Working-class Youth Research Articles

“Politics unusual”? Bobi Wine, People Power, and the ideology of popular opposition in Uganda

ABSTRACT What key ideas animate contemporary political movements in Africa, and how do they challenge—or reproduce—dominant (neo)liberal conceptions of democracy, development, and international relations? This article examines these questions through the political rise of Robert Kyagulanyi, also known as Bobi Wine, in Uganda. Since entering formal politics in 2017, Kyagulanyi's People Power movement has mobilized poor and working-class youth, positioning them at the heart of a broader push for democratic renewal in the face of intense state repression. While the movement adopts anti-establishment rhetoric and revolutionary symbolism, this article argues that its ideological core remains firmly rooted in liberalism—emphasizing electoral democracy, good governance, and broad alignment with a Western foreign policy agenda. At a time when the Museveni regime is drifting from neoliberal orthodoxy, Kyagulanyi's vision reasserts, rather than transcends, liberal principles, advancing a pro-poor discourse without a transformative, leftist programmatic agenda. Drawing on over 85 interviews, the article contends that dismantling the ideological structures entrenched during decades of National Resistance Movement rule may prove more difficult than ousting Museveni himself from power. By foregrounding the ideological commitments of Kyagulanyi and his movement, the article contributes to a growing body of scholarship that centers ideas in contemporary African politics and highlights the continent's growing ideological diversity.

On Centering, Yet Not Relying on Working-class Youth of Color KwonHyeyoungLanguage Brokers: Children of Immigrants Translating Inequality and Belonging for Their Families. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2024. $26.00. 256 pp. ISBN 9781503638686.

On Centering, Yet Not Relying on Working-class Youth of Color KwonHyeyoungLanguage Brokers: Children of Immigrants Translating Inequality and Belonging for Their Families. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2024. $26.00. 256 pp. ISBN 9781503638686.

The Terms of Inclusion: Transitional School Programs in a Racialized Organizational Field

As organizations committed to providing upward social mobility and leadership development for academically high-achieving working-class youth of color, transitional school programs (TSPs) prepare students to transition from urban public schools to elite, mostly private high schools. However, TSPs’ dependence on wealthy, White institutions to achieve these goals highlights racialized contradictions in the organizational field. How do TSPs navigate the race and class conflicts between the goals of their program and the racial organizational field of elite schools on which they depend for survival? Drawing on two years of ethnographic research at Ascend, a TSP in a northeastern city, this article demonstrates how because of racialized dependencies, Ascend is compelled to adopt the inequitable practices and assumptions of the racialized organizational field of elite education. Yet over time, the organization begins to resist this organizational order by decoupling their practices from elite schools. Student voice and activism contributed to destabilizing this racialized organizational order through direct action. As Ascend’s loose coupling to the field became untenable during national student protests, the organization sought to recouple to the demands of student protesters by explicitly renegotiating the terms of inclusion for their students in the racialized organizational field. These findings contribute to a limited literature about TSPs, organizations critical to the desegregation of elite schools. The findings also demonstrate how studying an organization in the context of its organizational field can reveal how organizations become racialized in practice. Finally, the case of Ascend shows that decoupling, previously theorized to be a method of evading commitments to equity, may also be a method of subverting racialized dependencies.

Working-class youth participation in climate action: networks, civic experience, and equity

Research on individual participation in climate action largely focuses on middle class environmental activism around protest events. To better understand the expansion of civic engagement on climate issues, more work needs to be carried out on wider sectors of the population. This study examines the drivers associated with involvement in climate action at the individual level with a survey sample of working-class youth of color. The findings suggest that youth embedded in pro-climate social networks, a history of civic engagement, and an equity belief system increase willingness to participate in several forms of climate action, including climate meetings, demonstrations, and inviting others to participate. For larger climate action initiatives to overcome the barriers of participation, linking to specific pools of sympathy in civil society that value economic equality may provide a mass base of support for policies consistent with just transition perspectives.

“First Blood”: The 1960s Origins of the Australian Sharpie Youth Culture

ABSTRACT The sharpies were a uniquely Australian youth culture that lasted from the early 1960s into the 1980s and were a significant continuation of the trajectory of Australian, male-dominated, working-class, consumption-based, rowdy youth-cultural traditions, which include the bodgies and widgies of the 1950s and the larrikins of the 1860s to 1918. Sharpies are under-discussed in social narratives and academic texts. This article focuses on the life cycle of the original generation of sharpies. In addition to exploring the origins of sharpie culture, I explore why it provided an outlet for its bored suburban, working-class youths, present explanations for behavioural attitudes and offer some insight into its attraction. I also explore how the first generation of this youth culture came to its natural end, how it was picked up again by the next generation and why. In learning about the sharpies’ activities and behaviours, from the egregious to the mundane, we open ourselves to learning something not just about suburban, working-class Australian youths but about all young people who take part in group-based youth cultures.

