Imagining new narratives of youth: Youth research, the 'new Europe' and global youth culture

Discusses the importance of maintaining a critical perspective on the question of youth troubles, and the possibility of a fruitful debate between globalization theory and youth cultural research. Examples from recent youth studies are considered as possible means of developing a continued critique of the "youth as trouble" paradigm in the context of an engagement with globalization theory. One of the key themes of the article is the continuing force of dominant representations of (particular groups of) young people as "troubled" or "troubling" from the early prevalence of the Storm and Stress model (e.g., J. Conger, 1979) through to more recent anxieties over boys' underachievement at school, teenage pregnancy, youth crime and school dropout. The author considers the potential value of radical youth cultural approaches in relation to emergent theories of globalization and the notion of global youth culture. The importance of maintaining a critical perspective in rapidly changing times is advocated, and especially the need for continued vigilance over the ways in which such critical research can play into the marginalization and pathology of young people as "troubled" or "troubling." (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved)