Dimitriadis, Greg. (2008). Studying urban youth culture. Reviewed by Nathalis Wamba, Queens College, City University of New York

Dimitriadis, Greg. (2008). Studying urban youth culture. New York: Peter Lang. Pp. viii + 166         ISBN 978-0-8204-7269-0 Reviewed by Nathalis Wamba Queens College, City University of New York August 19, 2008 Studying youth in general and urban youth in particular is an exercise in “othering,” argues the author. In the introduction, he defines key concepts including “studying”, “urban”, “youth” and “culture”. “Studying” evokes a kind of clinical impulse that has been closely linked to imperialistic projects. The entire history of social sciences has been a history of the powerful studying the less powerful for other powerful people suggests Dimitriadis. The term “urban” is both geographic and symbolic. It suggests densely populated areas with block population averaging 1,000 people per square mile and surrounding blocks with populations of 500 people per square mile. Today the term “urban” symbolizes a range of ills, uncertainties, and a code word for pathology. “Youth” is a construction and a highly contested term. Although used to refer to minors (those under the age of 18), its meaning varies across cultures and classes. “Culture” often refers to high culture which includes literature, art, music, philosophy and the like. It is also used to refer to a whole way of life. Having defined the terms, the author examines the traditions of studying urban youth culture. He starts with the Chicago School of Sociology discussing the work of Frederick Trasher’s The Gang: A study of 1,313 gangs in Chicago (1927), William Foote White’s Street corner society: The social structure of an Italian slum (1943), Elliot Liebow’s Tally’s corner: A study of the Negro streetcorner man (1967), Ulf Hannerz’s Soulside: Inquiries into ghetto culture and community (1969). The author suggests that a social pathology framework marked these studies. The city was the problem, one in which sociology needed to intervene. However, the work of William Julius Wilson The declining significance of race (1978), The truly disadvantaged: The inner- city, the underclass and public policy (1987) and When work disappears: The world of the new urban poor (1996), as well as Elijah Anderson’s Street wise: race, class, and change in an urban community (1990) and Code of the street: Decency, violence, and the moral life of the inner city (1999) shifted the focus to a more racialized discourse explaining social pathology as the result of deindustrialization thus extending the work of Chicago school in new directions with significant implications for social and economic policy. From the Chicago School of Sociology, the author turns his attention to cultural work emerging from the United Kingdom. In England, the Marxist tradition influenced cultural studies since culture was seen as an extension of class. British scholars were interested in the role of culture in the lives of young people. Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson’s Resistance through rituals: Youth subculture in post-war Britain (1976) was a watershed book of the movement and the moment. It drew together many scholars who would be central to these debates in the following years. Paul Willis’ Learning to labor: How working class kids get working class jobs (1977) explored the notion of youth agency and resistance and also looked at the production of masculine identity. Dick Hebdige’s Subculture: The meaning of style (1979) examined how youth take the symbols and signs available in everyday life and used them in new and different ways to carve out their own, distinctive subcultural identities. A third body of knowledge that the author explores are critical ethnographies as per the work of Michelle Fine, Lois Weiss and others. In Framing dropouts: Notes on the politics of an urban public high school (1991) Fine merges ethnography and social critique. She argues that schooling works to silence youth. She writes “If youth who drop out are portrayed as unreasonable and academically inferior, then the structure, ideologies and practices that exile them systematically are rendered invisible and the critique they voiced is institutionally silenced.” (p. 3). Those who break this code are framed as dropouts. In The unknown city: The lives of poor and working-class young adults (1998), Michele Fine and Lois Weis look at the commonalities and the distinctions that operate across the lives of working-class black, white, and Puerto Rican men and women in Jersey City, New Jersey and Buffalo, New York. The last book the author discusses is his own, Friendship, cliques, and gang: Young Black men coming of age in urban America. He investigates the lives of two young men, deconstructs the stereotypes while remaining faithful to the various dimensions of their lives. The third chapter entitled “Rethinking the research imaginary” the only one co-authored with Lois Weis examines the role and importance of multisited ethnography for understanding the out-of-school pedagogic experiences of urban youths. “Research imaginary” implies a kind of self-reflexivity about how particular ethnographic sites are imagined, how objects are delimited. Marcus (1998) writes “Multisited