ABSTRACT
Young people are the focus of much research. An increasing number of journals are devoted to their lives, supported and partly driven by the continued revision of current media forms of youth as folk devils, ensuring a steady stream of attention. Much of this research is by adults investigating young people as ‘other’. Such investigation is political, and a broad analogy can be drawn with the European mapping of other lands as part of the process of exercising control, colonising and trade through a knowledge of local society.
