Faculty of Criminology, Justice and Policy Studies

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The focus is on: a) differences and similarities between fifteen-year-old male and female groups which occupy differently specialised positions within the field of popular youth culture; b) the relationship between such positions and forms of involvement in schooling and education. The research is further concerned to explore the relationships between social class, sexuality and patriarchy in the practices within and between the various groups. To place the study in context, I discuss the role of qualitative research on youth, and examine five major traditions, ranging from the Chicago School, the Functionalists, British research on deviance in the 1950s and 1960s, Sociology of Education, through to the work of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. Criticism of these approaches forms the starting point of the theory and method of the research. The sample consists of over 120 girls and boys in a secondary school in the South of England. Five major groups are identified: Mod Boys, New Wave Girls, Boffin Boys, Boffin Girls and Criminal Boys. All the young people were studying for a number of GCE examinations (except the Criminal group). From this point of view the sample is unusual in British research, as it offers the possibility of studying forms of resistance and conformity among those whom the school considers as the pedagogic elite. The method used was ethnographic and entailed sharing the experiences of the various groups both inside the school (classroom and leisure spaces) and outside the school (leisure and family spaces), for a period of two years. In addition, I have interviewed the headteachers, all heads of subject departments, and younger members of staff. Tape recorded discussions took place in and out of school (street and other locations), with groups and individuals. The research provides the basis for a theory of youth cultural forms, which integrates structural, communicative and semiotic practices. The theory has arisen out of, and in part controlled the collection of the ethnographic data.

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In the early twenty first century, the mobile phone plays an integral role in helping young people shape their identity and achieve social goals. This means that designers of mobile phones are not only creating an artefact that will have a functional purpose for the end user, but one that will be saturated with cultural meanings. In response, the research conducted for this thesis aims to investigate the use of mobile phones in youth cultures so the social and cultural intricacies of interactions can be understood. Consistent with a user centred design approach, the insights from the user study are applied to the development of new technology. The result is the development of The Swarm; a mobile phone prototype that meets the specific social and cultural needs of the young users in the study. Integral to this is the development of a methodological approach that embeds cultural theory within Human Computer Interaction and more specifically, the user centred design process.

This thesis is a reception study that examines potential reasons why the adolescent to college aged demographic of youth culture is embracing communicative and informational mobility. The project attests that the move to mobility is motivated by two major factors, the attraction of being an early adopter of technology and the way social behaviors are made attractive in mobile marketing. Chapter 1 explores the importance of these social behaviors, as they are very much intertwined and contribute to how youth acclimate into society. Chapter 2 demonstrates that creating social distinction and cultural capital is linked to being an early adopter of technology. The remaining portion of the document examines recent mobile advertisements and why youth would be attracted to the aesthetic and thematic elements contained in the advertisements. Chapter 3 examines how Blackberry utilizes the behavior of creating and expressing identity in their advertisements. Chapter 4 focuses on how Apple has worked to create a community centered around their brand. Finally, Chapter 5 looks at how Google/Android has highlighted the acquisition, sharing, and utilization of content through the phenomenon of applications. With this project, I hope to illustrate the rationale why youth would be attracted to communicative and informational mobility.

Young women occupy unprecedented space in contemporary society. Their professional ambitions, educational achievements, practices of cultural consumption, and participation in sport and leisure all offer evidence of a new position for young women. This thesis analyzes female snowboarders as exemplars of young women in contemporary society and popular physical culture. Many young women today play sport and engage in physical activity with a sense of enthusiasm and entitlement unknown to most of their mothers and grandmothers. Against this background the female snowboarder is an excellent barometer of the nature of contemporary youth and popular culture, of the changes in those cultures including the development of niche female cultural industries, and of the emerging opportunities available to middle-class women in Western society. Women's snowboarding, however, is a complicated and multidimensional phenomenon interwoven with numerous political, cultural, social and economic events and processes. In this thesis I set out to capture the complexity of female snowboarding by systematically contextualizing and interrogating the lived experiences of female boarders through drawing upon six critical social theoretical perspectives: Marxist political economy, post-Fordism, feminism, hegemonic masculinity, Pierre Bourdieu's theory of embodiment, and Foucauldian theorizing. In applying these theories, I select key concepts and engage them in conversations with my insider cultural knowledge of snowboarding, numerous periods of fieldwork, and an extensive base of artifacts and sources collected over five years. In this thesis I extend academic understandings of female youth culture via the case study of women in snowboarding, and offer a valuable critique of contemporary social theories used to explain many different social phenomena that involve tensions and power relationships between the genders. While no single theory or concept proved adequate to deal with the multidimensional phenomenon of the female boarder, each having its shortcomings and offering quite different insights, several reveal important commonalities in relation to some key concepts in critical sociology, viz, structure, agency, culture, the body and embodiment, gender and power. These commonalities, I argue, offer future directions for theorizing about, and advancing our understanding of, young women in popular physical culture.

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This thesis focuses on the skateboarding industry in China as both a youth subculture and a cultural industry. I am investigating the transition between the two and examining how the emerging skateboarding industry operates through detailed analysis of the feelings, motivations and meanings attributed to it by its participants and the emerging strata of cultural workers. In order to achieve this research objective, this thesis has positioned the analysis in a triangle of forces between the development of Chinese skateboarding culture, the emerging skateboarding cultural industry and government interventions. This ethnographic study takes into account distinctive characters in the development of Chinese skateboarding communities that signify continuities inside contemporary Chinese youth cultures. I argue that such continuity is still embedded in the organisation of the Chinese skateboarding industry as a cultural industry, in both subcultural and corporate entrepreneurial practices. Moreover, this thesis contributes to ongoing discussions in the field of not only cultural studies but also of the political economic analysis of cultural/creative industries by examining the dynamic incorporations at play between the commercial and governmental forces at the centre of current debate around the inclusion of skateboarding in the Olympic Games, and the consequences of the sportisation of skateboarding in mainstream economic structures. Last but not least, this research captures the working conditions of the cultural labourers who are at the forefront of shaping and reshaping the Chinese skateboarding industry.