“A Kind of Humble Proletarian Tragedy”: Romper Stomper, Class and Global White Nationalism

ABSTRACT Released in 1992, the Australian film Romper Stomper provoked a storm of controversy. Writer/director Geoffrey Wright’s portrayal of neo-Nazi skinheads targeting Vietnamese Australians in Melbourne created unease because it was unclear where the filmmaker’s sympathies lay. Did the film condemn its skinhead characters or, if inadvertently, justify their racist views and behaviour? This article unpacks the film’s ambivalent portrayal of its central protagonists by placing it in historical context, focusing particularly on the filmmaker’s insistence that Romper Stomper is a film about class. Building on scholarship on the history of working-class youth subcultures and the emerging field of global White nationalism, it examines Wright’s feature debut as (in his words) a kind of “proletarian tragedy” to argue that the film offers rare insight into a violent, bigoted, disenfranchised sector of the population and helps illuminate aspects of broader socioeconomic, political and cultural changes taking place in Australia in the 1980s and early 1990s.

University and the Pursuit of a ‘Career’ for Working-Class Youth in Deindustrial Rochdale

This article examines the way in which working-class young people in Rochdale, a former industrial town in the north-west of England, imagine their future transitions from college to work through qualitative research at Rochdale’s only A-Level college. It explores how students’ aspirations to attend university reflect their desire for a ‘career’ in the absence of alternative forms of work and as a symbolic marker of upward social mobility that is subsequently differentiated from other forms of work as a form of distinction, as a great deal of emphasis is placed on the moral and cultural worth of a ‘career’. In doing so, this article highlights how such perceptions are shaped by the material conditions faced by these young people, such as inequality, financial precarity, and relative poverty against the backdrop of deindustrialisation.

Clashing Gender in the Age of Transnational Infrastructural Capitalism: The Vocational Education and Subject Making of China's Future Workers

Accompanying the “China Dream” as a symbol of the advent of Chinese transnational infrastructural capitalism, a new project of subject making is emerging: an increasing number of Chinese youth, especially those from working-class backgrounds, have entered the expanded urban vocational education system for training as future workers. As a national project attempting to (re)invent educated, skilled labor subjects to serve the state goal of industrial upgrading, vocational education is geared toward entrance into the labor market, producing valuable “marketable subjects” specifically for the enhancement of the export manufacturing sector and a new service sector now increasingly extending to overseas markets. Engaging in a participatory action project in vocational schools between 2016 and 2019, this article’s authors studied students’ learning experiences and examined how the larger structural, political, economic, and cultural forces shape the girls’ and boys’ educational and occupational decisions. To understand the subject making of young Chinese workers, the concept of “clashing gender” is used to illustrate how gender plays a central yet conflicted role, torn between forces of state, market, school, and individual desire, during these young people’s years of vocational training. The article thus illustrates how the postsocialist state’s linking of China’s new economic sectors into the circuits of transnational capitalism produces intimately gendered and subjective effects for working-class youth.

Deaths at the heart of the state: incarcerating working-class youth at Ferme Neuve of Les Douaires, France

ABSTRACT In the 19th century, French youth detention was a necropolitical enterprise aimed at controlling precarious social classes. Built in the 1840s in Normandy, Ferme Neuve is a rare example of the first generation of public youth penal colonies in France. First an annex to the prison of Gaillon, from 1862 to 1868, it then formed the core of the youth penal colony of Les Douaires. This paper reconstructs the history so-far disregarded of Ferme Neuve, demolished in the 1960s, and produces a 3D digital reconstruction of what its built environment might have looked like. It then goes on to discuss the high mortality at Ferme Neuve, emphasizing the responsibility of the French state in this surplus of deaths and arguing that this system prefigured contemporary processes of othering poor and racialized youth in France. The paper ends by discussing the need to politicize archaeologies of incarceration in the recent past.

