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Youth and media culture.

Stuart R. Poyntz Stuart R. Poyntz Simon Fraser University
and Jennesia Pedri Jennesia Pedri Simon Fraser University
https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190264093.013.75
Published online: 24 January 2018

Media in the 21st century are changing when, where, what, and how young people learn. Some educators, youth researchers, and parents lament this reality; but youth, media culture, and learning nevertheless remain entangled in a rich set of relationships today. These relationships and the anxieties they produce are not new; they echo worries about the consequences of young people’s media attachments that have been around for decades.

These anxieties first appeared in response to the fear that violence, vulgarity, and sexual desire in early popular culture was thought to pose to culture. Others, however, believed that media could be repurposed to have a broader educational impact. This sentiment crept into educational discourses throughout the 1960s in a way that would shift thinking about youth, media culture, and education. For example, it shaped the development of television shows such as Sesame Street as a kind of learning portal. In addition to the idea that youth can learn from the media, educators and activists have also turned to media education as a more direct intervention. Media education addresses how various media operate in and through particular institutions, technologies, texts, and audiences in an effort to affect how young people learn and engage with media culture. These developments have been enhanced by a growing interest in a broad project of literacy. By the 1990s and 2000s, media production became a common feature in media education practices because it was thought to enable young people to learn by doing , rather than just by analyzing or reading texts. This was enabled by the emergence of new digital media technologies that prioritize user participation.

As we have come to read and write media differently in a digital era, however, a new set of problems have arisen that affect how media cultures are understood in relation to learning. Among these issues is how a participatory turn in media culture allows others, including corporations, governments, and predatory individuals, to monitor, survey, coordinate, and guide our activities as never before. Critical media literacy education addresses this context and continues to provide a framework to address the future of youth, media culture and learning.

media culture
media literacy
consumer culture

Introduction

It would be absurd for teenagers today to forgo the Internet as a resource for schoolwork and learning experiences of all sorts. Whether to research an essay, acquire new skills, find an expert, watch a video clip, or contribute a blog post, the Internet is often the first source that students turn to pick up new information, to access useful networks, or to find resources that they need to accomplish whatever it is they want to learn. And why wouldn’t it be? The Internet is now a digital learning economy populated by YouTube and Vimeo channels, social media sites like Wikipedia, software and learning games, library data archives, learning television shows, documentaries, massive open online courses (MOOCs), and assorted other resources that are changing when, where, what, and how young people learn. Some educators, youth researchers, and parents lament this reality (Bakan, 2011 ; Louv, 2008 ), but today’s youth, media culture, and learning are nevertheless entangled in a rich set of relationships.

These relationships and the anxieties that they produce are not new. Since the earliest decades of the 20th century , learning dynamics have been thought to be integral to the way youth and media cultures weave together. But these relationships are vexed; the connections among youth lives, media, and education are sites of tremendous anxiety and concern around the world. Yet learning is now such a profoundly mediated experience that traditional dichotomies separating education and entertainment, work and leisure, expert and nonexpert, and pedagogy and everyday life are no longer helpful.

In this article, we examine this context and address how relations among youth, media culture, and learning have been understood since the turn of the last century. Our story begins in the Anglo-American world, but it has quickly become global as media and youth cultures expand around the world. We highlight the anxieties and panics common to thinking about media in young people’s lives and indicate where and how the mediation of youth learning has been taken up to support progressive ends through the development of novel resources, institutions, and pedagogies that nurture young people’s agency, identities, and citizenship. Our survey examines how specific media forms, including film, television, and Web design, have been calibrated to support young people’s learning through the media, and the development of media literacy education to promote critical learning about the media. To conclude, we detail three major problematics that continue to shape the relationships among youth, media culture, and learning.

Teen Screens

Teenagers graduating from high school in 2017 across the global North and much of the global South have always known smart mobile devices, social media, and YouTube, near-constant data surveillance, the ability to Google facts as needed, and texting, messaging, and posting as part of the regular rhythms of daily life. While many statistics have been collected over the years about the time that adolescents spend immersed in media, the general impression is that most children and youth are more involved than ever with media technologies and content. A new area of children’s and youth media has emerged in recent years. It is a world where the Internet, mobile devices, and “television,” now consumed across multiple platforms, compete for attention alongside older media (i.e., radio, appointment television, and movies). Various studies conducted in recent years have sought to understand these developments, with particular attention given to investigating the role of the Internet, social media, smartphones, and mobile technologies in young people’s lives. Regular television and radio continue to hold a place among teenagers’ media choices, and along with mobile phones, they are part of a primary youth media ecology in the global North and South (Common Sense Media, 2015 ; Livingstone et al., 2014 ).

Today, however, one can no longer assume that television programming is viewed on a television set via regularly scheduled broadcasting. While watching television continues to make up a significant portion of teens’ overall media usage in the United States, Canada, Europe, and other regions (Common Sense Media, 2015 ; Caron et al., 2012 ; Livingstone et al., 2014 ), smart TVs, on-demand services, mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets, and video-streaming services such as YouTube, Netflix, and Baidu have redefined what it means to “watch television.” Because the options for consuming content now exist simultaneously across many platforms, there is also a significant amount of diversity in young people’s preferences and patterns of use. Music, for example, remains the most preferred medium among teens, but among only about one-third of teens (30%). After music, video games are a favorite among 15%, reading among 10%, social media among 10%, and television among 9%. The fragmenting of tastes and preferences is notable, with no single medium standing out above all. Added to this is the diversity of ways that teens can engage in these activities, as well as differences in relation to class, gender, and race/ethnicity (Common Sense Media, 2015 ). The point to be made is that changes in how young people spend time with the media are taking place as part of longer-term trends in how media is knit into adolescents’ lives.

