<p>This research aimed for an extended knowledge and understanding of young people in stigmatized areas and their construction of group identity. With a focus on Roma youths in Konik, Montenegro, and their involvement in hip-hop we wanted to explore what this culture meant to them in relation to their context. An ethnographic approach was used in collecting the empirical data through observations, interpreting music lyrics and conducting qualitative semi-structured interviews. Five young Roma boys from Konik, all involved in hip-hop, were interviewed. Theoretical perspectives on identity, youth culture and stigmatization were central. In addition, Bourdieu’s theory regarding cultural capital was emphasized and connected to youths and hip-hop. The empirical material showed that involvement in hip-hop provided the Roma youths with a group identity that they referred to in positive terms. Contextual factors of stigmatization excluded the Roma group from the majority population and the engagement in hip-hop created a possibility for the youths to be someone. The cultural capital gained through hip-hop was not used to verify and legitimate an authentic Roma identity. It was rather a way for them to create boundaries towards the negative elements in their community.</p>

Today’s society is subject to an increased importance of aesthetics and an increasing individualism. New trends are adopted early by young people, which make it interesting to focus on how identity is formed and meanings are constructed in a youth culture context and in relation to ongoing societal processes of change. The purpose of this dissertation is to interpret and analyse the construction of meaning within the skateboard and snowboard communities in the social and cultural contexts. In particular, this dissertation is about the relationship between three levels, cultural, practice and individual. The title “Traces” alludes to four analytical themes taking different tracks in the book; consumption, gender, place and identity that are reflected in different chapters. However, the individual leaves traces in culture as culture does in the individual. Furthermore, skaters and snowboarders leave actual tracks in their local geography. Theoretically the study has a culture analysis approach with a semiotic base where five theories are intertwined. Johan Fornäs contributes with his interpretation on culture as system of signs and signifying practices, Stuart Hall adds the concept of representations, Kirsten Drotner provides her argumentation regarding aesthetic practices whilst Ulf Hannerz enriches the dissertation with his discussion on transnational culture-flows and the social diffusion of culture. Roger Säljö proposes a socio-cultural perspective of learning where learning is about participation in knowledge and skills. The method used is ethnographical. The multifaceted empirical material, from field studies and interviews, Swedish skateboard and snowboard magazines between 1978 to 2002, skateboard and snowboard videos, press articles, and websites, has been triangulated. In addition, there are three personal albums of skateboarder, snowboarder and surfer Ants Neo. The study shows that there are stereotyped notions about what boarding means and what it means to be a boarder. These notions both create and are created by the boarders themselves but are also used by advertisers for products not related to board sports at all. These notions, based as they are on ideas of resistance and radicalism, serve to emphasise that boarding is masculine. Resistance takes concrete form in its attitude to organized sports and to multinational brands and in the unusual use of places in the urban environment. To be a boarder is, apart form the boarding skills required, to be also part and parcel of these attitudes. The study explains how meaning and identity are created through informal learning processes in youth culture contexts. In these group-forming processes, both the individual and the community are formulated in social, cultural and aesthetic terms.

The purpose of this essay is to analyse how and why culture and tradition is created and maintained within a minor student society at a Swedish university by looking at its history. The West Coast Nation student society provided the material which was subsequently analysed and three sociological perspectives were applied in order to give the study a theoretical base. In order to investigate the purpose of the society, durkheimian theories on functionalism were applied. Moreover, Bourdieu’s thoughts on social fields were used as well as Elias’ theories on the established and the outsiders. The results indicate that the purpose of a student society of this sort is to provide the students with a culture and a group with which they may identify. From a historical perspective, the West Coast Nation seems to have had an increase in members steadily from the early 90’s on, but at the start of the 21st century, the numbers dwindled, something which had as a result that a process of professionalization was begun. Furthermore, the society displayed strong intentions of establishing and maintaining continuity, which may be a result of the nation having trouble keeping members and board members since students, who form the basis of the society, leave the university after a few years.

This research aimed for an extended knowledge and understanding of young people in stigmatized areas and their construction of group identity. With a focus on Roma youths in Konik, Montenegro, and their involvement in hip-hop we wanted to explore what this culture meant to them in relation to their context. An ethnographic approach was used in collecting the empirical data through observations, interpreting music lyrics and conducting qualitative semi-structured interviews. Five young Roma boys from Konik, all involved in hip-hop, were interviewed. Theoretical perspectives on identity, youth culture and stigmatization were central. In addition, Bourdieu’s theory regarding cultural capital was emphasized and connected to youths and hip-hop. The empirical material showed that involvement in hip-hop provided the Roma youths with a group identity that they referred to in positive terms. Contextual factors of stigmatization excluded the Roma group from the majority population and the engagement in hip-hop created a possibility for the youths to be someone. The cultural capital gained through hip-hop was not used to verify and legitimate an authentic Roma identity. It was rather a way for them to create boundaries towards the negative elements in their community.

