1st Edition
Youth Collectivities Cultures and Objects
This volume seeks to address what its contributors take to be an important lacuna in youth cultural research: a lack of interest in the phenomenon of collectivity and collective aspects of youth culture.
It gathers scholars from diverse research backgrounds – ranging from contemporary subculture studies, fan culture studies, musicology, youth transitions studies, criminology, technology and work-life studies – who all address collective phenomena in young lives. Ranging thematically from music experience and festival participation, via soccer fan culture, leisure, street art, youth climate activism, to the design of EU youth policies and Australian government ‘project’ work with young migrants, the chapters develop a variety of approaches to collective aspects to young cultural practices and material cultures. To establish these new approaches, the contributors combine new theories and fresh empirical work; they critically engage with the tradition and they complement or even reconfigure traditional approaches in and around the field.
The book will be of interest to researchers in a broad range of areas in and around the field of youth culture studies including post-subculture studies, cultural studies, musicology, fan-culture and youth transition research, but it is also of acute interest for theoretically interested sociologists. The volume offers a new afterword by French sociologist Michel Maffesoli.
Introduction: Collectivity and youth cultural research
Bjørn Schiermer, Ben Gook and Valentina Cuzzocrea
Part I
1. ‘I just wanted to be a part of it’: Musical experiences of youth and belonging
Ben Green
2. Making time for the tribes: The work of synchronization in the making of youth collectivities in the age of digital media
Dan Woodman
3. Top-down collectivity? European youth policy and the need for social cohesion
Valentina Cuzzocrea
4. Enacting the music: Collectivity and material culture in festival experience
Bjørn Schiermer
5. Making a brotherhood: Young ultras beyond the match
Ilaria Pitti
Part II
6. Learning from Willis’ Lads: Collectivity and object-oriented practice
Bjørn Schiermer
7. Spaces of collective individualism: Practices of collectivity for young street artists in Yogyakarta
Michelle Mansfield
8. School strikes for climate: Young people, dissent and collective identities in/for the Anthropocene
Peter Kelly, James Goring and Meave Noonan
9. Scoring the refrain: Young African men in a diasporic context
John Fitzgerald and Adam Simmons
Afterword
Collective narcissism: Some basics of neo-tribal sociality
Michel Maffesoli
Biography
Bjørn Schiermer is Professor at the Department of Sociology and Human Geography at the University of Oslo. His sociological interest is equally divided between theoretical work and empirical interest in youth culture. Recent publications include "Nostalgia, Irony and Collectivity in Late-Modern Culture: Ritual around the Disney Christmas Show in Scandinavia", "Late-Modern Hipsters: New Tendencies in Late-modern Culture" in Acta Sociologica and Forms of Collective Engagements in Youth Transitions: A Global Perspective edited together with Cuzzocrea and Gook.
Ben Gook is a Lecturer in Cultural Studies at the University of Melbourne. His publications include Divided Subjects, Invisible Borders: Re-unified Germany after 1989 (2015) and "Ecstatic Melancholic: Ambivalence, Electronic Music and Social Change around the Fall of the Berlin Wall" in Emotions: History, Culture, Society (2017).
Valentina Cuzzocrea is Associate Professor in Sociology at the University of Cagliari, Italy, and a past coordinator of the European Sociological Association Research Network ‘Youth & Generation’. She has published internationally on youth in journals such as Journal of Youth Studies, Young, Time & Society, Current Sociology, Sociological Research Online, European Societies, Mobilities and Studi Culturali. Her last books are Mobility, Education and Employability in the European Union. Inside Erasmus (co-authored with D. Cairns, E. Krzaklewska, and A. Allaste, 2018), Italian Youth in International Context (co-edited with B.G. Bello and Y. Kazepov, 2020), and on the theme of collectivity, the forthcoming collection Forms of Collective Engagements in Youth Transitions: A Global Perspective (co-edited with B. Gook and B. Schiermer, 2021).
"Youth Collectivities sets a bold new agenda for youth cultural researchers: the challenge of bringing the collective back in. A timely work of deep scholarship, it offers new insights into the project of understanding the nature of youth cultures, including the legacy of the Birmingham School, a consideration of the undeveloped nature of Maffesoli’s concepts of collectivity and new work that recognises collective, reciprocal relations and assemblages of the material and human worlds in youth cultures. These central questions are explored in depth by leading youth researchers from around the world, to give new life to theories of collectivity and collective material culture in young people’s lives."
Johanna Wyn, Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor, The University of Melbourne
"This is an important and illuminating collection. In their concern with the collective aspects of youth and subculture, which are rightly argued to have been neglected, the contributors help to refocus our attention on issues of practice, experience and affect - the doing of youth and subculture, rather than just their symbolic effects. In so doing, they also highlight the range of actors involved, including the objects with which youth and subculturalists engage, and, in drawing on Durkheimian and actor network approaches amongst others, help to advance relevant theoretical debates, moving us beyond important but over rehearsed debates about subculture and post-subculture and into increasingly interesting and innovative terrain."
Dr Paul Sweetman, Senior Lecturer in Cultural & Creative Industries, King's College London
"The scapegoating of youth as individualistic and selfish is commonplace in media representations, but this distortive figure is sometimes imbued in research on young people. As this lively collection demonstrates, the reality is much different: young people find being part of collectivities inspiring and valuable, expressing a desire to be part of something much bigger than themselves. Whether it is the creative practices of various youth cultures, art movements and fandom, or participating in political activities such as climate activism, youth are struggling to transform the world to create a livable future. Presenting cutting edge research from Europe and Australia and bringing together a wide range of theoretical perspectives, Youth Collectivities: Cultures and Objects will appeal youth studies researchers committed to bridging the gap between cultures and transitions and to all those interested in how collective practices make the world."
Steven Threadgold, University of Newcastle, Australia
