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GCST2612: Youth and Youth
Cultures
Week 4:
“At Risk” and on “The Margins”
Lecture starts at 3:05
• This lecture will touch on some very political and emotional topics, especially relating to
Indigenous people.
• We will handle this with care and respect. Please look after yourselves.
• This lecture will contain images of Indigenous people who may have passed.
I reiterate my Acknowledgement of Country. We are meeting, talking, and learning on unceded
Gadigal Land, and I pay my respects to elders past and present and extend that respect to any
Indigenous people who may be in the unit.
- Emergence of a “youth” or “teen” culture
- Resistance, “Refusal” (Hebdige)
- Visibility, identity, social alignments
- “Lines of flight” (Grossberg)
- “Reading” style
Where we left off last week…
- Youth as a problem, a policy object
(setting up for deeper discussion in future
weeks)
- Concepts of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ youth,
‘at risk’, or ‘marginal’
- Some popular culture negotiations of
these ideas (with the close reading
exercise assessment task in mind)
- Two readings this week, on film,
narratives of escape, identity, empathy
This week…
Dylan Mooney (2022). ‘Collide’. Digital Illustration.
https://canvas.sydney.edu.au/courses/49922/assignments/473135
Close reading - foundational cultural studies skill, though something you’re likely already doing
Subjecting a text to some close observation, and analysis of its meanings (within its broader context):
you might focus on the big: the narrative/plot/context, or the small: particular moments, details,
symbols that illustrate your ideas.
Each lecture so far has engaged with close reading – you’ve all done it here already! Assessments are
engaging the skills, knowledge, ideas you are developing.
NOTE: 1 academic reading, 1 text of your choice.
• Yes, you can use a text referenced in a lecture! It should be a text that you know well (aka that
you’ve seen it!)
• Academic integrity stands though if discussing one of the films in this week’s readings – your close
reading must be original, and you must cite the reading when you are using it.
• We suggest picking a text that interests you – it can be old or new, in any language, from any context
– just as long as you subject it to some detailed discussion/analysis.
Close Reading Exercise (10%)
“Youth is not an identity but
a distribution of practices
and affects.”
(Grossberg, 1995/2016,
p. 34)
Reminder: affects referring to feelings, emotions,
experiences
Looking for ways to be in the world, beholden to
“affective extremism”:
“Youth does not so much involve an
ideological search for identity as a search for
appropriate maps of daily life, for appropriate
sites of involvement, investment and absorption.
This involves youth in a constant shuttling
between extremes. Searching for something
worthy of their passion, they "have no choice
but to talk in extremes; they're being
wrenched and buffeted" (Baker, 1989) by all of
the competing (and in the contemporary world,
unworthy) demands of the historical formation.”
(Grossberg, p. 33)
https://tinyurl.com/
young-4
What are some
things that happen
when we’re young?
Menti code: 2233 8307
“Structure of
feeling” (Raymond Williams): a
feeling or consciousness proper
to a way of living in particular
social conditions
• Being “young” is experienced in
a highly culturally specific time
and place
• Youth as a structure and a feeling of
presentness and futurity, of
possibility and potentiality and
of emotional intensity – time
“the best/worst time of your life”
What feelings do we associate with youth?
Our Times (film, 2015)
• Defining period of your life
• When you become who you are going to be
• Necessarily transient - has an end point, ‘coming of age’
• Possibility of missing out, falling behind
• Full of extremes, ‘firsts’, heightened experiences – “storm and stress” (wk1)
• The only time without the responsibilities of adulthood
• Therefore necessitating institutional/adult controls
Youth as a ‘crescendo experience’
“The fragility of this, process meant that
youth would be ambivalently valued: on
the one hand, nurtured as a time directed
beyond the present (the American dream),
a time for constructing new mattering maps
projected into an unknown future.
“On the other hand, youth was envied and
feared as a heightened experience of the
present, as a challenge to the viability and
necessity of existing social norms and
regulations.”
