding the transitions, (sub)cultural experiences and identities of social groups like this. The empirical focus is upon the significance of leisure careers in the neighbourhood‐based, social networks of some criminally involved, socially excluded young adults. Theoretically, we argue that a focus on leisure careers, as part of a broad, holistic approach to youth transitions, can help overcome some of the problems that currently affect youth studies. In particular, fuller examination of shifting, leisure‐based activities and identities within studies of youth transition may help bridge the analytical divide between that tradition of youth research and that which focuses primarily on youth culture and identity.

Poverty talk: how people experiencing poverty deny their poverty and why they blame ‘the poor’

Drawing on life history interviews with sixty men and women in north-east England who were caught up in ‘the low-pay, no-pay cycle’, this article describes how people living in poverty talk about poverty – in respect of themselves and others. Paradoxically, interviewees subscribed to a powerful set of ideas that denied poverty and morally condemned ‘the poor’. These findings are theorized in four ways: first, informants deployed close points of comparison that diminished a sense of relative poverty and deprivation; second, dissociation from ‘the poor’ reflects long-running stigma and shame but is given extra force by current forms of ‘scroungerphobia’; third, discourses of the ‘undeserving poor’ articulate with a more general contemporary prejudice against the working class, which fuels the impetus to dissociate from ‘the poor’ (and to disidentify with the working class); and fourth, the hegemonic orthodoxy that blames ‘the poor’ for their poverty can more easily dominate in contexts where more solidaristic forms of working-class life are in decline.

Young people, class and place

1. Young people, class and place Tracy Shildrick, Shane Blackman and Robert MacDonald 2. Constructions of the working-class Other among urban, white, middle-class youth: chavs, subculture and the valuing of education Sumi Hollingworth and Katya Williams 3. Who needs enemies with friends like these? The importance of place for young people living in known gang areas Robert Ralphs, Juanjo Medina and Judith Aldridge 4. Nightscapes and leisure spaces: an ethnographic study of young peoples use of free space Cara Robinson 5. Grafting, going to college and working on road: youth transitions and cultures in an East London neighbourhood Anthony Gunter and Paul Watt 6. From inheritance to individualization: disembedding working-class youth transitions in post-Soviet Russia Charlie Walker 7. Steps and stages: rethinking transitions in youth and place Tom Hall, Amanda Coffey and Brett Lashua 8. (Re)constituting the past, (re)branding the present and (re)imagining the future: womens spatial negotiation of gender and class Yvette Taylor and Michelle Addison 9. New class divisions in the new market economies: evidence from the careers of young adults in post-Soviet Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia Ken Roberts and Gary Pollock

Biographies of exclusion: poor work and poor transitions

The usefulness of the concept of transition has been hotly contested in Anglophone youth studies over the past decade. A variety of criticisms have been ranged against it, including that it: presumes the continuing predominance of linear, obvious, mainstream pathways to adulthood; excludes wider youth questions in focusing narrowly on educational and employment encounters; prioritises normative and policy‐focused assumptions and de‐prioritises the actual lived experiences of young people; and is no longer a tenable concept, given the extension of youth phase and the blurring of it and ‘adulthood’ as distinct life‐phases. Drawing upon qualitative, longitudinal studies with ‘socially excluded’ young adults, this paper contends with these arguments. The research participants were 186 ‘hard to reach’ young women and men who were growing up in some of Englands poorest neighbourhoods, some of whom were followed into their mid to late twenties. The studies confirmed many of the specific criticisms lodged against the idea of transition. Interviewees lives post‐school were marked by unpredictability, flux and insecurity. Engagement with post‐16 education and training courses was common, despite wide‐spread disaffection from school pre‐16. Typically, these later learning encounters were short‐lived, negatively assessed and un‐related to labour market fortunes. Economic marginality and recurrent unemployment were uniform experiences. ‘Hyper‐conventional’, class cultural orientations to employment drove post‐school transitions, even when these motivations resulted only in low paid, low skill, insecure ‘poor work’. In conclusion, we re‐affirm the value of a broad and long view of youth transitions, situated in a panorama of socio‐economic change. We argue that this sort of conceptualisation of transition is crucial to understanding the twists and turns of individual biographies and the coming together of these in socially structured patterns of inclusion, exclusion and inequality.

