BCMCR Event Series – Digital Youth Subcultures

Date & Time:

12th February, 16:00

Location:

Parkside, P440 and Online via MS Teams

BCMCR invites you to the research event ‘BCMCR Transgressive Identities and Subjectivities – Digital Youth Subcultures’.

Date: 12 February 2025 | Time: 16:00PM – 17:30PM UK TIME

Place: Parkside Building, P440 / Online via MS Teams

Tickets Available: In-Person/Online

This will be a hybrid event – for those who will be on campus please join us in P440, where refreshments will be served. Alternatively, please sign up to ensure you receive the link for MS Teams.

 

Event Bio:

We are delighted to have Professor Kate Hoskins (Brunel University) and Dr Carlo Genova (University of Turin) joining us online for a research seminar. As co-editors (along with Dr Nic Crowe) of the collection “Digital Youth Subcultures: Performing ‘Transgressive’ Identities in Digital Social Spaces” (Routledge, 2022), they will discuss their work around this project and share key highlights and insights from the book. They will also each discuss their own personal research, including explorations of the digital social spaces of ravers, and transgressive uses of urban space – please see these fascinating abstracts below. 

 

Presenter Abstracts and Bios:

Digital social spaces of ravers

Since the 1990s, ravers have been a distinctive youth subculture, defined by their rebellion against authority and rejection of social conformity. Through stylisation of the self and a dedication to particular forms of music, this group is formed of those marked out by their embodied identifications of style and taste. But how has the physical rebellion of 1990s raves transmuted into digital social space (DSS) and what role does identity play? Is social class and gender evident amongst group members in these online spaces? If so, how is it made visible? This presentation examines these questions and considers how social class and gender are manifest in ‘classless’, gender neutral digital space. The presentation draws on data extracted from two DSS sites over a period of six months. The DSS identified reside in publicly available social media pages. The textual data collected has been thematically analysed and reveals the subversive ways in which social class and gender are evident in the exchanges between ravers, which are at times transgressive in terms of the content and associated ideology.

Kate Hoskins is a Professor in Education with a focus on policy. Her research interests rest on the intersections between education and social policy, identity and inequalities in relation to early years, further and higher education. Her current funded Froebel Trust project with Professor Emma Wainwright, Dr Utsa Mukherjee and Dr Yuwei Xu examines how low income families engage with Froebelian principles. She has published extensively on inequalities in ECEC, with a focus on the role of policy in exacerbating these. Kate has recently completed a British Academy funded research project with Professor Marie-Pierre Moreau and Dr Ellen McHugh to examine the precarious transitions undertaken by doctoral researchers negotiating the shift to an academic post. Kate is a Co-Editor of the British Educational Research Journal (BERJ).

 

Transgressive uses of urban space

In recent decades, an increasing number of practices have emerged, first in large European and North American cities and then globally, characterised by uses of urban space, mostly public space, that differ from those that are juridically defined, legally legitimised, and socially more widespread. This dimension of “alternativity” in practices such as skateboarding, parkour, graffiti, street bouldering, street dance, and other phenomena, has, however, evolved over time, taking on tones of deviance, resistance, conflict, and adaptation, depending on the moments and contexts. Through a research project developed in Italy, efforts are being made to address the complexity arising from these different approaches, and one of the most useful conceptual categories in this regard is “transgression.” Indeed, many of those involved in these practices, on the one hand, express awareness and claim their “illegitimate” nature, but on the other hand, adopt a pragmatic and accommodating attitude towards the containment and institutionalisation procedures with which societies are attempting to normalise these practices.

Carlo Genova is an associate professor at the University of Turin, where he teaches Sociology of culture and Lifestyles and urban spaces. His main fields of empirical research are youth cultures in urban space, youth political activism, food consumption and sustainability. His theoretical interests mainly focus on lifestyles and subcultures, social analysis of space and material culture, interpretative sociology. He is a member of the editorial board of the International Journal of the Sociology of Leisure, the Journal of Youth Studies, and Leisure Studies.