At the center of this trend is the fact that young people simply have more media options—both in terms of the media technology used and the content available—and these options are tightly wedded to the daily lives of children and youth. For instance, 57% of teens in the United States have a television set in their bedroom, 47% have a laptop computer, 37% have a tablet, and 31% have a portable game player (Common Sense Media, 2015 ). Sonia Livingstone ( 2009 , p. 21) identifies these technologies with “screen-rich ‘bedroom cultures,’” which have become the norm for kids in countries across the global North. Adding to and fostering media use in screen-rich bedroom cultures is the fact that two-thirds of teens (67%) now own their own smartphone, on which they talk and text, access social media (40%), and listen to music in daily patterns and rhythms (Common Sense Media, 2015 ).

With all these media options available, it is not surprising that teens are more likely than in the past to be media multitaskers, able to pack more media into an hour of consumption than was possible in previous generations. Young people in the United States spend approximately nine hours a day consuming media, for example, but they consume more than one medium at a time. In fact, 50% of teens say that they watch television while doing homework, and 51% say that they use social media some of or all the time when they do homework (Common Sense Media, 2015 ). The typical teenage user today is someone doing homework while watching Netflix, listening to music, and responding to the occasional text, Snapchat, or Instagram message. In this way, screens do not go away as much as they have become environmental in youths’ lives.

This story casts a pall over contemporary youth cultures for some. It is as though the media machine is never absent from youths’ time and space. It is attached to and formative of the worlds of young people, and it would appear to allow for no distance or time away from screens and representations in everyday life. Concerns of this sort are not new. They echo panicked worries about the consequences of young people’s media attachments that have existed for decades. To make sense of these worries, it is helpful to begin with the history of youth and youth culture, terms which are not exclusive to, but find an early emergence in, the West.

Youth as a Distinct Life Stage

The concept of youth can feel as though it has been with us for centuries. But while the age of transition between childhood and adulthood exists across societies, the idea that this period is associated with a particular group of people—youth—and the cultures that they partake in is a recent phenomenon. Andy Bennett (Bennett & Kahn-Harris, 2004 ) tells us that historical instances of what we now call “youth culture” can be traced back to the 17th and 18th centuries to a group of London apprentices whose dress, drinking, and riotous conduct set them apart from others. Early youth cultures can also be linked to stylistically distinct groups of young workers in northern England in the late 19th century , and to what Timothy Gilfoyle ( 2004 , p. 870) calls the “street rats and gutter snipes” of New York City, who developed oppositional subcultures to challenge adult authority from the mid- 19th century onward. But it wasn’t until the turn of the last century that a modern notion of youth took hold. Schooling would be key to this development.

Publicly funded or supported schooling on a mass scale was regularized in the United Kingdom by the late 19th century and had been ongoing in the United States in the post–Civil War period (i.e., after 1860–1865 ). Public schools developed around the same time in French and English Canada, and slightly later ( 1880 ) in Australia. The practice of batching students into groups by age contributed to the emergence of a new subject position linked to the teen years. If schools started this process, worries about delinquency served to consolidate the notion of youth as a stage of development. Juvenile crime in particular, initially considered primarily an affliction of poor and working-class youth, became generalized by the 1890s as juvenile delinquency and applied to all youth (Gillis, 1974 ). The fear of rising crime rates led to legislative action and the expansion of welfare provisions in the United Kingdom and the United States. The resulting system of social services addressed adolescents as a particular age cohort with specific interests and needs (Osgerby, 2004 ).

By the early 20th century , in psychology and pedagogy studies, G. Stanley Hall’s seminal text, Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, and Education (Hall, 1904 ) addressed this stage of life as a specific period of development associated with tumult and uncertainty—the sturm and drang of adolescence. Thinking of adolescence in these terms reflected the worries of legislators, educators, and reformers, but it was not until the early 1940s that the notion of youth culture was coined by the American sociologist Talcott Parsons ( 1942 ). Parsons used the phrase youth culture to name a specific generational cohort experiencing distinct processes of socialization that set them apart from others. Fears about young people’s maladjustment to war during the 1940s continued to feed worries about youth delinquency (Gilbert, 1986 ). But more significantly, a series of changes in the social, economic, and cultural lives of adolescents that began prior to World War II and consolidated during the postwar years proved essential to marking out a modern notion of youth culture.

Media and consumer markets were integral to these changes. From the start of the 20th century , mass media were among the key developments shaping youth culture and learning. This was evident in the United Kingdom and the United States, where industrialization and mass consumer markets emerged earlier than in other nations. This reveals something about the characteristics of youth culture; in many ways, youth cultures (dance, music, fashion, sports, etc.) have always been mediated and shaped by the effects of mass production, wage labor relations, and urban experience. In this way, youth and modernity are tightly connected. Modernity is linked to experiences of change driven by urbanization and migration, the expansion of mass, factory-based production, and the proliferation of images and consumerism as normative conditions of everyday life. Since the late 19th and early 20th centuries , youth have been harbingers of these developments and have often been considered the archetypical subject of modernity.

Early Mass Media and Youth Audiences

The tendency to link youth with the changes characterized by modernity has produced a history of anxieties where the relationships among youth, media culture, and education are concerned. These anxieties first appeared in response to the violence, vulgarity, and sexual desire in early popular culture (e.g., penny novels and mass sporting events, like Major League Baseball), which many educators thought posed an imminent threat to culture. The emergence of the cinema at the turn of the 20th century epitomized these fears by forever changing the nature of the intergenerational transmission of knowledge. Movies can be understood with little tuition, meaning that they can fix the attention of all age groups on the screen, a development that proved particularly attractive to children. Early cinematographers were able to stage dramas on a scale unheard of in live theater, to command an audience much greater than literature could, and hence to shape the popular imagination as never before. But because movies work through the language of images, they were thought to create highly emotional—and intellectually deceitful—effects. Images were thought to leave audiences (particularly young people) in something like a trance, a state of passivity that left adolescents open to forms of manipulation that were morally suspect and politically dangerous.

