The focus of this sociological research is on the five most popular and commercially successful Australian indie music festivals: Livid, Big Day Out, the Falls festival, Homebake, and Splendour in the Grass. The three key features of Australian indie music festivals are, firstly, that they are multi-staged ticketed outdoor events, with clearly defined yet temporal boundaries. Secondly, the festivals have a youth-orientated focus yet are open to all ages. Finally, the festivals are primarily dominated by indie-guitar culture and music. My aim is to investigate how these music festivals are able to strike an apparently paradoxical balance between the creation of a temporal community, or network of festivalgoers, and the commodity of the festivals themselves. My research methodology utilises a postmodern approach to ethnography, which has allowed me to investigate the festivalgoers as an ‘insider researcher.’ Data was collected through a series of participant observations at Australian indie music festivals which included the use of photographs and field notes. In addition I conducted nineteen semi-structured interviews and two focus groups with festivalgoers and festival organisers. The thesis adopts a post-subcultural approach to investigating the festivalgoers as an ideal type of a neo-tribal grouping. Post-subculture theory deals with the dynamic, heterogeneous and fickle nature of contemporary alliances and individuals’ feelings of group ‘in-betweeness’ in late capitalist/ global consumer society. I argue that Maffesoli’s theory of neo-tribalism can shine new light on the relationships between youth, music and style. Music festivals are anchoring places for neo-tribal groupings like the festivalgoers as well as a commercialised event. An analysis of the festivalgoers’ ritual clothing (t-shirts as commodities), leads to the conclusion that the festivalgoers use t-shirts to engage in a process of identification. T-shirts, I argue, are an example of a linking image which creates both a sense of individualism as well as a connection to a collective identity or sociality. Through a case study of moshing and audience behaviour it is discovered that the festivalgoers develop neo-tribal sociality and identification with each other through their participation in indie music festivals. Although pleasure seems to be the foremost significant dimension of participating in these festivals, the festivalgoers nevertheless appear to have developed an innate sense of togetherness and neo-tribal sociality. The intensity and demanding experience of attending a festival fosters the opportunity for a sense of connectedness and belonging to develop among festivalgoers. / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

<p>The purpose of this essay is to investigate what it means to be a punk in Linköping, Sweden today. This is done by interviewing four informants on a number of topics. The topics being discussed are appearance and values. The topics “values” contains a number of sub-topics, but the emphasis is put on D.I.Y-ideals and equality.</p><p>D.I.Y-ideals (Do It Yourself-ideals) are important. The informants are more or less involved in the D.I.Y-networks in which record labels, bands, fanzines and other things are a part.</p><p>This and other things being discussed shows an image of punks that is different from the traditional image. The informants are of the opinion that the general image of punks is wrong.</p> / <p>Syftet med denna uppsats är att utröna vad det innebär att vara punkare i Linköping, Sverige idag. Detta har gjorts med utgångspunkt i intervjuer med informanter om ett antal ämnen. De ämnen som behandlas är utseende och värderingar. Ämnet ”värderingar” är omfattande, men är främst inriktat på D.I.Y-ideal och tankar om jämställdhet.</p><p>D.I.Y-idealen (dvs. gör det själv-idealen) är viktiga. Informanterna är mer eller mindre involverade i de nätverk i vilka skivbolag, band, publikationer i form av fanzines och annat ingår.</p><p>Detta och annat som tas upp visar på en bild av punkare som inte överensstämmer med den traditionella bilden. Informanterna anser inte själva att de är och ser ut som de tror att andra anser att punkare ska vara och se ut. Den vanliga bilden av punkare är felaktig.</p>

<p>This essay will focus on drug addicts and the world as they see it. The essay is based on intervjues with three men and one woman and participant observation of the three men´s social life in the surroundings of Stockholm. The informants’ opinions and experiences are central as well as the observations made of them during an intensive fieldwork. The study which was of an exploring character has revealed a complex relationship between the informants and society. The concepts of subculture and stigmatization seem equally central in the social life and perception of life of these drug addicts. The intricate relationship between the two needs further study before a model of the interrelationship can be presented. In a final discussion of the results of the study with the informants they confirm that they see themselves both as part of a subculture and stigmatized by society.</p><p>The study also includes some ethical reflections on the role of the investigator in relation to informants who are drug addicts.</p>

