Urban Youth Culture Research Articles

Rhythms in the concrete: Re‐imagining relationships between space, race, and mediated urban youth cultures

In this paper we describe a spatial approach toward leisure inquiry to report in part on a three‐year, arts‐based ethnographic study conducted through an urban recreation music program called The Beat of Boyle Street. Adopting the French philosopher/sociologist Henri Lefebvre's concepts of “rhythmanalysis” (2004) and the social “production of space” (1991), we question how young people produce and represent everyday urban spaces through leisure (e.g., hip‐hop musical practices), and explore how spatial inquiry informs ideas about leisure, youth popular cultures, and power relations. This focus emphasizes the politics of popular leisure as spatial practices; popular practices which produce social space. This paper broadens a number of under‐theorized and under‐explored aspects of leisure research, primarily in terms of social space, and additionally in terms of popular culture, racialized bodies and identities, and boundaries of difference.

Drinking Games, Karaoke Songs, and "Yangge" Dances: Youth Cultural Production in Rural China

This article examines the different ways youth in rural Shaanbei, northcentral China participate in cultural production. It explores the media through which young people express themselves and the roles that social institutions (temples, schools, villages, households), modern technologies (video compact discs), and translocal/transnational mass media (satellite and cable TV) play in enabling youth to assert their presence as cultural beings and producers. Shaanbei youth do not choose between modern forms of entertainment (karaoke songs) or traditional forms (playing drinking games), or between institutionally organized activities and those self-initiated to express themselves. (Rural Chinese youth, cultural production, temple festivals, drinking games) ********** Anthropologists have a long-standing interest in studying the socialization of children and processes of enculturation cross-culturally, yet youth culture has largely remained the preserve of sociologists and specialists of popular culture. The study of Western youth culture has its roots in studies of youth social and cultural movements in the 1960s and 1970s: the Hippies, the anti-war protests, Punks, Beatles fans, etc. (Hall and Jefferson 1976; Hebdige 1979; Skelton and Valentine 1998). Youth culture in the West seems to be predicated on a self-conscious, relatively coherent set of mental attitudes and behavioral patterns, often dubbed subcultural or counter-cultural. The most important characteristics of Western urban youth culture are the degree of expressivity (e.g., It's loud!) in terms of music, fashion, hairstyle, and manners, and the effort to counter what is perceived to be adult stiffness and conservatism. Though having originated in the West, analytical approaches for studying Western urban youth movements seem to be easily transferable to the Chinese urban context, with the May Fourth Movement and subsequent student culture as prime examples of a self-conscious Chinese urban youth culture. In recent years, the import of rock 'n' roll, disco, hip hop, and rave parties further consolidated and expanded an urban youth style distinct from adult and other cultural productions (Farrer 2002; Moore 2005). (2) One might think that because rural China is portrayed in the media as being impoverished in things cultural (wenhua pinkun), (3) its youth lack the opportunity to have or produce culture. But this depends on where in rural China one looks. In certain parts of rural China, some forms of metropolitan youth culture are emerging since urban cultural forms are rapidly penetrating rural areas, especially along the coast and the peripheries of large cities. In a village near a major urban center (Heilongjiang in northeastern China), Yan (1999) found the local rural youth culture largely derivative of urban popular culture in terms of taste and activities (e.g., billiards, music cassette tapes, printed T-shirts). In Shaanbei, many aspects of youth culture are also drawn from metropolitan pop culture. Although the more education a Shaanbei rural youth receives the more he or she is alienated from village culture and peasant knowledge, the attractiveness of traditional forms of cultural production persists with young people, especially in places like Shaanbei, where such forms of cultural production are still vibrant and popular. Yan (1999) included in his study rural youth's increased consumerism and materialism, increasing premarital sex, the assertion of individual rights and independence, resistance to parents and local state authorities, and a tendency to try new ways of life such as working in the city or traveling. As the focus of this article is on youth cultural production, other aspects of youth life are de-emphasized. Cultural production here refers to the ensemble of mostly expressive cultural activities, and not instrumental activities such as agriculture, employment, and trade. Expressive culture also includes the consumption of cultural products, such as karaoke songs and the necessary accompanying equipment. …

