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‘What Time Is Now?’: Researching Youth and Culture beyond the ‘Birmingham School’

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Youth Cultures in the Age of Global Media

Part of the book series: Studies in Childhood and Youth ((SCY))

Abstract

In the second half of the 1970s, the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (hereafter CCCS)1 at Birmingham University produced a series of highly influential texts on the relationship between (predominantly white, male, working class, heterosexual, British) youth and popular culture. Texts by Hall and Jefferson (1975), Hebdige (1979), Willis (1978) and McRobbie (1978) were to prove formative for what became the new field of youth sub/cultural studies. Work linked to ‘the Birmingham School’ attempted to represent youth sub/cultures ‘from the inside’, employing ethnographic methods and drawing on versions of New Left/Marxist and feminist theory. This work took young people’s cultural practices seriously, in opposition to the then contemporary academic and popular orthodoxy that viewed working class youth in overwhelmingly negative terms.

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© 2014 Christine Griffin

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Griffin, C. (2014). ‘What Time Is Now?’: Researching Youth and Culture beyond the ‘Birmingham School’. In: Buckingham, D., Bragg, S., Kehily, M.J. (eds) Youth Cultures in the Age of Global Media. Studies in Childhood and Youth. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137008152_2

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