These fears were common, and yet for some, the very fact that movies could reach larger and more diverse audiences—including women and the working class—meant that the medium held a promise for learning that couldn’t be ignored. Such responses not only reflected the sentiment of early film boosters, but they also were part of a more nuanced sense of how life—including the experience of learning—was changing in the 20th century . In a remarkable series of essays, Walter Benjamin ( 1969 , 1970 ) argued thus, suggesting that movies could widen audiences’ horizons through the unique technology of the shot, the power of editing, and sound design. These tools allowed people to see and experience distant lands, other times, and new and fantastical experiences in live-action and highly structured narrative formats. Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush ( 1925 ), MGM’s The Great Ziegfeld ( 1936 ), and Victor Fleming’s The Wizard of Oz ( 1939 ) exemplified film’s early appeal because they seemed capable of helping people to dream and escape vicariously from everyday experiences to imagine a different (and perhaps better) world.

Not surprisingly, Benjamin’s was a minority view in the mid- 20th century . Far more common were fears that modern media would serve to undermine how young people learn proper culture—meaning good books and the right music and stories thought to foster a vibrant and meaningful cultural life. Benjamin’s colleagues in the Frankfurt School (so-called for the city where their work began), Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, were especially influential in this regard. Drawing from their experiences with the role that media (i.e., radio and film) played in the rise of fascism in Germany, as well as their disappointment with the quality of early popular music and Hollywood movies, Adorno and Horkheimer ( 1972 ) argued that the culture industries (the artifacts and experiences produced by the corporations who sold or transmitted film, popular music, magazines, and radio) threatened to undermine rich and autonomous forms of cultural life. They meant that movies, advertisements, and eventually television were signs of the commodification of culture, an indication that culture itself—epitomized by the rich European traditions of classical music, painting, and literature—was being reduced to a sellable thing, a commodity just like any other in capitalist societies.

In this context, Adorno and Horkheimer suggested that culture no longer works to promote critical and autonomous thought; rather, the culture industries promote sameness, a uniformity of experience and a standardization of life that at best serve to distract people from significant issues of the day. Through childish illusion and fantasy, the culture industries produce false consciousness, a form of thinking that misinterprets the real issues that matter in our lives, leaving young people and adults blissfully unaware of key issues of common concern that demand our attention and action. For those suspicious of these observations, they are worth considering in light of Donald Trump’s election as president of the United States in 2016 . Since the election, it has become clear that distraction (by “fake news,” for instance) and illusion (facilitated at least in part by foreign manipulation of social media) played a vital role in the campaign and Trump’s eventual election.

Youth Markets and Media Panics

The concerns of the Frankfurt School found a receptive audience in the second half of the 20th century . The postwar decades mark an especially significant period of expansion in youth markets and youth culture in the West (Osgerby, 2004 ). Increasing birth rates during the postwar baby boom fueled the expansion of youth markets, as did the extension of mass schooling, which “accentuated youth as a generational cohort” (Osgerby, 2004 , p. 16). Complicating this were the emergence of television and an intensely organized effort to shape and calibrate the spending power of young people in the service of conspicuous consumer consumption.

First introduced to the general public at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, in the postwar years, television became a new kind of hearth around which parents and children would gather. In the United States, television was initially thought potentially promising for children’s education. The small screen represented the promise and possibility of modern times. Not surprisingly, this sentiment was short lived (Goldfarb, 2002 ). By the late 1950s and 1960s, it became apparent that “most children’s programming was produced with the size of the audience rather than children’s education in mind. [As a result,] television [became] the source of anxious discourses about mesmerized children entranced by mindless cartoons, punctuated by messages from paying sponsors” (Kline, Stewart, & Murphy, 2006 , p. 132; also see Kline, 1993 ). These worries aligned with increasing concerns about the dangerous and morally compromising influence of rock ‘n’ roll, popular magazines, early celebrities, and movies in youths’ lives, and what resulted was a media panic that harkened back to the earliest days of mass media.

Most often characterized by exaggerated claims about the impact of popular commercial culture on children and youth, media panics are a special kind of moral frenzy over the influence of media on vulnerable populations (Drotner, 1999 ). Stanley Cohen’s groundbreaking study of the mods and rockers, Folk Devils and Moral Panics , suggests that emerging youth cultures became the most recurrent type of moral panic in Britain after World War II (Cohen, 1972 ). He reveals how youth are positioned in postwar industrial societies as a source of fear and often misplaced anxiety. His study has been criticized for simplifying the meaning of the term moral panics and for underestimating how complex media environments can shape them (McRobbie & Thornton, 1995 ); nonetheless, his work draws attention to the ways that overwrought fears of youth and media culture can come to act as stand-ins for larger social anxieties. In the process, youth and youth culture become scapegoats. Media panics don’t offer helpful tools for explaining social change, in other words, as much as they distract parents, educators, and others from making sense of the formative conditions shaping young lives.