Youth and wellbeing: experiencing bereavement and ill health in marginalised young people’s transitions

Research that explores youth transitions, health, bereavement and wellbeing is rare. Rarer still is research that does this on the basis of long-term, longitudinal, qualitative research with socioeconomically disadvantaged young people. This article draws upon biographical interviews undertaken with 186 young adults in some of Englands poorest neighbourhoods (in Teesside, North East England) to examine how experiences of health, wellbeing and bereavement interact with processes of youth transition and social exclusion. Depression was the most widespread health problem arising from the multiple pressures and hardships encountered in contexts of severe socioeconomic deprivation. Unpredictable critical moments (for example, of bereavement) were common and had unpredictable consequences for youth transitions. It is argued that research of this sort, particularly with a close, qualitative and biographical focus on critical moments, has value for research about youth, health and wellbeing that seeks to better understand how spatially concentrated, class-based inequalities are lived by young people and play out in their lives.

Classed Intersections: Spaces, Selves, Knowledges:

Michel Agier’s Managing the Undesirables is one of several texts that addresses the complex and proliferating humanitarian infrastructure that is increasingly prevalent in regions of the world besieged by violence and displacement, but his work stands out as particularly important and innovative. Agier addresses some of the central questions facing our world today: belonging, personhood, and the ability of those most cut off from political power to speak for themselves and shape their own lives, and he does so in a way that combines passion and keen observation. In doing so, his work should be of interest to a broad range of sociologists who study social inequality and the structures (even those built from the best of intentions) that perpetuate it. In this volume, Agier explores the concept of humanitarian government, the political apparatus set up during emergency situations that takes responsibility for the life and death of individuals no longer protected adequately by a state. For as Agier shows, a refugee camp is far more than a place of shelters and emergency food aid. They are places in which someone decides who gets plastic sheeting and who does not, who receives food rations and for how long, what social programs should be put into place and who should be in charge of them, and what barriers need to be constructed (barbed wired, armed guards, cinderblock walls) to ostensibly protect those inside but also to protect the local population from incursions of these displaced ‘‘undesirables.’’ Further, these ‘‘camps’’ are hardly temporary shelters; many have existed for decades, taking on the appearance of towns and cities with entrepreneurs setting up small businesses and political elites emerging from the post-flight chaos. And yet, the camp is a hybrid social form, taking the shape of something entirely new from what existed before in the lives of its inhabitants, and as Agier convincingly argues, it exists in a state of exception, outside the bounds of the political and social life that humanitarian law and human rights ostensibly guarantee. Agier uses his ethnologist’s eye for culture to analyze observations he made during fieldwork in refugee camps in Kenya, Zambia, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea between 2000-2007, accessing the camps through Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF; in English, Doctors Without Borders). His affiliation with MSF gave him a level of flexibility and independence (particularly from the United Nations High Commission for Refugees) that allowed him sufficient time in the camps to not only observe humanitarian government at work but also the response of the refugees under its purview. He combines his observations with detailed histories of different migrations, explaining the historical and geographic paths that led different groups of refugees to the camps that he studied. Agier demonstrates the discursive power that humanitarian organizations have over defining and categorizing the displaced individuals in the camps; defining a person’s status as a refugee leads to acceptance into the camp and the security that brings, but the denial of such status leads to rejection and often deportation back to life-threatening circumstances. Once determined as a refugee, a person’s suffering and vulnerability come to define their place in the camp and the world, with moral hierarchies created around different definitions of vulnerability with different access to resources provided by the humanitarian organization. This process, Agier argues, de-socializes refugees; they lose their individual personhood and either become ahistorical, pitiable masses that the charitable-at-heart seek to keep alive, or potential threats to order and the safety of the non-displaced that must be managed or