The Subcultural Imagination

Shane Blackman is a Professor of Cultural Studies at Canterbury Christ Church University, UK. His books include Youth: Positions and Oppositions, Style, Sexuality and Schooling (1995); Drugs Education and the National Curriculum (1996) and Chilling Out: The Cultural Politics of Substance Consumption, Youth and Drug Policy (2004) and Young People, Class and Place, (eds), with Shildrick, T. and MacDonald, R. (2010). He has recently published papers on ethnography, subcultural theory, anti-social behaviour and alcohol and young women. He is an editor of the Journal of Youth Studies and YOUNG: Nordic Journal of Youth Research and a member of the ESRC Peer Review College. Michelle Kempson is a Lecturer at Solihull College and University Centre, UK. She completed her PhD in Women and Gender studies at the University of Warwick, and her research interests and publication history centre on youth studies, adult education, feminist theory, and cultural aesthetics.

Introduction: The Social Imagination – Towards the Subcultural Subject Part I: History, Biography and Subculture 1. From Here to Modernity: Rethinking the Youth Question with C Wright Mills 2. Subcultural and Post-Subcultural Compatibility: The Case of Cuban Underground Rap 3. From Bad to Worse? Marginalised Youth and ‘Road Life’ (Mis)Representations and Realities Part II: Practising Reflexivity in the Field 4. The Emotional Imagination: Exploring Critical Ventriloquy and Emotional Edgework in Reflexive Sociological Ethnography with Young People 5. Rachela through the Looking Glass: Researching the Occupational Subculture of Lap-Dancers 6. ‘Biography in the Laboratory’: Applying the Chicago School Approach to Dual Researcher Positionality within the Night-Time Economy 7. Temporary Reflexive Disempowerment: Working through Fieldwork Ethnography and Its Impact on a Female Researcher Part III: Epistemologies, Pedagogies and the Subcultural Subject 8. Understanding Nightlife Identities and Divisions through the Subculture/ Post-Subculture Debate 9. Feminism, Subculture and the Production of Knowledge: Developing Intersectional Epistemologies amidst the Reflexive Turn 10. Bulgarian Post-Transitional Subcultures: Insider Ethnographic Research of the Underground Scene 11. Connecting Personal Troubles and Public Issues in Asian Subculture Studies 12. Conclusion: C. Wright Mills, the ‘Subcultural’ Imagination, Reflexivity and the Subcultural Subject