research is designed around chains, paths, threads, conjunctions, or juxtapositions of locations in which the ethnographer establishes some form of literal physical presence, with an explicit, posited logic of association or connection among sites than in fact defines the argument of the ethnography “(p. 90). They challenge the objectification and calcification of previous ethnographies and offer instead a deterritorializing ethnography, to open up our imaginations to what counts as education today, where it happens, and how we understand it. They highlight alternative or community-based learning settings where young people enact “emergent cultural formations”. In a final thought on the research imaginary, the authors argue that it is imperative to re-imagine our object of study in a way that forces us to reengage with the lives of urban youths on fresh terrain while challenging predictable notions of culture and identity. The fifth chapter deals with new directions in studying urban youth culture. The author recognizes that studying youth culture is a complex endeavor because the language used is not neutral or value-free, nor is the history of the fields or the methods used. He raises what he considers to be substantive issues facing research in this field including: the relationship between culture and structural economic questions at a time of neoliberal retrenchment: the emergent redefinition of the urban and suburban and its methodological implications; new forms of identity work in a time of globalization, including the role and importance of youth culture in a post- subculture moment; and finally the study of urban youth including the new role of youth participatory action research. In the last chapter, Dimitriadis unpacks the various aspects of qualitative research with a special emphasis on how the technical discussions are written out. He focuses on the epistemology of knowledge and how people come to possess it. He examines various interpretations of the world, challenging the assumptions used to understand and interpret individual, social and cultural processes and methods used to collect, analyze and interpret empirical materials. The author points to the fact that we need to be acutely aware of the ways in which these youths have been discursively “framed” in the popular imagination. The book reads very much like a review of literature. This review ignores the important work of Christine Griffin, a prolific British scholar who examined the study of youth and adolescence in both Britain and America was missing. In her book entitled “Representations of youth. The study of youth and adolescence in Britain and America published in 1993 by Polity Press Griffin extends the work of both US and British scholars bringing an original prism of analysis. She analyzes representations of youth using Gramsci’s notion of hegemony; post-structuralist discourse analysis and feminist theories and practices. She explains that hegemony is concerned with the production and reproduction of forms of consciousness as a form of domination which is imposed through a mixture of persuasion and coercion. Youth research can be read in part as a reflection of hegemonic common sense about youth and adolescence. Using a post-structuralist and feminist approach to discourse analysis, she destabilizes language, meaning, and social institutions and recognizes the ways in which specific discourses and discursive configurations can construct, marginalize, silence and reproduce certain concepts and argument within particular structural relations of domination. This discourse analysis reveals rules that determine what can be said and how it can be said and practices through which power is legitimated. Another significant aspect of youth research in the US that Dimitriatris does not dicuss is that it has followed both a mainstream and a radical strand. The mainstream strand is positivistic, empiricist and conservative, presenting itself as apolitical and objective. This strand investigates young people as both the source and victims of a series of “social problem” adopting the victim-blaming thesis in the search for the causes of specific phenomena. This strand is very much part of the “youth as trouble” “youth as crisis” discourse. Fuentes (1998) argues that the ascendancy of corporate culture has created conditions in which adults can exhibit a sour, almost hateful view of young people. (p. 21) The youth as crisis discourses are institutionalized accounts because social institutions e.g., the school system and the legal system among others, regulate and monitor the activities of adolescents. These accounts assume that youth in the US are being raised in an overtly permissive society. Youth are increasingly amoral and immoral and must be tightly controlled in order to be properly socialized for responsible adulthood (Abowitz, n.d.). The radical strand has been more likely to adopt structuralist and post-structuralist analyses and to deconstruct the association between young people and social problems asking different questions and viewing research as part of a consciously political project. The counter discourse to the “youth as crisis” discourse argues that contemporary youth serve as scapegoat for a variety of adult-generated