‘Du hast jar keene Ahnung’: African American English dubbed into German

This paper explores the translation of sociolinguistic variation by examining the ways that African American English (AAE) is dubbed into German. In discussing this ubiquitous yet poorly studied area of language use, I show that ideas about language as an index to social groupings are transferable to the degree that the ideas overlap in the cultures in question. In the case of German, if the character being dubbed is young, male and tied to the street cultures of the urban inner city, then AAE is dubbed using a form of German that has links to the urban youth cultures of north‐central Germany. The transferability of sociolinguistic variation is important to issues related to cross‐cultural communication and the ideologies that may play a role in the outcomes of that communication as well as to linguistic creativity and language style more generally.

The Noisy Mix of Hip Hop Pedagogies

The Noisy Mix of Hip Hop Pedagogies

Sociolinguistics and cultural studies: New ethnicities, liminality and interaction

With the emergence of ‘new ethnicities’ as its central empirical focus, this paper explores the relationship between sociolinguistic discourse analysis on the one hand, and research on youth in cultural studies, anthropology and sociology on the other. After a brief sketch of some major trends in the study of youth, the paper focuses on recent European work on inter‐ethnic processes among young people in urban neighbourhoods, and it notes the way in which major themes in the theorisation of late modernity have been brought to bear on descriptions of multiracial youth. From among these, it selects ‘liminality’, a notion that has been used to characterise youth cultural phenomena at a number of fairly macro levels of social organisation, and it then shifts attention to the details of interactional discourse, arguing that there are also conspicuous moments of liminality within the interaction order. Through the analysis of a short piece of recorded talk, this paper illustrates the way in which interaction can host the emergence of new ethnicities, and it concludes with some general observations about the contribution of sociolinguistic discourse analysis to studies of urban youth culture (sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, new ethnicities, urban youth culture, liminality).

Rethinking the Youth Question: Education, Labour and Cultural Studies

Introduction - PART 1: CLASS, GENDER AND 'RACE' IN URBAN YOUTH CULTURE - The Writing on the Walls - Subcultural Conflict and Working-Class Community - Rules of Territoriality and Discourse - Knuckle Sandwich and Sore Thumbs - Policing the Working-Class City - On the Wrong Side of the Tracks - PART 2: TRANSITIONAL SUBJECTS - Rethinking the Youth Question - Losing the Generation - PART 3: UNSENTIMENTAL EDUCATION - Teaching Enterprise Culture - No Kidding: Cultural Studies in School Transitions - Negative Capabilities: On Pedagogy and Post-Modernity

It's a Riot! Mob Violence in Antebellum America

In 1837 mob violence roiled the usually peaceful community of Elmira in upstate New York. Visiting ministers attending an annual conference of Methodist churches organized an antislavery meeting of over three hundred people. [W]orthy and respectable citizens, including Elmira's leading business and civic leaders, tried to stop the gathering, arguing that it would create a public disturbance. Undeterred, abolitionist forces met in nearby Davis Island. Soon, a noisy rabble, armed with tin horns, . . . pans, ... rattles... and implements of rowdyism and riot, disrupted the meeting.' Elmirans' attack against abolitionists was not unique. Anti-abolitionist riots were a regular occurrence in the antebellum United States. So too were riots against prostitution, gambling, and drinking. Crusades against these alleged evils provoked rioting by men determined to keep practicing them. Partisan politics and theatrical performances also sparked mob violence as did conflicts among different class, ethnic, religious, and racial groups. The emergence of an urban youth culture in the early nineteenth century exacerbated rowdyism and rioting. Historians have made a good start in exploring mob violence in antebellum America. In 1970 Leonard Richards tackled the challenging task of identifying those who mobbed abolitionists in Gentlemen of Property and Standing: Anti-Abolition Mobs in Jacksonian America. During the 1970s historians began exploring how class, ethnic, racial, and religious divisions prompted various kinds of rioting in the antebellum United States. Michael Feldberg, for example, authored two books on rioting, The Philadelphia Riots of 1844: A Study in Ethnic Conflict (1975) and The Turbulent Era: Riot and Disorder in Jacksonian America (1980). The violence which characterized this nation in the 1960s and early 1970s whetted historians' interest in mob violence. So too did the work done by historians of European collective violence such as George Rude, E.P. Thompson, Natalie Zemon Davis, and Charles Tilly.2