During the recent years in Turkey, the word &ldquo / apache&rdquo / had taken its place in Turkish popular culture as a pejorative word that is used to label a group of slum-dweller, working class youth. Those young people are distinguished through their visual styles, music consumption, and everyday activities that form a subculture. This thesis, firstly, is an attempt to understand the material, social and cultural circumstances which produce this subculture. Secondly, the thesis seeks to analyze the cultural reflections of these circumstances into the subculture that is emerging. As an attempt to understand that process, a four months media survey and a ten months field research with in-depth interviews and participant observation was conducted with the members of this subculture in Ankara-Turkey. As a result of the media survey and the field research it was observed that the most dominant factor that leads to/produces this subculture is the precarious working conditions that these youths are embedded. The members of that subculture are composed of the young members of the working class who enter into labor market under the &lsquo / internalized&rsquo / conditions of precarity. They consistently, experience employment under the precarious working conditions and unemployment. Therefore, they occupy a liminal and marginalized position in which they neither articulate to their class position nor depart from it. Their ambiguous position in the relations of production redounds on their cultural practices. They create a subculture both through the mediation of their socio-economically obscure position and as a cultural response to it. They seek to construct a new position through the survival strategies and daily tactics in the realm of cultural practices / through a subculture in which they can define and situate themselves within the bounds of possibilities of their material conditions. However, this subculture also constitutes a continuum with their material conditions and consolidates their liminality. They are labeled as Apaches in that subculture and experience a similar kind of a marginalization with their counterpart precarious youth in all around the world. This thesis examines that subculture in which the cultural reflections of young people to precarity became concrete.

This essay will focus on drug addicts and the world as they see it. The essay is based on intervjues with three men and one woman and participant observation of the three men´s social life in the surroundings of Stockholm. The informants’ opinions and experiences are central as well as the observations made of them during an intensive fieldwork. The study which was of an exploring character has revealed a complex relationship between the informants and society. The concepts of subculture and stigmatization seem equally central in the social life and perception of life of these drug addicts. The intricate relationship between the two needs further study before a model of the interrelationship can be presented. In a final discussion of the results of the study with the informants they confirm that they see themselves both as part of a subculture and stigmatized by society. The study also includes some ethical reflections on the role of the investigator in relation to informants who are drug addicts.

This thesis examines the genesis of the derogative emo kid representation and considers the latent functions it initially served in being applied to visible categories of adolescent subculturalists on the behalf of participants within the wider punk subculture. Pulling from the work of Stanley Cohen in arguing that the emo kid representation be conceptualized as a subcultural folk-devil, this thesis argues for the applicability of a Bourdieuian theoretical framework in understanding the means in which subcultural authenticity is not only distributed throughout fields of subcultural participation, but within those spheres of communicative entertainment media in which subcultural knowledge is created, legitimized and disseminated. In offering a Foucaultian genealogy of the niche-mediated emo pseudo-genre, and highlighting its correlation with concurrent movements perceived as facilitating the mainstream colonization of the punk subculture, this thesis argues that the emo kid folk-devil was constructed and reified by virtue of an array of discursive measures based largely in online, micro-mediated forums - through which punk subculturalists vied to marginalize those emo kids so perceived as threatening the exclusivity of the punk subculture and the long-established symbolic economies contained therein. Finally, this thesis demonstrates the process through which this subcultural folk-devil was annexed into a wider socio-discourse concerning dangerous youth populations and, thus, came to be utilized in collusion with mass-mediated campaigns meant to perpetuate the political disempowerment of adolescent populations through the endorsement of representational politics.

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.

This dissertation contributes to music scene and online community studies. It is an historical examination of the CBLocals music scene in the summer of 2006. This scene is located in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Canada, and the website with which its participants identify. This study analyzes the CBLocals website as a cultural infrastructure of a music scene and thus positions itself to advance pre-Internet arguments about scenes. This dissertation argues that on the one hand, the Internet changes how music scenes function by increasing accessibility and mobility. On the other hand, it has left the social composition and ideological outlook of music scenes unchanged. Users celebrate the medium's possibilities and what the CBLocals website has brought to their scene. They also feel nostalgia for the practices they feel their scene has lost along the way. The result is that the most significant consequence of CBLocals.com and the Internet on the music scene is a feeling of ambivalence in its participants. In the second and third chapter, I demonstrate how local context still greatly affects the representation of the CBLocals scene. In Chapter Two, I analyze the social composition of CBLocals based on race, gender, region, class, sexuality and age. I conclude that this social composition is unaffected by technological advances. In Chapter Three, I analyze discussions of "selling out" within the scene. I conclude that regional perspectives of state-supported professionalism in music and arts inform discussions on "selling out" that are specific to the CBLocals community. The fourth chapter explores the CBLocals users' perceptions of the website and messageboard. Users celebrate a variety of benefits, such as an interactive forum, the social lubrication provided by online gossip and the ease of promoting music online. However, many users dislike what they see as the erosion of work ethic and standards of discourse that have occurred in the Internet age. These mixed emotions reflect the ambivalence resulting from the celebration of possibilities and the nostalgia emergent with new technology.