Media panics continued to appear throughout the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. In the United Kingdom, for instance, media panics arose around “video nasties” and the risks that horror films and sexually explicit material were thought to pose for youth (Oswell, 2002 ). Related concerns arose in the 1990s regarding video games and violence, the presence of dangerous and disturbing messages buried in the lyrics of popular music, and fears about fantasy board games, including Dungeons and Dragons . More recently, anxieties have come to the fore having to do with the role of the Internet and social media in young people’s lives, including fears of “stranger danger,” cyberbullying, and the likelihood that teenagers are sharing explicit images of themselves and others online (i.e., “sexting”).

We note these fears not to dismiss them outright, but to draw attention to the history of anxieties that have characterized worries about youth and media culture. Such concerns are often underpinned by the view that young people are vulnerable and highly impressionable persons unable to manage the impact of media in their lives. Indeed, the wariness of public officials, parents, health practitioners, and educators toward media is still today often underpinned by deeper commitments to a sense that youth is a time of innocence and hope. Whether understood biologically as a period of maturation toward adulthood or as a distinct generational cohort characterized by shared processes of socialization, adolescence has long been a repository for both the greatest hopes and fears of a nation. While youth are often considered a risk to society and the reproduction of social order, they also have long been framed in connection with the future health and well-being of nations. The result is that youth often occupy a contradictory space in relation to media culture (Drotner, 1999 ).

On the one hand, popular media culture has been a vital resource through which youth communities, subcultures, and generations have defined themselves, their desires, and their hopes and dreams for decades. This continues to be reflected in the dynamic ways that youth are using and creating digital media to shape their lives and address matters of common concern in societies around the world. We take up these developments in more detail later in this article.

On the other hand, it is evident that consumerism and commercial media culture remain sources of tremendous anxiety. The media content that teenagers access—beyond the watchful eye of guardians and educators—and the way that they learn about gender, race, sexuality, the environment, and other issues continues to raise alarms. From at least the 1980s onward, the quantity of media culture has expanded around the world, meaning that more advertising, more commercial screens, more branded experiences of play, and more intensive systems of corporate surveillance and tracking have become common features of youths’ lives.

The digitization of media and the emergence of more dynamic, participatory media cultures (Jenkins, 2006 ) are crucial to this development, as we explain in the final section. But changes in media concentration and the development of vast media conglomerates—including Google, Disney, Time Warner, Viacom, Baidu, and News Corp—that produce media commodities and experiences for various national markets have been instrumental in shaping the tensions and impact of media culture on youth lives. It is just these sorts of developments that have long raised the concerns of educators and others who remain deeply ambivalent about the relationship between consumer media and young people. The consequence of this ambivalence has led some educators to argue that media, including film, television, and the Internet, can have a broader educational impact, particularly given their ability to reach large audiences. In the following sections, we take up this possibility and address how learning media and media education have been developed to create forms of public pedagogy with the potential to enrich young people’s learning.

The Media as Learning Portal

While the ties between consumer culture and media continue to raise worries, television’s reach and increasingly central role in families have drawn the attention of educators who argue that it can be repurposed to have a broader educational impact. This sentiment crept into educational discourses throughout the 1960s in a way that would shift the thinking about youth, media culture, and education. Educational media programming was not a new idea in the decade so much as it extended and contributed to an older tradition of using stories and folk tales to teach moral lessons to children (Singhal & Rogers, 1999 ). What was different in the 1960s (and today), however, is that this work wasn’t (and isn’t) being undertaken around the local hearth; it was (and is) developing through the conventions, institutions, and practices of a highly complex media system.

Using this media system to create successful learning resources has been a delicate business. The idea of using radio and documentary movies as informational (and often didactic) educational tools to teach kids social studies, geography, and history has a long tradition in national schooling systems. More dynamic forms of educational programming came online in the late 1960s, led by a then-remarkable new program called Sesame Street that came to epitomize these developments.

Created by the Children’s Television Workshop (CTW) in 1969 as part of the so-called American war on poverty (Spring, 2009 ), Sesame Street helped launch the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) in the United States as a counterweight to the influence of commercial programming in the American mediasphere. Originated by Joan Ganz Cooney and Lloyd Morrisett, Sesame Street drew lessons from early children’s television programming in countries like Canada and the United Kingdom (Coulter, 2016 ) and set out to promote peaceful multicultural societies and to provide inner-city kids with a head start in developing literacy and numeracy skills. To do this, the now well-known strategy was to adapt conventions of commercial media—muppets, music, animation, live-action film, special effects, and visits from celebrities—to deliver mass literacy to home audiences.

By the late 1990s, approximately 40% of all American children aged 2–5 watched Sesame Street weekly. From the 2000s onward, the reach of Sesame Street became global, extending to 120 countries and including many foreign-language adaptations developed with local educators in Bangladesh, China, Egypt, Germany, Israel, Palestine, Russia, South Africa, and many other places (Spring, 2009 ). With global audiences, the show’s storylines and issues addressed have also changed. Sesame Street is now engaged in raising awareness and understanding about a host of global issues. For instance, in the South African coproduction, a muppet named Kami who is HIV-positive was introduced in response to the large numbers of South African children who are HIV-positive. Through Kami and related stories, the goal of the program is “to create tolerance of HIV-positive children and disseminate information about the disease” across South Africa” (Spring, 2009 , p. 80). Meanwhile in Bangladesh, the local version of Sesame Street has been used to promote “equality between social classes, genders, castes, and religions” (Spring, 2009 , p. 80).

This success led to the development of other CTW educational programs, including The Electric Company , 3-2-1 Contact , and Square One TV . A conviction that electronic and digital media can support progressive educational goals has also fueled the development of a learning media industry over the past two decades. We are in fact witnessing a veritable explosion of educational media, including an array of educational learning software ( Math Blaster , JumpStart , Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego , etc.) designed to improve older students’ competencies (Ito, 2008 ). Some of this media may be useful, but evidence about the learning value of many of these programs remains scant (Barbaro, 2008 ). On the other hand, at least three other forms of educational media have continued to develop, and in ways that can be beneficial to youth learning. They include public service announcements (PSAs), entertainment education, and cultural jamming.

