Cool Places: Geographies of Youth Cultures

Music, drugs, clubbing and travel--this is the popular image of what it means to be young. However, young people's lives are also busy with the everyday realities of home, school and work. The engaging essays in Cool Places explore the dichotomy of youthful lives by addressing the issues of representation and resistance in youth culture today. Using first-person vignettes to illustrate the wide-ranging experiences of youth, the authors consider how the media has imagined young people as a particular community with shared interests and how young people resist these stereotypes, instead creating their own independent representations of their lives. Drawing examples from gang life in Santa Cruz, CA, techno music and ecstacy in Germany, to experiences at home with sibling rivalry, loitering on streets and seeking employment, the contributors introduce the ideas of culture and space--identity politics, gender, race, class, disability, sexuality and power--through a context directly relevant to livedexperience. Cool Places brings together the latest thinking within social, cultural and feminist studies to focus upon the complexities of youth cultures and their spatial representations and interactions. Excerpt: People who don't know or who aren't aware of the culture, see someone in baggy jeans and a blue sweatshirt whatever, and the thought is "Oh he's a gang member." And a lot of times kids can't help it . . . Because even if you're not a gang member, for example if you live in the Villa San Carlos. It's a given you're going to wear loose jeans with a blue sweatshirt . . .It's the environment that the kids live in . . . cops assume they're gangbangers because of the way they dress."