Co-hosted by the Griffith Centre for Cultural Research & The Australian Sociological Association Sociology of Youth Thematic Group.
Date and Venue
Thursday 22 – Saturday 24 November, 2012
South Bank Campus, Griffith University Brisbane, Australia
Convenors
• Professor Andy Bennett (Griffith University)
• Dr Dan Woodman (Melbourne University)
Youth Cultures, Belongings, Transitions: Bridging the Gap in Youth Research
Traditionally, the field of youth research has maintained two distinct areas: the study of transition to ‘adulthood’ and the study of young people’ s cultural practices. Indeed, both fields of research have yielded highly important insights. Thus, there is now a highly comprehensive, international literature on many aspects of youth experience. Spanning leisure and lifestyle activities including popular music, style and fashion, media and digital technologies, activism, eco-politics, body modification, sport/extreme sport, tourism and travel researchers have traced the patterns and meanings of youth consumption. Moreover, as an emerging literature on ageing and youth culture illustrates, many of the leisure and lifestyle practices once firmly associated with the teens and early twenties are now forming the bedrock of lifestyles and aspirations of young adults well into their ‘post-youth’ years.
Approaching youth from a different perspective, research on youth transitions illustrates how the risks and uncertainties linked to post-industrialisation are reshaping youth, not only for socio-economically or educationally disadvantaged groups but more broadly. Increasing unemployment among university graduates is also a product of longer-term structural labour market changes.
While the two approaches have developed along separate paths, with real engagement rare, the conditions are right for increasing engagement and even convergence. For example, the cultural competencies acquired by young people through their immersion in particular youth consumption, leisure and lifestyle practices can provide critical pathways into adulthood, transcending leisure to inform other aspects of biographical trajectory including perceptions, and the actualisation, of relationships, parenthood, work and employment.
Confirmed Keynote Speakers
• Professor Robert Hollands (University of Newcastle, UK)
• Professor Andy Furlong (University of Glasgow, UK)
• Associate Professor Anita Harris (Monash University)
Call for Papers
This three-day conference will seek to map the connections between youth cultural practice and youth transitions. The Convenors welcome individual paper and panel proposals that seek to combine or rework the theories and perspectives of cultural and transitions youth research. Papers may focus on, but are not limited to, the following topics:
• Youth and ageing
• Gender and ethnicity
• Local and global identities
• Leisure
• Lifestyle practices and culture industries
• DIY cultures
• Culture and inequality
• Politics and religion
• New Technologies
CLICK HERE TO REGISTER
Please send paper and panel proposals to gccr@griffith.edu.au
Individual paper proposals should be a maximum of 200 words.
Panel proposals should be a maximum of 700 words.
Closing date for receipt of proposals is 31 July, 2012.