YOST4319: Understanding Youth Subcultures

The purpose of this course is to introduce the ideas of youth subculture(s), youth worlds and youth lifestyles and to show how these can be useful in thinking about and developing youth policy, youth programs and services, and in direct youth work, as well as in research about youth and young people. All are crucial frames for understanding youth who typically act, dress, talk, and otherwise do their everyday lives in ways which disclose membership in groups and larger worlds. To understand young people is to understand their everyday worlds, and (sub)culture and world are approaches to both.(Sub)culture and world are powerful frames for understanding the very idea of youth and the related ideas of being and doing youth as a young person. This is so even though subculture as a frame is under intense academic scrutiny. These ideas are also useful for understanding youth populations, small groups of youth and individual young persons. It complements and broadens psychological and developmental perspectives by giving these context, while helping locate youth-ness in a world beyond the self. The self is cultural, as much as social and psychological, spiritual (and philosophical). So too is identity.The focus of much youth policy, program(s) and service(s) is the individual or small groups of youth, i.e. a group of individuals. An alternate angle and focus is youth subculture(s) and worlds, e.g. gang subculture, sports subcultures, drug subcultures, “street” subcultures, and the like, where the group of individuals is seen in a context of culture – a social group living a ‘way of life,’ thinking, talking, dressing, playing and making sense in more or less common ways. Middle and senior high schools are cultural worlds where “hicks,” “geeks,” “preps,” “skaters,” “jocks,” “emos,” and the like are ways of action, dress, speech, and relationships which correlate, even predict, school performance, pregnancy and drug use rates, drop-outs and the like. How is this knowledge used to enhance healthy youth development, and, if not so used, why not? For example, consider co-creating a deviant world in a high school made up of non-drug users, or alternate pathways for peer recognition outside of sports; or co-create a “sanctuary” in a world of tension and fear. Would we come to these alternatives if we did not understand the notions of youth world, youth life-styles, youth subcultures?During times of deep economic and political, institutional and structural change, as now, youth emerge as one population who can symbolize our despair, as well as our hope. Often youth are treated as a blank screen upon which adults project their fears and anxieties about their own changing worlds. During such times of socioeconomic and sociopolitical changes, there are also “moral panics,” and in these, youth are often seen as “folk devils” and demonized. To them is attributed much that is wrong with society. Indeed, they can be called a (the) source of “our problems.” We are now in such a period of tumultuous social change and moral panic, with its predictable calls for “old values,” “family values,” “patriotism,” “community,” and the like. Subcultures, worlds, and lifestyles help us to understand the timing, compelling need for, and the content of these calls and to anticipate the consequences of proposed actions on conceptions of youth and on actual young people. The absence of youth political groups and subcultures in the United States may suggest why youth continue to be vulnerable to these calls for more adult control over how and where this chronological age is lived.This is a course about all young people – all social classes, races/ethnicities, genders, sexual orientations, abilities, and places. This is not negotiable.

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