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Paper
Youth culture studies are becoming increasingly rare. In the 1980s, many Dutch scholars investigated youth cultures (e.g. Ter Bogt 1987; Van Duin 1983; De Waal 1989), an interest to which the then thriving academic journal Jeugd & Samenleving (Youth & Society) also attested. In the 1990s, this interest declined and the cultural perspective on youth culture was replaced by a psychological perspective on individual adolescents.[2] Jeugd & Samenleving stopped and was replaced by a more policy oriented professional journal focusing on problems. In this perspective there is less attention to cultural differences, and, perhaps as a result, Dutch youth cultures were no longer studied. The move from a collective to an individual perspective is also visible in the international literature on youth cultures. After the almost overwhelming research on youth cultures in the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) (e.g. Hebdige 1979; Hall and Jefferson 1976), critique on this original approach led to a reformulation of youth cultural theory. Informed by feminist, postcolonial and postmodern insights, the focus shifted from attention to collective expressions of resistance to individual expressions of consumerism (see Muggleton 2000; Bennett 1999; McRobbie 1990). Although some empirical work is done (e.g. Thornton 1995 on club cultures in the UK), most of these current studies on youth culture focus on conceptual discussions such as the applicability and usability of the term ‘subculture’ (see Hesmondhalgh 2005 for an overview). The critique on the CCCS is repetitive and hinders further theorising based on concrete new youth cultures. For example, youth studies acknowledge the importance of location (e.g. Perho 2000; Spaaij 2006; Holt and Griffin 2005) yet fail to theorise the relationship between context and content. To sum up, the literature on youth cultures suffers from both an empirical and theoretical gap.
In this article, I aim to understand how context affects content of youth cultures. I investigate youth culture in the specific context of the school, which, simply in terms of time spent, takes precedence over leisure sphere contexts such as sports, meetings or parties. Furthermore, the social life of most youngsters consists of school friends (Duits 2008). I chose to investigate 8th form, when pupils are on average twelve years old. The period of youth has become prolonged in the last decades (Kehily 2007) and twelve-year olds are now already considered part of youth. This age group is also remarkable because puberty with all its biological changes has just started or is around the corner. In the Netherlands, 8th form or groep 8 is the final year of primary school, after which pupils leave the familiar primary school womb. The year is marked by the CITO-test and other preparations for secondary school.[3] The central research question is: How do specific, varying school contexts affect the routines and rituals that constitute everyday youth culture at school? Before explaining the methods employed to answer this question, I discuss the notion of everyday life, in order to frame this research question and to formulate two sub-questions that further guide this study.