Public Service Announcements

Public service announcements (PSAs) are now ubiquitous. They can be seen in schools, on television, online, and at commercial film screenings. They address issues ranging from the dangers of smoking, alcohol, and drugs, to concerns about youth driving habits, bullying in schools, what children are eating, and a host of other media-related social causes and health crises. At root, the strategy with PSAs isn’t altogether different from that of learning-oriented programs like Sesame Street . While the broad research and learning agenda that informs Sesame Street isn’t often replicated with PSAs, the idea that commercial media language can be repurposed to influence behavior is common to both formats.

PSAs use the language of advertising—quick, emotional, and sometimes funny messages that emphasize hard-hitting lessons—and the practices of branding to alter behavior or encourage youth to get involved with issues shaping their lives. Studies suggest these strategies can be remarkably effective for influencing young people’s behavior (Montgomery, 2007 , 2008 ; Wakefield, Flay, Nichter, & Giovino, 2003 ; Singhal & Rogers, 1999 ; DeJong & Winston, 1990 ). Wakefield et al. ( 2003 ) for instance, review a number of studies that show antismoking PSAs are useful tools for changing kids’ attitudes, especially when combined with school support programs that help youth to quit or avoid smoking.

These successes are important, of course, because they attest to the ways that learning through media can be nurtured in creative, dynamic, and effective ways, even in a time when media saturation is common in youth lives. A cautionary note is nonetheless in order. PSAs have become so common today that companies are using PSA-like formats to promote everything from cars to personal care products. The personal health products company, Unilever Inc., for instance, has been especially successful with their Dove “Campaign for Real Beauty.” Cutting across online platforms as well as television and film, the campaign has foregrounded the way that beauty ads create unrealistic notions about women’s body images. This is an important message, to be sure; however, while this campaign was underway, Unilever launched an equally provocative campaign for AXE body products for men. What stood out in the latter campaign was precisely the opposite message about women’s body images; AXE ads in fact seemed to suggest that women matter only when their appearance corresponds to a rather tired and old set of stereotypes. This doesn’t necessarily undermine the value of the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty, but it does suggest that the value of PSAs (particularly when developed as singular learning resources) may be waning as this style of communication becomes just one more strategy for channeling commercial messages to youth.

Entertainment Education

Another strategy, often called entertainment education , has a similarly long history in both the global North and South (Singhal & Rogers, 1999 ; Tufte, 2004 ). Distinct from the more explicit focus of learning TV and PSA campaigns, this strategy takes advantage of the fact that it has been clear for some time that youth negotiate their identities and values through popular media representations and celebrity identifications. Because of this, educators and youth activists have turned to network programming (e.g., Dawson’s Creek , MTV’s Real People , and Glee ), as well as teen magazines (e.g., Teen People and Seventeen ) as vehicles for developing storylines and articles that address issues in youth’s lives. Similar practices are evident around the world. In India, Mexico, Brazil, and South Africa, for instance, popular television formats like soap operas and youth dramas (e.g., Soul City and Soul Brothers in South Africa) have been used to raise awareness and change unhealthy behaviors related to a host of issues, including child poverty, community health, HIV-AIDS, and gun violence.

In a related vein, the Kaiser Foundation in the United States has been influential in the development of a multinational set of entertainment education programs on HIV-AIDS in partnership with the United Nations. Since 2004 , the Kaiser Foundation has partnered with the United Nations, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), the South African Broadcasting Corporation, Russia’s Gazprom-Media, Rupert Murdoch’s Star Group Ltd. in India, and more than 10 other media companies to develop a Global AIDS initiative. This eventually led to the integration of HIV-AIDS messages into various programs watched by young people, including a reality series in India modeled on American Idol , called Indian Idol (Montgomery, 2007 ). Similarly, series like the Degrassi franchise in Canada and the United States have addressed issues such as family violence, school shootings, mental illness, and questions about sexuality (Byers, 2008 ). Other series, including Buffy the Vampire Slayer , have ventured into similar territory, and while many educators are perhaps wary of the close working partnership between commercial broadcasters and producers in entertainment education, others note that the very success of this kind of programming demonstrates that media culture can be more than entertainment; it can be a form of meaningful pedagogy that helps young people engage in real social, cultural, and political debate.

Culture Jamming

Fomenting social, cultural, and political debate has been the objective of a third strategy used by educators and progressives concerned about youth, media culture, and education. Culture jamming draws on a long tradition of using media techniques with satire and parody “to draw attention to what may otherwise go unnoticed” in society (Meikle, 2007 , p. 168). Antecedents to culture jamming include the anti-Nazi dada posters of John Heartfield (born Helmut Herzfeld) and the détournment tactics of the Situationist Movement of the mid-1950s and 1960s, which sought to dismantle the world of commercial media culture that transforms “[e]verything that [is] directly lived . . . into a representation” (Debord, 1994 , p. 1).

Culture jammers frequently argue that our lives are dominated by a vast electronic and digital field of multimodal texts (images, audio, and now hypertext and hyperlinks), and the only way to respond is to use the design methods (pastiche, bricolage, parody, and montage) and genres (advertising, journalism, and filmmaking) that characterize commercial media to challenge media power and taken-for-granted assumptions within contemporary culture (Kenway & Bullen, 2008 ). Mark Dery ( 1993 , p. 1) calls this a form of “semiological guerrilla warfare,” through which culture jammers fight the status quo by using the principles of media culture to upend the meanings and assumptions operating in this culture.

