One foot in the rave: Ageing ravers’ transitions to adulthood and their participation in rave culture

Challenging adolescence limited life-course theory, this article presents the results of an online survey (2016) that aimed to establish if, how and to what extent ageing ravers continue to participate in rave culture. The survey collected data from members of the original rave generation. We explored the ravers’ transitions to adulthood, and how these influenced their participation in club culture. We found that our ravers continued to participate in rave culture; their persistence is related to the frequency of their engagement at a younger age. Adopting interdisciplinarity, we apply theories from both life course research and youth culture studies and argue that the persistence of leisure practices, such as raving, can be understood in the same way as persistence of drug use: frequent behavior in adolescence determines persistence in older adulthood. Consequently, we are able to recognize patterns of leisure beyond adolescence, thus making leisure choices more predictable

The altered mind A study of some forms of visionary intoxication

SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre-DSC:DXN031083 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo

The unity of social movements

A coherent intellectual structure for social movement studies has recently been emerging over a range of theoretical and empirical studies. This structure counterposes ‘within social movements’ a diverse range of collective actions against the unity imposed by a collective identity. However, theorisations of this collective identity have so far failed to address the contradiction between structure and agency. A definition of collective identity for social movements that is not caught in the structure/agency divide is proposed by defining the appropriate level of abstraction for such a definition, defining why movements are unified and then how

Subcultures or neo-tribes? Rethinking the relationship between youth, style and musical taste

Despite the criticisms of subcultural theory as a framework for the sociological study of the relationship between youth, music, style and identity, the term 'subculture' continues to be widely used in such work. It is a central contention of this article that, as with subcultural theory, the concept of 'subculture' its unworkable as an objective analytical tool in sociological work on youth, music and style that the musical tastes and stylistic preferences of youth, rather than being tied to issues of social class, as subculture maintains, are in fact examples of the late modern lifestyles in which notions of identity are 'constructed' rather than 'given', and 'fluid' rather than 'fixed'. Such fluidity, I maintain, is also a characteristic of the forms of collective association which are built around musical and stylistic preference. Using Maffesoli's concept of tribus (tribes) and applying this to an empirical study of the contemporary dance music in Britain,I argue that the musical and stylistic sensibilities exhibited by the young people involved in the dance music scene are clear examples of a form of late modern 'sociality' rather than a fixed subcultural group

Consuming the car: anticipation, use and meaning in contemporary youth culture.

Drawing on evidence from a recently conducted study of the everyday lives of young people in Manchester, UK, this article considers the place of cars in contemporary youth culture. The article acknowledges the recent beginnings of sociological and social science discussion of cars but concurs with the view that this topic has been much neglected. More specifically the study of young people and personal mobility has been constrained by approaches that emphasise the problematic nature of this phenomena or locate it within a theory of subculture. Taking its cue from recent studies of consumption, this paper offers an alternative theorisation. Refinement of the work on television consumption by Roger Silverstone leads to a discussion of more affluent young people's relationships to cars under three heads: anticipation, use and meaning. It is suggested that car use must be seen in the framework of sociability and networks and that it also critically and suggestively mediates ordinary consumption with imaginative possibilities

Collective bodies: raving and the politics of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari

No description supplie