A new museum, an online archive and a film season offer some great resources for researching – and teaching about – youth culture. Taken together, they raise some interesting questions about who represents youth culture, and how we define it.
Category Archives: Youth culture
Art and youth work in post-war Britain: ‘Journey into a Fog’
A forgotten best-seller of the mid-1950s sheds light on youth culture and the potential of creative youth work. Continue reading
The sixties started here: revisiting ‘Ready, Steady, Go!’
The relationship between pop music, youth culture and television has often been an uneasy one. Here’s a critical look back at one of the most fondly-remembered British pop shows, sixty years since it first appeared.
Youth representing youth
Two recent films, produced collaboratively with groups of young people, raise some interesting questions about representation. A discussion of Sarah Gavron’s Rocks (2020) and Fred Baillif’s La Mif (The Fam, 2021). Continue reading
A suburban scene: youth and music in sixties London
In the late 1950s and 1960s, the south-west London suburbs of Richmond and Twickenham were a hotbed for innovation in popular music. What can the history of this very local music scene tell us about youth culture more broadly?
Revisiting youth subcultures
Looking back at Dick Hebdige’s classic book Subculture: The Meaning of Style, on the anniversary of its first publication forty years ago.
Introducing ‘Growing Up Modern’
Announcing my new writing project Growing Up Modern: Childhood, Youth and Popular Culture Since 1945.
Teen sexting: from moral panic to legal absurdity
‘Sexting’ has become the focus of a new moral panic. Yet responses to this apparent problem have become increasingly contradictory and absurd. We need a more considered educational response.