The Production of High Fidelity Audio Electronics and the Politics of Technological and Social Modernization in Late State Socialist Poland

This paper investigates the development of the production of High Fidelity (Hi-Fi), audios and the emergence of an accompanying audiophile culture in late state socialist Poland of the 1970s. My case study offers a discussion on the re-negotiating of the cultural values of a specifically marketed technology that was used as a status symbol in affluent market economy countries. In state-socialist Poland, a host of social actors appropriated Hi-Fi audios technologies and audiophile culture to be part of a nationwide project of technological and social modernization. I investigate how in this specific historical setting the mass-scale development and the production of Hi-Fi audios emerged, and how this was embedded into the government policy of building “consumer socialism.” This development also corresponded with a state-sponsored program of technological modernization, in which the electronics industry was identified as a flagship sector that received substantial government investment. I also discuss the emergence of a local audiophile culture, which was redefined by intermediary actors, from being a Western elitist “consumption microculture” into an accessible form of cultural uplift for working-class youth.

Embodied Cultural Capital, Social Class, Race and Ethnicity, and Sports Performance in Girls Soccer

Compared with working-class parents, middle-class parents increasingly promote sports performance for their children as part of a larger strategy of ensuring that their children are upwardly mobile and likely to attend and graduate from college. However, we need to learn more about the distribution of youth sports performance in specific sports and whether it relates to social class. In this study, we test for a relationship between social class and performance in girls soccer by examining the success of high school girls soccer teams in 16,091 contests. We find that schools with more working-class youth consistently lose by many goals. The relationship between performance and social class is weaker in predominantly Latinx schools than in predominantly Black and predominantly White ones, likely reflecting the community cultural wealth in soccer in Latinx immigrant communities. We discuss the practical and theoretical implications of these findings.

Hooliganism as a problem of public order in the Ukrainian SSR in the early 1950s

The article examines the topical and insufficiently studied in historical and legal science issue of the factors that caused hooliganism in the early 1950s, the level of this type of crime in the main regions of Ukraine at that time and some steps taken by the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Ukrainian SSR to reduce hooliganism. Hooliganism occupied one of the main positions in the list of offences committed by young people. The factors of hooliganism had their roots in the years of war and post-war devastation, which were the childhood and adolescence of the majority of those who committed crimes under the relevant article “Hooliganism” of the Criminal Code of the Ukrainian SSR.
 The complex events of this time certainly affected the psyche and psychology of these people: they saw violence in all its forms, often being brought up in the absence of their father, who was at the front. The famine of 1946–1947, malnutrition during the war, lack of proper living conditions, and often housing, also affected their psyche. Their educational and cultural levels were also insufficient. The age of these hooliganism perpetrators was 18-25 years old, which also influenced their behaviour and actions. The incompletely formed character and marginality inherent in young people generally played a negative role in their development as positive individuals. Homelessness and neglect of children and adolescents played a detrimental role in the escalation of hooliganism in the 1950s. The war and post-war devastation deformed the normal process of initial socialisation of children and adolescents, which had a detrimental effect on the set of social roles and cultural norms they learned and served as one of the reasons for the rise in hooliganism in peacetime. The amnesty of March 1953 did not improve the political situation in the country and only worsened the crime situation. Hooliganism became widespread among urban working-class youth, especially among the social group that lived in dormitories and worked on construction sites of industrial enterprises, i.e., was mostly unskilled labour.
 The memorandum by the Minister of Internal Affairs of the Ukrainian SSR T. Strokach to the first secretary of the CPSU Central Committee O. Kyrychenko dated 30 September 1953 contains numerous facts of hooliganism in Donetsk, Kharkiv, Kryvyi Rih, Dniprodzerzhynsk, Sievierodonetsk and other cities of the republic. These facts show that hooliganism was often senseless and cruel, led to more serious crimes (murder, rape), and was usually committed while under the influence of alcohol. According to the criminal law doctrine of that time, it was believed that there were no socio-economic reasons for hooliganism, and that its manifestations arose as a result of shortcomings in law enforcement and youth education. But this was an erroneous point of view, an attempt to hide from the real problems.