In this thesis I argue that the yaoi community addresses a gap in subculture studies through the ways in which women use the genre to socialize. Yaoi is a genre of Japanese animation and comics which focuses on romantic relationships between two men and is directly geared towards women. Through ethnographic research in the United States, I look at how the women I interviewed conceptualize their participation within the community and what yaoi means to them. The women within the yaoi community are not rebelliously opposing the mainstream as many subcultural theories suggest, but are instead carving out a social space for themselves and others who have a distinct taste for the yaoi genre.

The aim of this study is to explore hiphop music as an aspect of youth socialization and the relationship between music creation and identity. The study is conducted through five semi- structured qualitative individual interviews. Our theoretical starting points are Putnam’s (2000) bridging and bonding social capital symbolic interactionism. We also have used a model of learning presented by Fornäs, Lindberg and Sernhedes (1989). In our study it is presented as " model of learning." The study results have shown three important skills. The first conclusion is that involvement in hiphop culture can lead to an alternative learning about the society. Our second conclusion is that the alternative socialization of hiphop leads to integration. A third conclusion is that hiphop leads to a conscious identity.

This dissertation examines the role progressive college radio played as a site of political engagement for youth in the United States in the 1980s, particularly in its connection to punk culture. Progressive college radio is defined here as a particular type of noncommercial radio broadcast from university radio stations. It inherited from educational radio a commitment to democratic communication and from community radio a commitment to localism and representing underrepresented communities. Progressive college radio continued these missions, but also applied them to music, playing music considered unmarketable by the commercial music industry and thereby representing underrepresented musicians. College radio is popularly remembered as the radio format that helped create commercial alternative rock in the 1980s. This narrative effaces the way the most progressive college stations programmed music hostile to the music industry, especially punk and its related genres, and the way that progressive DJs often felt uncomfortable being part of a farm system for the music industry, something this dissertation investigates. Through discourse analysis of archival materials from four progressive college radio stations, as well as interviews with former DJs, this dissertation reveals how station personnel understood the role of progressive college radio in relation to the music industry, punk culture, the dominant culture of the US in the 1980s, and in their own lives. By investigating how the DJs conceptualized and debated their programming and production practices, this project illustrates how progressive college radio responded to increasing music industry scrutiny and a conservative culture’s increasingly hostile and narrow conceptions of youth. This dissertation also charts the ways progressive college radio DJs mobilized punk’s do-it-yourself (DIY) mode of cultural production, amateur aesthetics, and anti-authoritarianism, to create both a physical and sonic space for self-representation and creative expression. / text

Social media has come to play an increasingly important role in today's society. It’s hard in today’s world not to talk about youth culture without mentioning social media. Large amounts of research show that this type of media adversely affects young people, but at the same time, much of this research is written from an adult perspective. Our purpose in this bachelor thesis is to examine and highlight a young persons own perspective on this type of media. We have chosen to focus on younger people that use Instagram between the ages of thirteen through sixteen. The teens are most active on Instagram and it's their main social media platform. We have been studying Instagram accounts and have had interviews with focus groups to explore the culture that prevails on Instagram today. The study shows that young people today use Instagram in order to take advantage of the sharing of their everyday lives. All of the respondents believe that girls and boys use Instagram in different ways. The main difference is that girls seem to care more about their social media lives than boys do. Something that is demonstrated by all the girls is that they use two different accounts for two different audiences. In the discussion, we review why the culture looks like it does and how young people today jointly build rules about how to behave in this social medium. Then we finally arrive to the point that young people today have a better eye on social media than previous researchhas shown. We believe that the concerns many parents have about their children on social media in many cases is excessive. / Sociala medier har kommit att spela en allt större roll i dagens samhälle. Det går idag inte att prata om ungdomskulturen utan att nämna de sociala medierna. Mycket forskning visar att ungdomar påverkas negativt av denna typ av media men samtidigt är mycket av denna forskning skriven ur ett vuxenperspektiv. Vårt syfte med denna studie är därför att undersöka och belysa de ungas egna perspektiv på denna typ av medier. Vi har valt att inrikta oss på ungdomar och Instagram då det är unga mellan 13-16 som är mest aktiva på sociala medier och Instagram är deras största plattform. Vi har genom att studera Instagram-konton och intervjuer i fokusgrupper undersökt kulturen som råder på Instagram idag. Studien visar att ungdomar idag använder Instagram i syfte att ta del av samt själva dela med sig av sin vardag. Samtliga respondenter menar att Instagram används på olika sätt av tjejer och killar. Främsta skillnaden är att tjejer verkar bry sig mer än vad killar gör. Något som styrks av att samtliga tjejer använder sig av två olika konton för två olika målgrupper. I diskussionen går vi igenom varför kulturen ser ut som den gör idag och hur de unga idag tillsammans bygger regelverk kring hur man ska bete sig på detta sociala medium. Det vi till sist kommer fram till är att unga idag har bättre koll på sociala medier än vad tidigare forskning visat. Vi anser att den oro många föräldrar känner över sina barn på sociala medier i många fall är överdriven.