(Grossberg, p. 36)
Youth as heroic, inventive, saviour? Youth as corrupted, unknowable, dangerous?
To momentarily visualise this using popular ‘speculative fiction’
(science fiction, horror, fantasy etc)…
Gill Valentine & Tracy Skelton, Cool Places:
Geographies of Youth Culture (1997)
Also.. Youth as the problem of the future in the
present – with all its risks, opportunities,
questions, hopes:
Youth-as-hope
Youth-as-trouble or Youth-at-risk
1. What are some examples of youth as
embodying hope?
2. How about youth as embodying “trouble” or
“at risk”?
3. What are youth “at risk” of?
“Discourses, or systems of reasoning, operate across numerous social sites (for
example, across the fields and institutions associated with the law, medicine,
education, and psychology); this sense of being everywhere confers an aura of
naturalness or inevitability to them. Bronwyn Davies ascribes four dimensions
to discourses: (1) language, categories, metaphors; (2) the emotional
meanings attached to main categories, images, and terms; (3) the narratives in
which the social categories and emotions are linked; and (4) the moral
frameworks in which the narratives operate to communicate good and evil or
desirable and undesirable behavior.”
Nancy Lesko, “Troubling Teenagers” (2012), p. 13.
How is being “at risk” decided?
How is being “at risk” decided?
Kitty te Riele, 2006. “Youth ‘at risk’: further marginalizing the marginalized?” Journal of Education
Policy
““Policy identification of youth ‘at risk’” has tended to “focus on personal attributes of young
people”, and “this identification has set up a false distinction between a supposed problematic
minority versus a ‘normal’ majority’” (p. 115)
“The tendency in Australian policy has been to perceive more education as unquestionably
beneficial, both for the individual and the nation, and to describe those young people
likely to leave early as youth ‘at risk.’’ (te Riele, 133)
“The concept of young people ‘at risk’ is often connected with a failure to make a proper
transition from youth to adulthood, and in particular from school to work.” (p. 136)
(NOTE: Week 5 guest lecture focuses on schooling and youth…)
Week 3: subculture, identity, moral panic
Stanley Cohen Folk Devils and Moral Panics (1972):
“A condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to
societal values and interests; [and] its nature is presented in a stylized and stereotypical fashion by
the mass media.” (Cohen 1972, p. 9)
Impacting on how certain practices are viewed, and how participants potentially see themselves
How is being “at risk” decided?
“Moral panic fosters notions of personal and professional
'risk’ in challenging hegemonic discourses, which
act as a powerful social control mechanism,
maintaining the dominant power relations that operate
within cultural binaries such as adult/child,
parent/educator, teacher/student, heterosexual/homosexual.” (p. 115)
Kerry Robinson, 2011, “In the Name of ‘Childhood Innocence’”, Cultural Studies Review
- Based on psychological understandings (Hall, Piaget, Parsons) of childhood/youth as a
“universal” state – a “shared ‘human’ experience” that is biologically determined,
bound to ‘normative’ processes of time and development.
- Binary opposition between ‘child’/’youth’ and adult – linked to power
- ‘Non-normativity’ – necessitates a response, intervention, symbolises societal risk.
“The othering of young people is, we might argue,
constituted within an ambivalence which leads both to the
desire to expel these dangerous youths from the realms of
decent society (to exclude them from the boundaries of
citizenship) and also to the desire to protect them from
further harm.”
David Oswell, Cool Places: Geographies of Youth Culture
(1997), 38.
What might these two responses look like in action?
Driscoll & Grealy (2015). The plastic adolescent:
classification and minority.
“common-sense” management of “what pleasures,
knowledge and
experiences are deemed appropriate for minors
and… the question of what should be consumed by
whom.’ (p. 63-4)
‘managing immaturity and training cultural
maturity.’ (p. 72)
Idea that there are appropriate and inappropriate
things to experience in youth, - and things that are
mature
(NOTE: Week 6 on sexuality and youth elaborates)
Catherine Driscoll, Teen Film, 2011.
