ABSTRACT
Neoliberalism has become one of the most widely invoked critical concepts across a variety of academic disciplines. This chapter explores the usefulness of neoliberalism as an analytical concept when employed as part of a symptomatic reading of drinking cultures within the frame of a conjunctural analysis. Conceptions of identity, identity work and differentiated power relations that work through categories of identity are all central to understanding the complexity of young people's socially orientated drinking practices. Digital media technologies simultaneously enhance the neoliberal, corporate promotion of alcohol in the NTE and the disciplinary dimensions of drinking cultures in novel ways, while providing new avenues and sites of resistance, evasion and contestation. This complexity and ambivalence is central to our argument, and invites a close empirical analysis of young people's actual social practices and identity work online as part of a symptomatic reading of drinking culture.