Crossing borders and crossing the line

ABSTRACT In 1989, the Malaysian music group, Search, were a popular culture phenomenon across the Nusantara, successfully exporting their Malaysian brand of hard rock and heavy metal retrospectively termed rock kapak (lit. axe rock). Their success set the stage for cross-border collaboration in Indonesia, which included recordings, tours and a feature-length film. In 1992, the group was subject to a long hair ban that restricted broadcast of their music on television and radio in Malaysia. As a result of their defiance of the ban, the band’s live performances in the country were denied permits. This study conceptualises the connections and contestations mobilised by Malay rock as a crossing of nation-state borders and a crossing of moral boundaries. The former is viewed in inter-regional popular culture exchanges within the Nusantara region, while the latter is analysed in terms of Malay rock’s defiance to authoritarian moral policing. The boundary crossings of Search signify the musical mobilities of Malay rock, read as an informal cross-Nusantara ‘movement’ of mostly male, working-class youth who challenged conservative ethno-national states. While Search’s mobility across the region clearly represents a porous crossing of domestic and regional borders, it was the affectively ‘moving’ aspects of their ballads that appealed to a wide demographic of Nusantara audiences and the politicians that were complicit in controlling their public image.

London's Working-Class Youth and the Making of Post-Victorian Britain, 1958–1971

London's Working-Class Youth and the Making of Post-Victorian Britain, 1958–1971

The Biosecuritization of the Tourist City

The impact of COVID-19 on tourism has been enormous across the globe. The successful recovery of the tourism industry at the local, national, and global levels is strictly dependent on the efficient contention and mitigation of the COVID-19 pandemic at the global level and on the capacity of tour operators, governments, and other actors to generate complete trust among tourists. In this article, we examine the biosecuritization of Lisbon (Portugal) and the efforts carried out by the administration to preserve the city as a COVID-free urban destination. In this sense, we will examine two main strategies that have received little attention from the scholarly community, namely (i) the strengthening of repressive, punitive, and criminalizing policies against suburban working-class youths ('the perilous') within the scope of guaranteeing a COVID-free city for tourists ('the untouchables'), and (ii) the (in)governance of the urban night of Lisbon during the current pandemic. In the last section, we will argue how mobility restrictions, lockdowns, and nighttime curfews have shown us how central culture, arts, entertainment, and leisure are for not only the cultural and social life of many young and adult people in Europe but also for their socio-emotional wellbeing.

Awareness, accessibility and utilization of mental health care services among youths in Lagos State, Nigeria

Mental health diseases or illnesses in all human beings especially youths in the prime of their lives, are crucial and worthy of attention. This is a crucial epidemiology that should be of prime concern because mental health issues among youths appear to be increasing. This paper seeks to investigate the level of awareness, accessibility and utilization of mental health services (provided by professional counsellors) among working class youths in Lagos state. A descriptive survey research design was adopted for the study with a random sample of 613 comprising 464 female and 149 male young workers. A questionnaire constructed by the researcher was used to gather data from respondents. Three research questions were raised and four hypotheses were tested at 0.05 level of significance. Data gathered were analyzed and presented using figures, simple percentages, frequency tables and Analysis of Variance (ANOVA). The findings revealed that 96.2% of respondents are aware of mental health services, 64.2% have access to mental health service, however 26.4% actually utilize mental health services from professional counsellors. A significant gender difference was observed in the level of awareness and utilization of mental health services. There is also a significant difference in the level of awareness and utilization of mental health services due to age of respondents. Recommendations include the introduction of courses into junior school curriculum for early exposure of young people to signs and symptoms mental health problems. To also expose them to the importance of seeking assistance from professional counsellors who are trained to render such assistance.