Perhaps the most common and popular form of culture jamming is the sub-vertisement that groups like Adbusters have made popular. Sub-vertisements use popular references and techniques in branding campaigns to turn the meaning of logos, branded characters, and signs (like the Absolut Vodka bottle) on their heads. (See http://adbusters.org/spoofads/index.php for a gallery of examples that target fast food culture, alcohol and fashion ads, and political communication.) Other groups, including the Yes Men , have developed another culture-jamming strategy based around highly elaborate spoofs of websites, media interviews, and public corporate communications. Reverend Billy and his Church of Stop Shopping is yet another example of culture jamming. Reverend Billy and his allies use impromptu, guerrilla theater tactics to raise awareness of the deleterious effects of consumerism (i.e., sweat shop labor, debt, climate degradation, etc.) in society. The idea behind this and similar work is to use fun yet subversive tactics to offer radical commentary about common images, brands, and ideas that circulate in our lives. These learning practices are open to all, of course, but they have been especially relevant among educators eager to address critical issues about youth media culture.

Media Education and Direct Interventions in Youth Learning

Learning media aims to educate people through various media forms, and while this continues to be a popular strategy, for more than 80 years educators and activists have also turned to more direct interventions to affect how young people learn and engage with media culture. Media literacy education addresses how media operates in and through particular institutions, technologies, texts, and audiences. In its early development, media education tended to position schools and teachers as the defenders of traditional culture and impressionable youths. Early relationships among youths, media cultures, and education were framed around a reactionary stance that implored educators to protect youth from the media. F. R. Leavis and Denys Thompson ( 1933 ) were the first to champion this protectionist phase of media education in their book Culture and Environment , which is credited as the first set of proposals for systematic teaching about mass media in schools. Leavis and Thompson’s work includes a strong prejudice against American popular culture and mass media in general and reflects the aspirations for early media education within schools to inoculate young people against media messages to protect literary (i.e., high) culture from the commoditization lamented by mass culture theorists (Hoechsmann & Poyntz, 2012 ).

These sentiments remained strong into the early 1960s, but much as learning media took a new and compelling turn in this decade, so too did media education. Fueling this trend was the belief that educators could adapt curricula and teaching practices to the increasing role of commercial television and movies in young people’s lives. In the United Kingdom, this sentiment led educators to develop a screen education movement based around the critical use of movies in classrooms. Drawing from the influential work of Richard Hoggart’s Uses of Literacy ( 1957 ) and Raymond Williams’s Culture and Society ( 1958 ), the purpose of screen education was to study the popular media that teenagers were watching so that they would be in a better position to understand their own situation in the world, including the causes of their alienation and marginalization.

A similar desire to help youth see connections between school and everyday life motivated early initiatives in media education in Australia and Canada. Pedagogically, this led to the development of film analysis and film production courses, which drew inspiration from cultural shifts in the way that movies were understood. No longer seen simply as forms of entertainment, film education focused on the way that popular Hollywood movies (e.g., Easy Rider and Medium Cool in 1969 ) reflected social and cultural values and were thus thought deserving of critical attention. This meant teaching students to understand the language of cinema and the ways that movies engage and shape prospects for social and political change.

As an outgrowth of this work, the 1980s and 1990s witnessed the first sustained period of institutionalization of media education. Key curricular documents were produced, and media education entered the school curricula in many countries in a formal way for the first time. The Canadian province of Ontario led the way, mandating the teaching of media literacy in the high school English curriculum in 1987 . Eventually K–12 students across Canada would receive some form of media education by the end of the 1990s. Meanwhile in the United Kingdom, the late 1980s witnessed the integration of media education into the curriculum as an examinable subject for students pursuing university entrance. This helped to fuel the popularity of courses in media studies, film studies, and communication studies in schools, and by the 1990s and 2000s, additional intermediate courses in media studies were added to the curriculum.

In Australia, the late 1980s and 1990s marked a period of expansion in school-based production and media education training, in part because such training was seen to be an ideal way to equip young people with the technical skills and competencies needed to compete in a globally competitive, highly mediated world (Edith, 2003 ; McMahon & Edith, 1999 ). Similarly, in various non-English-speaking countries, including Norway, Sweden, and Finland, media literacy developed and expanded throughout the 1990s (Tufte, 1999 ).

Even when not included in the formal curriculum, media education became a pedagogical practice of teachers aware of the impact of the media in the lives of their students. In particular, in those countries in the global South where the broader educational needs of the society were still focused on getting children to school and teaching basic literacy and numeracy, media education may not have emerged in the mandated curriculum, but teachers were drawing on media education strategies to help youth make sense of and affect their worlds.

In the United States, school-based media education initiatives were slower to get off the ground. In 1978 , in response to children’s increasing television consumption, the Parents-Teachers Association (PTA) convinced the U.S. Office of Education to launch a research and development initiative on the effects of commercial television on young people. In short order, this initiative led the Office of Education to recommend a national curriculum to enhance students’ understanding of commercials, their ability to distinguish fact from fiction, the recognition of competing points of view in programs, an understanding of the style and formats in public affairs programming, and the ability to understand the relationship between television and printed materials (Kline et al., 2006 ).

Ultimately, attempts to implement this curriculum were hampered in the early 1980s as President Ronald Reagan’s move to deregulate the communications industry challenged efforts to develop media education in U.S. schools. Nonetheless, these early developments proved crucial in establishing the ground from which more recent media education initiatives have grown. Robert Kubey ( 2003 ) noted that as of 2000 , all 50 states included some education about the media in core curricular areas such as English, social studies, history, civics, health, and consumer education.

