Popular Media, Critical Pedagogy, and Inner City Youth

In this article, we explored ways youth, traditionally silenced, engaged with popular culture to voice experiences and challenge dominant narratives of public schools and daily lives. We also considered how educators use popular culture as critical pedagogy with inner city youth. Through ethnographic bricolage and case study methods, and drawing from cultural studies and critical pedagogy, we have presented two case studies. One study highlighted how a school used popular theatre and critical literacy to connect with students’ experiences. The second focused on narratives in students’ rap songs. These case studies highlight the risks, challenges, and potential for building respectful and reciprocal relationships with students. Key words: rap music, popular theatre, ethnography, bricolage, case study, schools, poverty Dans cet article, les auteurs analysent comment des jeunes, d’ordinaire réduits au silence, utilisent la culture populaire pour exprimer leur vécu et contester les discours dominants des écoles publiques. Ils étudient également comment des éducateurs ont recours à la culture populaire comme outil de pédagogie critique auprès de jeunes de quartiers défavorisés. Utilisant un montage ethnographique et s’appuyant sur des études culturelles et la pédagogie critique, ils présentent deux études de cas. L’une met en relief comment une école s’est servie du théâtre populaire et de la littératie critique pour faire le lien avec les expériences des élèves. L’autre est axée sur les narrations des élèves dans des chansons « rap» de leur cru. Ces études de cas montrent bien les risques, les défis et les possibilités d’établir des liens réciproques et respectueux avec les élèves. Mots clés : rap, théâtre populaire, ethnographie, étude de cas, écoles, pauvreté

Rec Needs a New Rhythm Cuz Rap Is Where We\u27re Livin\u27

This research presents an autoethnographic strategy for self-reflection by sharing stories consistent with Indigenous methodologies and establishing a frame for re-mixing leisure theory. As an autoethnographic study, we reflect on how we have been engaged, changed, and challenged to rethink understandings of leisure and ourselves as leisure scholar-practitioners as a result of listening to rap music, especially composed by Aboriginal young people. We pause on questions related to how Aboriginal young people challenge leisure theory and its relevance to their lives through their rap and hip hop performances

Steps and stages: rethinking transitions in youth and place

This article is concerned with the interplay of young people's biographies and transforming landscapes in south-east Wales. In particular the article focuses on a South Wales Valleys town, Ebbw Vale, to explore how changes to a place can be understood in relation to, and alongside youth transitions. The article reports on the ways in which narratives of the transformation, redevelopment and regeneration of place sit alongside the biographical transformations of young people themselves, as they make their transitions into adulthood. The article draws on concepts borrowed from geography, anthropology and architecture to advance a sociological argument for the consideration of continuity and everyday registers of meaning as a way of understanding change – both to place and in young people's lives. The focus on a place which has undergone significant material, economic and landscape change enables the argument to be developed in relation to the transformation of communities and post-industrial economies. The article thus explores some of the connectivities between young people, locality, and (both imagined and real) biographical and material changes

Khat-chewing, adiaphorization and morality: Rethinking ethics in the age of the synopticon

In June 2014, the U.K. Government made khat (Catha edulis) a Class C drug under the U.K. Misuse of Drugs Act. Based on limited evidence, this decision went against the Government's own Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) and has divided members of the British-Somali diaspora, where khat is a popular form of recreation. The Government’s decision to ban khat highlights broader questions regarding how ethical legislation is implemented within post-industrial societies, exposing postcolonial power systems that ‘Other’ migrant groups through synoptic control. Based on qualitative interviews with members of the Somali diaspora and external agencies in Northern England, the research explores how this system fails to consider khat's complex moral position while framing users and those living within the diaspora as deviant

Sound and the everyday in qualitative research

In this article, a constitutive aspect of the everyday world is attended to, which is too often absent or suppressed in social scientific accounts of social life: noise. A question is raised as to how social science has addressed the question of noise, through a reconsideration of sound and the everyday. Conventional “good practice” for the organization and conduct of research interviews is compared with alternative approaches more open to the space of everyday sounds, and the practice of soundwalking—the mobile exploration of (local) space and sounds—is offered as a productive context for the creative disturbance of the conventional interview. In closing, some of the possibilities of noise as these have been brought home to us in our own research with young people in noisy, everyday settings are set out

Sounds and the City, Volume 2

This book draws from a rich history of scholarship about the relations between music and cities, and the global flows between music and urban experience. The contributions in this collection comment on the global city as a nexus ofmoving people, changing places, and shifting social relations, asking what popular music can tell us about cities, and vice versa.Since the publication of the firstSounds and the Cityvolume, various movements, changes and shifts have amplified debates about globalization. From the waves of people migrating to Europe from the Syrian civil war and other conflict zones, to the 2016 “Brexit” vote to leave the European Union and American presidential election of Donald Trump. These, and other events, appear tohave exposed an anti-globalist retreat toward isolationism and a backlash against multiculturalism that has been termed “post-globalization.” Amidst this, what of popular music?Does music offer renewed spaces and avenues for public protest, for collective action and resistance? What can thediverse​​histories,hybridities, and legacies of popular musictell us about the ever-changing relations of people andcities