De manière générale, ce mémoire vise à rendre compte du déploiement global du nightclubbing commercial montréalais en tant qu'option de divertissement nocturne de premier plan ainsi que phénomène sous-culturel institué important pour plusieurs jeunes adultes de dix-huit à vingt-cinq ans. Dans une perspective plus précise, il s'agit d'une « proposition de compréhension » (Paillé, 2006, p.117) visant à déceler et à mettre en lumière de potentiels éléments signifiants sous-jacents aux divers comportements et pratiques ritualisés observés lors d'une vingtaine de séances de terrain dans cinq établissements différents de la grande région métropolitaine de Montréal. Le processus d'observation utilisé pour recueillir les données pendant chaque session pivote autour d'une grille semi-ouverte, assurant flexibilité et polyvalence au chercheur, mais restreignant toutefois volontairement les enquêtes au déroulement même du phénomène ainsi qu'aux expressions corporelles et aux habitudes qui le constituent. L'interprétation des informations récoltées, ces dernières réorganisées en sept catégories thématiques exposant chacune un aspect particulier du phénomène, est basée sur un cadre théorique multidisciplinaire mettant à l'avant plan une perspective postmoderniste inspirée des conceptions de Maffesoli et de Jeffrey, une construction analytique interactionniste de Riis et Woodhead assurant une compréhension dynamique de la dialectique réunissant les sphères de l'individuel, du collectif et du symbolique, puis quelques notions issues du courant religiologique utilisées pour leur capacité à rendre compte de l'indicible dans l'expérience de certains moments paroxystiques. Ceci dit, l'idée d'une perspective signifiante larvée dans la pratique du clubbing est soutenue, dans le dernier chapitre, par l'irréductible lien symbiotique unissant le participant et la collectivité, dans un élan de dépassement des limites, de proximité des corps et d'exaltation festive régénératrice, mais également dans une logique consommatrice, expressive et désinhibitrice. Celle-ci est mise en scène, dans un rapport spatio-temporel réorienté vers le présent, l'imminent, l'ici et le maintenant, par plusieurs pratiques ritualisées. C'est par l'entremise de ces dernières ainsi que par les représentations symboliques auxquelles elles réfèrent que les potentialités significatives deviennent saisissables, intelligibles, expérimentables. Enfin, les conclusions laissent à penser que cette production de sens est possiblement un facteur à considérer dans la reproduction, la réactualisation et l'institution de ce divertissement nocturne si populaire. ______________________________________________________________________________ MOTS-CLÉS DE L’AUTEUR : Nightclub, postmodernité, fête, sous-culture, communauté.

MP3 blogs and their aggregators, which have risen to prominence over the past four years, are presenting an alternative way of promoting and discovering new music. I will argue that MP3 files greatly affect MP3 blogs in terms of shaping them as: a genre separate from general weblogs and music blogs without MP3s, especially due to the impact of MP3 blog aggregators such as The Hype Machine and Elbows; a particular form of rhetoric illuminated by Kenneth Burke's dramatistic ratios of agency-purpose, purpose-act and scene-act; and as a potentially subversive subculture, which like other subcultures, exists in a symbiotic relationship with the traditional media it defines itself against. Using excerpts from multiple MP3 blogs and their forums, interviews with MP3 bloggers and Anthony Volodkin (creator of The Hype Machine), references to MP3 blogs in traditional press, and Burke's theory of dramatism and Hodge and Kress's theories of social semiotics, I will demonstrate that the MP3 file is not only changing the way music is consumed and circulated, but also the way music is promoted and discussed.