ABSTRACT
This chapter begins by critically reviewing the post-structuralist cultural-studies and sociological literature on youth cultural production and identity formation. It then presents the methods and findings for a 2010–2013 cross-national ethnographic study on a group of Los Angeles and London adolescents’ educational experiences and everyday leisure and civic activities (N = 41, ages 16–19). In particular, this study focuses on the extent to which young people’s aspirations, media consumption, and political orientations reflect institutional and culturally salient neoliberal discursive formations. A three-fold typology is developed consisting of what are classified as Critical/Political, Artsy/Indie, and Mainstream youth, and formulated via a novel socio-cognitive and typological approach to the examination of interview data, ethnographic observations, and media texts. The findings provide nuanced understandings of some of the ways that Anglo-American urban youth contest, internalise, negotiate between, and reproduce neoliberal discourses, values, and practices.