social problems. Giroux (1996) explains that “American society at present exudes both a deep rooted hostility and chilling indifference toward youth, reinforcing the dismal condition under which young people are increasingly living.” ( p. 31). Mike Males (1999), a social ecologist, explains that the deficit model conceals the fact that it is in the adults’ interest to blame young people, especially when they are getting richer while youth are experiencing increased poverty. In the last 20 years, US child and youth poverty rose by 60%. In contrast, poverty among adults over 40 declined. Griffin (1993) writes “Youth research does not simply reflect aspects of young people’s lives, nor does it merely misrepresent their experiences, as though the latter were sitting around like the truth waiting to be discovered or misunderstood. Youth research is more complex than this given the ideological role it plays in constructing the very categories of “youth” and adolescence” and in presenting stories about the origins of specific forms of youthful deviance or resistance.” (p. 2). The new directions of research on youth should not only involve the relationship between culture and structural economic questions, new emergent definitions of urban and suburban, new forms of identity and work in an era of globalization, but also questioning the dominant practices, language, policies and values of the adult world, and especially those of academic youth research texts operating from the mainstream perspective. John Clarke in Resistance through rituals argues “That youth can serve as a metaphor for dealing with crises in society” (Clarke et al., 1975). Youth is still treated as the key indicator for the state of the nation itself. It is expected to reflect the cycle of booms and troughs in the economy; shifts in cultural values over sexuality, morality and family life; and changes in class relations, concepts of nationhood and in occupational structures. Young people are assumed to hold the key to the nation’ s future and the treatment and management of youth is expected to provide the solution to the nation’s problems, from drug abuse, hooliganism, and teenage pregnancy to inner city riots. The everyday operation of international capitalism or unjust power relations is seldom represented as the sources of such social problems (Pearson, 1983). Social science researchers often neglect the fact that studying the so-called “other” as Dimitriadis pointed in the beginning of the book is truly studying oneself. The claim for objectivity or detached observation cannot be supported. There is no objective definition of the concept of objectivity and moreover the researcher is part of the society she is studying while pretending to be detached from it. Research analyses and interpretations are loaded by the way the researcher experience his or her own community. Should this be taken into consideration the researcher’s intellectual expert status about other people lives will be more reflective of our lives and less hostile and prejudiced toward young people. It is consequential to recognize the implications of the culture of power that belies scientific inquiry when participants of research have none of it and when their voices are often pathologized, criminalized or at time silenced (Griffin, 1993). What is missing from youth research is a balanced picture of the role of youth in society. Sociologists and psychologists have failed to see youth as an asset as a source of strength. Seldom are young people depicted as working, concerned about others or even innocent. In the contemporary political economy, youth represent a significant consumer group, money makers and potential change agents. Missing in our research are resiliency narratives that put youth in a more positive light than they have been seen previously. The book overall value is that it gives a good introduction to the study of youth culture both in the US and England and enables the reader to think about the role of the researcher involved in the study of culture in general and youth culture in particular. The author’s call for detailed studies of urban youth culture –studies that move in new theoretical as well as methodological directions is long overdue. References Abowitz, K.K. (n.d.). Discourse on youth: Youth in crisis? Retrieved 2/2/08 from http://www.units.muohio.edu Fine, M. (1991). Framing dropouts. Notes on the politics of an urban public high school. Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press. Fuentes, A. (1998 June 15/22). The crackdown on kids. The Nation. Giroux, H. (1996). Hollywood, race, and the demonization of youth: The “Kids” are not alright (Movie review). Educational Researcher, 25 (2), 31-35. Griffin, C. (1993). Representations of youth. The study of youth and adolescence in Britain and America. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Males, M.A. (1999). Framing youth. 10 myths about the next generation. Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press. Pearson, G. (1983). Hooligan: A history of respectable fears. London: Macmillan. About the Reviewer Nathalis Wamba Ph.D. is an Associate Professor in the Department of Educational and Community Programs at Queens College, City University of New York (CUNY).