Beyond schools, a number of key nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have developed over the past two decades and have promoted dynamic forms of media education. The Alliance for a Media Literate America (AMLA), a national membership organization chartered in 2001 to organize and host the National Media Education Conference every two years and to promote professional development, is of particular note. So too are the Media Education Foundation (MEF), which produces some of the most important media education resources in North America, and the Centre for Media Literacy (CML), which offers a helpful MediaLit Kit to promote teaching and learning in a media age.

Literacy and Production

While often led by educators, parents, and young people, these developments in media education have been enhanced by interest in a broad project of literacy. The role and discussion of literacy discourse in media education go back to at least the early 1970s in the United States (Kline et al., 2006 ). As media education has internationalized, however, there has been a tendency to turn to literacy metaphors to conceptualize the kinds of media learning enabled through media education. As media education has increasingly become part of school curricula, the language of literacies also has been a familiar and useful framework to situate classroom (and out-of-school) practices. The New London Group’s ( 1996 ) “pedagaogy of multiple literacies” has been especially influential, offering a framework to address the diverse modalities of literacy (thus, multiple literacies) in complex media cultures, alongside a focus on the design and development of critical media education curricula.

While the New London Group’s work has helped to support the development of media literacy education in an era of multimodal texts, the arrival of the personal computer and the emergence of the Internet have been accompanied by the proliferation of a whole host of digital media technologies (e.g., cameras, visual and audio editing systems, distribution platforms, etc.), encouraging the integration of youth media production into the work of media education. Media production has an impressive history in the field of media literacy education going back to at least the 1960s, when experiments with 16-mm film production in community groups and schools were part of early film education initiatives in the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and other countries. By the 1990s and 2000s, media production became a common feature in media education practices because it was thought to enable young people to learn by doing , rather than just by analyzing or reading media texts. Newly accessible broadcasting (or narrowcasting) opportunities made available through Web 2.0 platforms (e.g., YouTube, Facebook, wiki spaces, etc.) accelerated these developments, encouraging the growth of information training programs in schools that focus on Web design, software training, and mastering camera skills in ways that emphasize technological mastery as an end in itself.

The turn to information training is perhaps not surprising, but while technical skills training can help young people to learn key competencies that may lead to job prospects, technical training on its own misrepresents the critical and civic concerns that have long animated media literacy education. How the civic and political involvement of youth are emerging inside highly engaging digital media cultures is one of three major issues examined in the next and final section of this article, where we address pressing questions about contemporary relationships among youth, media culture, and learning.

Contemporary Issues in Youth Media Culture and Education

Recent questions about youth and media culture are tangled up with the participatory condition common to network societies (Sterne, Coleman, Ross, Barney, & Tembeck, 2016 ; Castells, 1996 ). The age of mass media was preoccupied with problems of representation, atomization, homogenization, and manipulation, and these problems defined the thinking about youth consumption and commercial culture in much of the 20th century . This is reflected in the anxieties and studies noted earlier in this article. As we have come to read and write media differently in a digital era, however, a new set of problems has arisen (Chun, 2016 ). Among these is the new role of participation and a participatory turn in media culture that has enabled users (or those we used to call audiences ) to become more active and involved with brands, franchises, celebrities, technologies, and social media networks across everyday life (Jenkins, 2006 ). This turn is evidenced by the increasing amount of time that youth spend with screens, but it is also a function of the way that many of us now interact with media culture. Audiences have always been actively involved with still and moving images, celebrities, sports, and popular music, among other artifacts. Fan cultures exemplify this, as do studies of how real-life audiences talk about and use media (Buckingham, 1993 ; Williams, 2003 ; Silverstone, 2001 ; Scannell, 1989 ; Radway, 1984 ).

But today we are called on to participate in digital media culture in new ways. Participation has become a condition that is “both environmental (a state of affairs) and normative (a binding principle of right action)” (p. vii), and our digital technologies and highly concentrated media industries are woven into the fabric of this state of affairs (Sterne et al., 2016 , p. vii). “These media allow a growing number of people to access, modify, store, circulate, and share media content” in ways that have been available only to professionals or a select few in the past (Sterne et al., 2016 , p. viii). As digitalization has changed the nature of media production, we have not only become more involved and active in our media use, but our interaction with digital media has allowed others to interact with us in new and sometimes troubling ways. This is the paradox of the participatory condition, and it shapes how youth media culture and education are connected today.

Issue 1: Surveillance, Branding, and the Production of Youth

To begin with, the pointy end of the participatory paradox has to do with the way that digital media cultures allow others, including corporations, governments, and predatory individuals, to monitor, survey, coordinate, and guide our activities as never before. With our data footprint, states, political parties, media, toy, and technology companies (as well as health, insurance, and a host of other industries) become data aggregation units that map and monitor youth behavior to interact with, brand, and modify this behavior for profitable ends. Big data enables the production of complex algorithms that produce what Wendy Chun ( 2016 , p. 363) calls “a universe of dramas” that dominate our attention economies. These dramas (the stories, celebrities, associations, and products with which we interact) are “co-produced transnationally by corporations and states through intertwining databases of action and unique identifiers.” Databases and identifiers enable algorithms to target, engage, and integrate a diverse range of youth into the global imaginary of consumer celebrity cultures and the archives of surveillance states (Chun, 2016 ). The American former military contractor and dissident Edward Snowden draws our attention to this universe in the documentary CitizenFour , which tells his story, and makes clear that instead of governments and corporations being accountable to us, we are now, regularly and without knowing it, accountable to them (Snowden, 2016 ).