This thesis is a social history of spring break, examining the economic and social aspects of this youth culture phenomenon in Florida. Spring break follows the evolution of youth culture's increasingly complex relationship with an expanding consumer culture. I am exploring its many manifestations in music, film, and popular fiction, but also its rebellious expressions in the riots and arrests on Florida's beaches. I intend to focus on the small beach communities that were transformed by spring break, particularly Fort Lauderdale.Spring break in Florida dates back to the late 1920s in Palm Beach. Wealthy New England families spent their winters in Palm Beach. Their children who attended northern colleges joined their parents during Easter vacation. The hardships of the Great Depression and the sacrifices of World War II kept extravagant travel to a minimum, and the southeast coast of Florida became a popular vacation spot.By the 1950s, Fort Lauderdale reigned as the spring break capitol. Soon the competition to attract spring break crowds and the tensions of an emerging youth culture played an increasingly vital economic role in a consumer-driven America of the 1950s and 60s. Fort Lauderdale struggled to maintain an image of sophistication while catering to a notoriously raucous but financially lucrative onslaught of teenage spring-breakers. Spring break determined the development of both of these cities, and many others in Florida, by influencing municipal law, local industry, and, eventually, the cities' own senses of identity and public image.Spring break continues to demonstrate the vicissitudes of youth and consumer culture on the beaches of Panama City and Cozumel, Mexico, but it has also become an industry in itself.

With origins in the South Bronx area of New York in the early 1970s, hip-hop culture is now produced and consumed globally. While hip-hop activities can be varied, hip-hop is generally considered to have four forms or “elements”: DJing, MCing, b-boying/b-girling, and graffiti. Although all four elements of hip-hop have become a part of many youth work initiatives across the globe, public debate and controversy continue to surround hip-hop activities. Very little research and literature has explored the complexities involved in the assembling of hip-hop activities in youth work sites of practice using these hip-hop elements. This study attends to the gap in hip-hop and human service literature by tracing how hip-hop activities were assembled in several sites of youth work activity in Christchurch, New Zealand. Actor-network theory (ANT) is the methodological framework used to map the assemblage of hip-hop-youth work activities in this study. ANT follows how action is distributed across both human and non-human actors. By recognising the potential agency of “things”, this research traces the roles played by human actors, such as young people and youth workers, together with those of non-human actors such as funding documents, social media, clothing, and youth venue equipment. This ethnographic study provides rich descriptions or “snapshots” of some of the key socio-material practices that shaped the enactment of hip-hop-youth work activities. These are derived from fieldwork undertaken between October 2009 and December 2011, where participant observation took place across a range of sites of hip-hop-youth work activity. In addition to this fieldwork, formal interviews were undertaken with 22 participants, the majority being youth workers, young people, and youth trust administrators. The ANT framework reveals the complexity of the task of assembling hip-hop in youth work worlds. The thesis traces the work undertaken by both human and non-human actors in generating youth engagement in hip-hop-youth work activities. Young people’s hip-hop interests are shown to be varied, multiple, and continually evolving. It is also shown how generating youth interest in hip-hop-youth work activities involved overcoming young people’s indifference or lack of awareness of the hip-hop resources a youth trust had on offer. Furthermore, the study highlights where hip-hop activities were edited or “tinkered” with to avoid hip-hop “bads”. The thesis also unpacks how needed resources were enlisted, and how funders’ interests were translated into supporting hip-hop groups and activities. By tracing the range of actors mobilised to enact hip-hop-youth work activities, this research reveals how some youth trusts could avoid having to rely on obtaining government funds for their hip-hop activities. The thesis also includes an examination of one youth trust’s efforts to reconfigure its hip-hop activities after the earthquakes that struck Christchurch city in 2010 and 2011. Working both in and on the world, the text that is this thesis is also understood as an intervention. This study constitutes a deliberate attempt to strengthen understandings of hip-hop as a complex, multiple, and fluid entity. It therefore challenges traditional media and literature representations that simplify and thus either stigmatise or celebrate hip-hop. As such, this study opens up possibilities to consider the opportunities, as well as the complexities of assembling hip-hop in youth work sites of practice.