Youth and Popular Culture (EDUC30067)

This subject explores how children and young people construct and reconstruct their sense of selves against the backdrop of pervasive contemporary popular cultures. It examines contrasting approaches to identity (e.g. developmental, sociological, feminist, post-structuralist) and contemporary debates about the place of popular culture and the media and entertainment industries in children and young people's lives.

The subject analyses the ways in which children and young people appropriate and colonise symbols, meanings, images and styles from different popular cultural media. Popular cultures provide resources for identity construction, for meaning-making and for political uses. The subject explores the ways in which popular cultures draw on global images in local settings.

An indicative list of topics in this subject is: the uses of cultural commodities in children and young people's construction of gendered, classed and racialised identity/ies; childhoods, global capital and multinational companies; the role of the Internet; children and young people as cultural consumers and as cultural producers.