Sociology and Anthropology Seminar Series: Steven Threadgold

This event was held on Thursday 11 August 2016

Dr Steven Threadgold

The Sociology and Anthropology Seminar Series presents Dr Steven Threadgold of the School of Humanities and Social Science and  Newcastle Youth Studies Network. Dr Threadgold will present "DIY Cultures, Creativity and 'Strategic Poverty': Youth and Everyday Struggles."

ABSTRACT

Young people investing themselves in DIY Cultures negotiate a complex but now normalised web of study, employment, unemployment and underemployment to make ends meet, while trying to maintain space in their lives to pursue creative and artistic passions. This paper presents research with youth in an underground music scene across Australia who are balancing economic pressures with their desires to generate and uphold DIY and punk influenced activities in a networked community of likeminded friends and collaborators. Some participants actively ‘choose poverty’, that is, they knowingly and strategically make decisions to ‘keep overheads low’. This frees temporal and emotional space to continue to be creative, even if that means giving up relatively well paid, but insecure, professional careers. Their ideas of living a successful and satisfying life are not expressed in material terms, but are contingent upon a future where they can continue to invest themselves in their interests, even if that means living in relative poverty. This paper provides a case study of some ways young people deal with a precarious existence. In this case, living an ethical life trumps material concerns, projecting a hopeful attitude towards the future. Against recent calls to resuscitate ‘false consciousness’ as a concept in youth studies, this paper proposes that the multi-faceted notion of ‘struggle’ can help understand the ways that young people make strategic choices and ‘make do’, while at the same time being pushed and pulled by forces they reflexively know are beyond their control.

This is a free event - all welcome.


Dr Steven Threadgold is a UON Senior Lecturer in Sociology and Anthropology. His current research projects are on: young people constructing a ‘DIY Career’ in networked music scenes; the ways figures such as ‘hipster’ and ‘bogan’ form an affective economy of class; ‘Affective Labour’ in front of house service work; and on the ‘Struggles and Strategies’ young people use to navigate from higher education into the labour market. His current book projects are a research monograph for Routledge called Youth, Class and Culture; a co-edited collection for Routledge called Bourdieusian Prospects (with Lisa Adkins and Caragh Brosnan); and an introduction to sociology primer for Cambridge University Press (with Dan Woodman).

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