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.
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).