What makes a film a teen film?
Are all films about youth
‘teen films’?
Why are ‘teen films’ seen as
culturally insignificant?
Teen films as being about becoming
a subject, citizen
Youth as a ‘problem’ in popular culture: a motif
(Many thanks to Dr Grace Sharkey for this section, and for inviting us to discuss silly texts)
…the ‘bad boy’
What are some examples of ‘bad boy’ characters in film, TV, pop
culture…?
(you might also think of the boy ‘rebel’, ‘juvenile delinquent’, the
‘boy from the wrong side of the tracks’, or the ‘angsty outsider’...)
Why is the bad boy bad?
• “a causal relationship between
environment and delinquency” (Driscoll, p. 31)
• Failures of his parents
• Difficult home life
• Class/racial elements
- Sensitive and unique
“Good youth are not only
tempted by the delinquent
image but partly defined by its
romance”
(Driscoll, p. 32)
Youth institutions and the managing of adolescence
What institutions or powers step in when youth behave ‘badly’?
How does society seek to ‘correct’ ‘bad’ youth?
• Law and juvenile courts
• Family
• Schools
• Churches
• Medicine
(see Driscoll, 2011, p.33; Lesko, 2012, p. 13.)
Youth institutions and the managing of adolescence
Lawrence Grossberg:
“Youth exists only as a mobile and flexible alliance or distribution of practices;
yet its mobility and flexibility must constantly be disciplined, stabilized or
even homogenized. This is at least in part the function of the various
institutions and apparatuses which operate on youth, including, I might
add, the various academic apparatuses which, in their research
formulations, organize youth into various formations, into various
conceptions of "the proper" forms of youth.”
Risk as deficit
“Conceptualizations of youth at risk in
education policy draw on a psychological
framework, conceiving of risk factors in terms
of dysfunction in individuals or their families,
rather than on a sociological framework.
Thus, policy discourses construct youth at
risk as a deficit” (te Riele, 132)
‘The individual approach to ‘risk’ focuses on
the attributes of students which make them
more susceptible to educational ‘failure’.
These attributes tend to be cast in terms of
weakness or deficiencies in the student.’ (te
Riele, 136)
• This portion of the lecture will contain images of Indigenous people who have passed.
How do these films position youth, or ‘coming of age’? How do they imagine it?
How do they present the subjectivity, identity of their young characters?
Going back to Grossberg, what are the practices and affects of youth in these
texts?
How is the audience invited to engage with these characters?
What, specifically, does the narrative film form offer?
Representing Marginal Youth: Three film examples
Beneath Clouds
2002 Australian film by Indigenous director Ivan Sen
Starring young first-time actors
Award-winning (including best first film at Berlin Film Festival)
Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0bf6HeKF5o4
https://www.sbs.com.au/whats-on/article/beneath-clouds-a-
superb-australian-film/9n0ld5o56
Samson and Delilah
2009 Australian film by Indigenous director Warwick
Thornton
Starring young inexperienced (some first-time) actors
Award-winning (including best first feature at Cannes)
Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0v6GTIEc0cw
Both classic Australian films in their own right, but for the
purposes of our discussion we’ll consider some similarities
or resonances between them…
Beneath Clouds and Samson & Delilah
Both films focus on “a pair of young Indigenous characters struggling to find their
place in a world characterised by disadvantage and disconnection from mainstream
society. The protagonists of the two films make a transition from adolescence to
adulthood at a time in Australia that is also experiencing a state of transition—the
reconciliation period.” (Fordham)
“Through enacting and understanding the various stories available to them
they negotiate the transitional space of adolescence and journey towards
adulthood. In this way they are also symbolic of reconciliation in Australia as
being at a time of adolescence—that is, negotiating exactly how the process
might mature and become a workable, positive process for both Indigenous
and non-Indigenous citizens alike.”