Youth culture and consumption

This chapter examines and concretises the mainstream trajectory of contemporary cultural studies around the substantive theme of youth culture and consumption, concentrating mostly on ‘the Birmingham School’. That designation-‘Birmingham School’— derives from the international reception of British cultural studies in the Anglophone world, especially the United States, during the 1980s (see Brantlinger 1990). It homogenises and abstracts a body of work from its real conditions of production: the real conditions were heterogeneous and interactive with research outside the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. Hence, a number of caveats must be entered into the account.