Coming of Age in Jim Crow DC: Navigating the Politics of Everyday Life

This book provides an important addition to the African American saga by offering an oral history of Black youth in segregated Washington, DC. The coverage is for the interwar years.Through skillful use of previous interviews and community studies, the author reveals what poor and working-class Blacks in their formative years were thinking, doing, and feeling. It's a revealing story that clearly notes the variety of sensibilities in a population that from the outside seemed homogenous.Paula C. Austin essentially revisits the work of Black sociologists who studied the nation's capital through extensive interviews within the Black community. She fills in aspects of Black life that earlier researchers missed or misinterpreted. For example, an interview with Susie Morgan reveals the relationship of poor teens with the police and the use of forbidden spaces allowable to whites. How these children dealt with the use of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool and the Southwest Settlement House tells the reader much about their spatial relationship to Jim Crow DC and their efforts to live with what was available. The need for recreational space resulted in a defiance that, as Susie Morgan said about the Pool, “Course we know we ain't got no business there, but that's why we go in” (p. 79).Expanding on the earlier studies, Austin also delves into attitudes of these poor and working-class youth toward class, sexual relations, political activity, and general engagement with their plight in a segregated city. Rather than apathy, acceptance of their subordinate place, and an absence of community connection, the author writes of residents engaged, aware, politically active, and desiring change in their neighborhood and in their future.The author also provides important insight into these adolescents’ sense of racial identity, gender, and, as with James Albert Gray, their leadership skills. Approved or unapproved outside activities are also examined in relation to clubs and gangs. Within this discussion, Austin offers a trenchant analysis of a burgeoning sense of masculinity. Nathaniel Smith's interview is informative in this sense in regard to his membership in the Society Gents Club and his views of what it meant to be a man.Likewise, the discussion of Black girls and women indicates their role in gangs, attitudes toward femininity, the future, marriage, and violence. Austin's use of interviews with the same person over several chapters and issues provides effective transitions and deeper probing. This is the case with Susie Morgan, whose views and stories, along with others such as Myron Ross, Jr., fill the chapters and shape the book's analysis.With both girls and boys, their inner thoughts show a more nuanced process than earlier studies reveal. Interviewers did not always present their questions in a way to elicit honest answers or ignored some of the information they received. And here Austin brings the reader into fresh territory. More is learned about these individuals than in the initial interviewer's interpretations. The rereading and reassessment of 1930s oral histories can provide clues to present behaviors among the adolescent Black poor and working class. The study also makes a good case for condemning past or present-day racial profiling and, as the author states, recognizing the humanity of a maligned and misunderstood group. To outsiders, and even to some of the interviewers, these neighborhoods and youths appeared to be degraded and hopeless elements within the city's poorest areas. Yet a hopefulness existed among the Black adolescents studied and re-analyzed that is a useful aid to present-day community workers and future scholars.

Mahsa Amini's killing, state violence, and moral policing in Iran

Iranian cities have been the scene of daily antigovernment protests by young women and men since September 16, the day Mahsa Jina Amini died in the custody of the “morality police” in Tehran. Over the next weeks, the waves of protests snowballed as the often very young demonstrators poured into the streets in some 160 cities, chanting antiregime slogans. Many women removed their mandatory headscarves at street protests to call for an end to the dual life forced upon them by the state's dress code. The protesters’ anti-authoritarian outrage met with broad public sympathy, moved beyond the discontented middle classes, and engaged significant segments of working-class youth and the ethnic Kurdish and Baluchi communities. However, workers, teachers, and other sectors of organized labor, who saw no immediate victory in sight, did not join the call for a national general strike. An estimated 500 demonstrators were killed, including 67 children, and more than 15,000 people were arrested. Three months of ongoing protests in Iran have garnered more international sanctions against the Islamic Republic. Though initially shaken, regime has doubled down in its brutality to eliminate the movement. The regime's reluctance to reform has convinced many observers that new waves of protest will follow, converging to break Iran's political impasse. This article outlines an analytical lens for understanding the movement's cultural transformative power as well as its challenges in achieving its political goals. I examine four critical aspects of this protest movement to explore where it stands in Iran's recent political turmoil. These include the radicalization of politics in Iran due to rising state violence over the past decade, the growing number of forced veiling dissidents, the contribution of the youth crisis to the protests, and finally, the confluence of ethnic outrage with women's and youth anti-authoritarian politics.

Pulp Vietnam: War and Gender in Cold War Men’s Adventure Magazines by Gregory A. Daddis

<i>Pulp Vietnam: War and Gender in Cold War Men’s Adventure Magazines</i> by Gregory A. Daddis

White working-class youth, rural disadvantage, sense of belonging and bonded social capital

The paper critically reflects on data derived from prolonged periods of ethnographic study in an economically disadvantaged white workingclass rural community in the North East of England. A central aim the study was to understand the culture of the village and to capture and penetrate the social relationships and meanings within that culture as understood by its inhabitants and their relationship with the local school (see Bagley and Hillyard, 2013, 2015, 2019; Hillyard and Bagley, 2013, 2015). The research employed participant observation inside the village and included semi-structured interviews with residents individually and collectively in a host of formal and informal settings. For the purposes of this paper, the research draws on those interviews conducted with white working-class young people aged 16-21 years old (N= 25), born in the village who were in neither education, employment nor training. The findings suggest the experiences of rural disadvantage for these young people results in them holding a strong relational metaphorical sense of belonging (Cuervo and Wyn, 2014) that draws on bonded social capital (Putnam, 1995) to help them survive.