This book brings together historians, sociologists and social scientists to examine aspects of youth culture. The book’s themes are riots, music and gangs, connecting spectacular expression of youthful disaffection with everyday practices. By so doing, Youth Culture and Social Change maps out new ways of historicizing responses to economic and social change: public unrest and popular culture.

Examines modern theoretical interpretations of social change in relation to young people and provides an overview of their experiences in a number of key contexts such as education, employment, leisure, health, crime and politics. This second edition offers introductory text for students in sociology of youth, sociology of education, and more.

The essays in this volume examine youthful dissent since Berkeley in 1964 within a number of contexts -- the school and the university, opposition to the draft and the Vietnam war, the civil rights struggle, and the drug culture. The contributors are particularly concerned with the role of the mental health professional in relation to the dilemma of youth today and their culture -- a culture that is widely divergent from that best known by the professional. "As old forms and tradition shave fallen away, the adults continue to move along familiar paths and often seem to refuse to look at the surrounding rubble. In an attempt to find individual definition and social purpose today's youth has become disaffected, uncommitted, hostile, angry, and apathetic. A relatively small number have dedicated themselves to total destruction of our society." Their very nonconformity often brings "a vicious storm of hatred -- and sometimes bullets -- down upon their heads." Particularly affected, the authors believe, are young people of the working class, whose homes were the first to be disrupted by the technological change and whose elders are the least tolerant of the characteristics of today's youth culture. Most of the papers in this volume were presented at the forty-seventh annual convention of the American Orthopsychiatry Association -- a convention noted for the continuous disruption of its presentations by young protesters. Drs. Levitt and Rubenstein have interspersed vignettes of the students participating in the dissent with the formal papers which include contributions by Edgar Z. Freidenberg, Daniel Offer, and Nathan Glazer among many others. The authors present varying viewpoints on the proper function of the professional as both teacher and therapist in dealing with dissent.

Draws on interviews in Mozambique, Senegal, South Africa, and Tunisia.

Published in 1997, this text is built around themes agreed upon for a conference which aimed to set the agenda for youth research over the next decade. These themes are: the shaping of trajectories and biographies - individualization, agency, structure; vulnerable groups excluded and included youth, polarization, marginalization; social construction of identity - identity, culture, gender, ethnicity; political and social participation and citizenship. The book brings together the work of British and Continental researchers.

Recent social changes have had an enormous impact on the lives of young people. The authors ask whether traditional parameters are still relevant, and examine the extent to which 'risk' and 'individualisation' convey an accurate picture of young lives.

The decline of the socialist governments in Eastern and Central Europe and the resulting political and economic reorganizations of the 1990s provided a dramatic illustration of the far-reaching effects of social change. For those interested in the health and well-being of youth, such instances of social upheaval raise the question of how young people are affected socially and psychologically by societal changes, and whether their development is compromised or enhanced. This important volume considers the processes through which societal changes exert an impact on the course of adolescent development and identify individual and contextual factors that can modify the impact of social change and enhance the likelihood of a successful transition to adulthood.