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Youth, Culture, and Identity: Ethnographic Explorations

Portraits of youth’s lives are often marked by extremes. On one side is the despair of poverty and the endless cycle of gang violence; on the other side, the self-absorption and materialism of middle-class youth who pass their lives in a postmodern haze of images and consumption. Although certainly there is validity (and cause for concern) in both of these representations, youth’s lives cannot be reduced to simple boilerplates, a point underscored by the three ethnographies under review in this essay. Conventional research on youth is dominated by psychological and sociological models that emphasize the “storm and stress” of the transition from childhood to maturity (Griffin, 2001) and conceptualize youth as a “problem” (Wulff, 1995). A significant challenge to this mainstream research approach emanates from the rich tradition of the Birmingham School, located at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham. Through the 1970s and 1980s, the Birmingham School produced numerous classic studies of youth (perhaps the most famous of which is Paul Willis’ Learning to Labour: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs) that centered youth’s cultural production, locating it within larger social, economic, and political contexts. Most significantly, the Birmingham School (and its followers and even its many critics) refused the model of youth as simply a transitional space between two more meaningful locations (childhood and adulthood). Instead, youth in itself was an important time and space—for individuals, but also for society as a whole. The Birmingham School recognized youth’s agency and its power to resist societal structures, often through flamboyant and spectacular subcultures (Hall & Jefferson, 1975; Hebdige, 1979). Youth culture research through the late 1980s and 1990s both expanded and questioned the notion of “resistance” and was further complicated by theoretical moves within poststructuralism and postmodernism that weakened the grand narratives undergirding much of the Birmingham School research (Griffin, 2001). The three studies under review in this essay draw on the traditions of the Birmingham School, recognizing its formative role in shaping inquiry into youth, culture, and identity. All take seriously the agency and creative cultural power of youth. But each author also takes us beyond the “resistance” and “conformity” paradigms that oversimplify the complicated patterns of youth’s lives. In this sense, the authors are representative of a new generation of youth culture researchers, whose work is theoretically innovative, ethnographically rich, and willing to challenge standard analyses of youth, culture, and identity.