ABSTRACT
This chapter draws on a multi-phase research project on the commercialization of far right youth subculture in Germany, which included the creation and analysis of a digital archive of thousands of images of symbols and commercial far right products, combined with data from interviews (N=61) conducted in two vocational schools for construction trades in Berlin in 2013–14. Two major methodological implications from the project are traced here. First, we need more research attending to the embodiment of extremist and nationalist beliefs and behaviours as captured through material and visual data. Political ideologies are not only held intellectually, particularly for youth; they are inscribed on bodies in youth choices about clothing, hair style, tattoos, musculature, body image, and violence enacted against other bodies. Visual and material culture – captured in historical and contemporary photographs, artifacts, posters, banners, stickers, license plates and more – proved to be a critical empirical domain for understanding the appeal of extremist thinking. Second, we need more studies of extremist engagement with youth who are not only in the ‘core’ of extremist and radical right-wing movements, but also those who are on the ‘periphery’ or in interstitial spaces, moving in and out of far right scenes throughout their adolescence and young adulthood. Studying youth who are in and around far right scenes helps to avoid one of the key methodological problems in research on the far right – namely, that researchers tend to sample on the dependent variable. In our research, youth on the periphery of the far right proved to be just as – and in some ways, more – informative compared to youth who were or are actively engaged in the far right.