‘Jaguda boys’: pickpocketing in Ibadan, 1930–60

ABSTRACTBy examining the development of pickpocketing by juveniles (jagudain Yoruba) in the later colonial era, the paper provides important information on popular urban society in the most populous city in Nigeria and tropical Africa: Ibadan. Representations of the urban experience for a group of criminally-minded citizens are detailed through explorations of street-life, public order, citizenry and neighbourhood reactions. It contributes to the emerging literature on urban patterns in colonial Africa, especially the growth of non-ethnic associations among the lower orders. The resistance of pickpockets to powerful attempts to inculcate conformist modes of behaviour through indigenous and colonial agencies of control and manipulation is highlighted. Both authority systems failed to tackle the problem of street crime beyond the banishment of offenders – a superficial, short-term solution to a well-rooted deviant urban youth culture.

An examination of the effect of culture on pro‐social messages directed at African‐American at‐risk youth

This study was part of a larger project designed to develop effective, pro‐social messages for dissemination to African—American youth. The research methods used were designed to examine the world view and “sense making” schemata of the culture's participants. The study's findings indicate that messages intended for urban youth populations often fail to account for the culture of the audience. Two basic issues became evident: first, these messages overlook the social contexts that shape the receiver's reception and interpretation of messages in urban youth culture; second, the design of these messages incorrectly assumes that the linear communication style used by mainstream culture, with its accompanying syllogistic reasoning, will be persuasive with an audience that communicates in a highly interactive, oral style utilizing a more horizontal mode of influence.

Acts of Union: Youth Sub-Culture and Ethnic Identity amongst Protestants in Northern Ireland

In Northern Ireland (hereafter called NI), as we all know, the sphere of cultural and political identities is a fiercely contested one. Young people in NI develop a sense of ethnic awareness in an ongoing situation of political mobilization and sectarian confrontation. Historically conditioned cultural divisions are reproduced in and through the education system. Increasing levels of segregation combined with the isolating effect of mass unemployment have led to further ghettoization of young people within their confessional communities. This paper examines the symbiotic relation between the dynamics of urban working-class youth culture and the ethnic boundary maintenance practices of adult life in NI. For working-class youth, as for their parents, the defence of the territorial and symbolic boundaries of their confessional communities are central concerns. We suggest that young people in NI are more than passive initiates into the Loyalist and Republican political and cultural traditions. In their youth-cultural practices they play an active part in the reproduction of'sectarian' ideology. In the research reported here we explore the specific relationship of Protestant youth to a parental culture of Loyalism a culture subject to acute tensions in the current situation of mass unemployment and felt political insecurity in NI. We argue that the cultural practices of Protestant youth their bands, parades, kerb and wall markings, bonfires are an attempt to address, at the level of the symbolic, the focal concerns of a Loyalist parental political culture and the material and ideological contradictions which beset this. But young people themselves are experiencing a specific material situation. This is the generation whose birth coincided with the onset of the 'troubles'. The ghettoization of-residential life since then has affected them perhaps more than any other age group. Their physical mobility is restricted as are their opportunities for recreation and even employment. Their adolescence is occurring in a period within capitalist society of general marginalization of young workers from