The Newcastle Youth Studies Network and the Consortium for Youth, Generations and Cultures facilitate this seminar hosted by ADI researchers Sherene Idriss, Rose Butler and Anita Harris.

Young people’s lived experiences, sense of personal agency and collective expressions, often theorised through the loose frame of ‘youth cultures’, always take shape in relation to intersecting forms of structural inequalities around race and class. Yet while ubiquitous to young people’s experiences, race and class are not always foregrounded in analysis. This seminar offers an opportunity to reflect, both conceptually and using empirical case studies, on how youth researchers in different contexts are theorising race and class in relation to contemporary youth cultures. We are prompted by the observation by Gary Younge, that “To try to understand race and class separately is to misunderstand them both completely. I think class is important, but in a multiracial country, it would be impossible to understand it without understanding race. Similarly race is important, but trying to understand it in a capitalist country without understanding class is impossible”. Key questions animating this seminar may include:

• How does youth culture research contribute to productive ways of theorising race and class today?

• How is COVID-19 making more visible the often-hidden ways that race and class, in intersecting ways, produce systemic disadvantage in young people’s lives?

• How do the complexities of current race-class conditions, such as popular discourses of the post-racial, deepening social and economic polarisation, and the burgeoning of activism shape the ways youth cultures are expressed, represented and theorised?

• How might we think through this race and class axis for young people and youth cultures in distinct contexts where the production and experience of ‘class’ and ‘race’ identities may differ significantly in relation to colonialism, place and power?

Find out much more on the registration page.