Youth Subcultures uses a cultural studies lens to explore contemporary American youth subcultures such as skateboarding, punk, Goth, and raves in a brief, flexible, and inexpensive reader. Part of the Longman Topics reader series, this collection of lively essays on controversial subcultures helps students think critically about contemporary culture and issues such as class, race, and gender as well as language, identity, and ritual. Youth Subcultures also contains a variety of writing genres that range from personal creative non-fiction to interviews to traditional research and argumentative essays. Rather than write about topics beyond their experience, students can examine their own experiences critically as they engage an exciting and accessible scholarly field.

First Published in 2002. It is easy to see that we are living in a time of rapid and radical social change. It is much less easy to grasp the fact that such change will inevitably affect the nature of those disciplines that both reflect our society and help to shape it. Yet this is nowhere more apparent than in the central field of what may, in general terms, be called literary studies. ‘New Accents’ is intended as a positive response to the initiative offered by such a situation. Each volume in the series will seek to encourage rather than resist the process of change. To stretch rather than reinforce the boundaries that currently define literature and its academic study.

First published in 1989. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Radical youth work is gaining popularity as a means of teaching adults how, in collaboration with youth, they can challenge dominant ways of knowing. This study uses two particular subcultures, skinheads and punks, to explore how constructions of subcultures in time, language, space, body practice, and identity offer alternative ways of understanding youth-adult relationships. In doing so, it investigates youth work as a radical political process and suggests a new approach to current subculture theory. In Youth and Subculture as Creative Force, Hans Arthur Skott-Myhre interviews six youths who identify themselves as members of either punk or traditional skinhead subcultures. He discusses the results of these interviews and demonstrates how youth perspectives have come to inform his understanding of himself as a youth worker and scholar. Youth subcultures, he argues, have considerable potential for improving relations between youths and adults in the postmodern capitalist world. Drawing on Marxist, Foucauldian, and postmodernist theory, Skott-Myhre uses the subjective formations outlined in his study to offer recommendations for constructing legitimate radical youth work that takes into account for the perspectives of young people.

Gangs are growing in many different social, economic, and political environments coupled with an alarming breakdown of public order. Failures to contain or reduce gang crime in European, Asian, South American, African, and North American cities may be symptoms of fundamental problems threatening the fabric of many societies. The spread of gangs to suburbia and remote locations is a palpable, worldwide threat. But despite nearly a century of scholarly inquiry into street gangs and youth subcultures, no single work systematically reflects on comparative international experiences with gangs. Gangs and Youth Subcultures takes up this challenge. Kayleen Hazlehurst and Cameron Hazlehurst argue that theories of gang behavior in immigrant communities and the influence of transnational crime syndicates are better tested in more than one host society. Similar phenomena would be better understood if placed in a comparative context. To this purpose, the editors assembled expert scholars and policy advisers from North America, Europe, South Africa, and Australasia. Gangs and Youth Subculture lays the groundwork for an explanation of why gangs continue to grow in strength and influence, and why they have spread to remote locations.Kayleen Hazlehurst and Cameron Hazlehurst present new findings and innovative preventive strategies in a clear, concise fashion. No other work brings together experts on gangs and youth subcultures from so many countries. As such, this trailblazing book will interest scholars and teachers of criminology and sociology, justice system administrators, as well as law enforcement officers and youth workers internationally.

This volume critically examines ‘subculture’ in a variety of Australian contexts, exploring the ways in which the terrain of youth cultures and subcultures has changed over the past two decades and considering whether ‘subculture’ still works as a viable conceptual framework for studying youth culture. Richly illustrated with concrete case studies, the book is thematically organised into four sections addressing i) theoretical concerns and global debates over the continued usefulness of subculture as a concept; ii) the important place of ‘belonging’ in subcultural experience and the ways in which belonging is played out across an array of youth cultures; iii) the gendered experiences of young men and women and their ways of navigating subcultural participation; and iv) the ethical and methodological considerations that arise in relation to researching and teaching youth culture and subculture. Bringing together the latest interdisciplinary research to combine theoretical considerations with recent empirical studies of subcultural experience, Youth Cultures and Subcultures will appeal to scholars and students across the social sciences.