Compounding these concerns, strangers can now access youth in ways that magnify the potential damage done by the pointy end of the participatory paradox. Fears about stranger danger and cyberbullying have been especially acute in recent years, and while these fears are not new (Poyntz, 2013a ), they have been central to panicked reactions among parents, educators, and others wary of youth media culture. These fears are often connected to worries about online content that young people now access, including vast troves of pornography available at the click of a button, as well as worrying online sites that promote hate, terrorism, and the radicalization of youth. The actual merits of concerns about who is accessing youth and what content they are accessing are sometimes difficult to gauge; nonetheless, it remains the case that for the foreseeable future, one of the fundamental issues shaping relationships between youth, media culture, and education is how and through what means youth are produced and made ready to participate in contemporary promotional and surveillance cultures—particularly when this happens for the benefit of people and institutions that exercise immense and often dubious power in young lives.

Issue 2—Creative Media and Youth Producing Politics

On the other end of the participatory paradox is a second issue shaping youth, media culture, and learning. While network societies produce new risk conditions (like those noted previously) for teenagers, digital media undoubtedly have enabled new forms of creative participation and media production that are changing how youth agency and activism operate. Mobile phones, cameras, editing platforms, and distribution networks have become more easily accessible for young people across the global North and South in recent years, and as this has happened, youth have gained opportunities to create, circulate, collaborate, and connect with others to address civic issues and matters of broad personal and public concern in ways that simply have not been available in the past. Since the mid-1990s, online media worlds have emerged as counterenvironments that afford teenagers a rich and inviting sphere of digitally mediated experiences to explore their imaginations, hopes, and desires (Giroux, 2011 ).

The fact that young people’s online worlds are dominated by the plots and affective commodities of commercial corporations means that these worlds can foster a culture of choice and personalized goods that encourage youth to act in highly individualized ways (Livingstone, 2009 ). But the skills and networks that teens nurture online can be publicly relevant (Boyd, 2014 ; Ito et al., 2015 ). The Internet, social media, and other digital resources have in fact become central to new kinds of participatory politics and shared civic spaces that are emerging as an outgrowth and extension of young people’s cultural experiences and activities (Ito et al., 2015 ; Soep, 2014 ; Kahne, Middaugh, & Allen, 2014 ; Poyntz, 2017 ; Bennett & Segerberg, 2012 ; Bakardjieva, 2010 ).

These practices extend a history of youth actions wherein culture and cultural texts have been drawn on to contest politics and power (including issues of gender, class, race, sexuality, and ability) and matters of public concern (including climate change and the rights of indigenous communities). Youth who lack representation and recognition in formal political institutions and practices often turn to culture and cultural texts to contest politics and power (Williams, 1958 ; Dimitriadis, 2009 ; Maira & Soep, 2005 ; McRobbie, 1993 ; Hebdige, 1979 ; Hall & Jefferson, 1976 ). Recently, these tendencies have been evident in the actions of the Black Lives Matter movement , which has produced an array of cultural expressions, including a video story archive and a remarkable photo library that lays bare the experiences and hopes of a movement that aims to be “an ideological and political intervention in a world where Black lives are systematically and intentionally targeted for demise.”

Beyond North America, in Tunisia, Egypt, Israel, Chile, Spain, the United Kingdom, Turkey, and other places, a range of bottom-up communication for social change practices has been part of epochal political actions and assemblies often led by students and other young people demanding government action on social justice and economic and human rights (Dencik & Leistert, 2015 ; Tufte et al., 2013 ). The contexts for these actions are complex, but in general, they point to instances where political cultures are emerging from young people’s cultural experiences and learning, challenging the meaning, representation, and response of those in power to matters of public concern.

More generally, across a range of youth communities, peer networks, and affinity associations, participatory media cultures are enabling levels of engagement, circulation, and cultural production by young people that are altering relationships between youth creative acts and political life. Kahne et al., 2014 have described these emerging practices as part of a wave of participatory politics that include a cross-section of actions that often extend across global communities. Examples include consumer activism (e.g., product boycotting) and lifestyle politics (e.g., vegetarianism); groups like the Harry Potter Alliance (HPA), which use characters and social justice themes from the novels to encourage connections between cultural and civic life; a community gathered around the Nerdfighters , a YouTube channel and movement organized around John and Hank Green and their mission to “decrease world suck”; fascinating examples of participatory storytelling, including the use of video memes by and about undocumented immigrant youth to draw attention to lives that have largely disappeared from mainstream media culture; and youth-driven campaigns and petitions organized in conjunction with groups like Change.org and Openmedia.ca to challenge public policy and focus attention on major injustices by institutions and officials using memes, videos, and mobile phone recordings of violence, inequity, and exploitation (Ito et al., 2015 ).

In addition to politically mobilized youth and youth drawn into mediated politics through cultural pastimes, there is evidence that youth connections to politics are being nurtured further by a diverse range of community youth media initiatives and groups that have emerged in cities across the global North and South over the past 20 years (Poyntz, 2013b , 2017 ; Asthana, 2015 ; Tufte et al., 2013 ; Tyner, 2009 ). Such community groups are part of a response to the risk conditions that shape contemporary life. They are crucial to negotiating citizenship in highly mediated cultures and for addressing digital divides to equip young people with the resources and networks necessary to manage and respond to experiences of change, injustice, violence, and possibility.

Community youth media production groups are part of an informal cultural learning sector that is an increasingly significant part of the work of provision for socially excluded youth. These groups are of many types, but they are symptomatic of a participatory media culture in which new possibilities and new opportunities have arisen to nurture youth creativity and political action. How to foster these developments through media education and the challenges confronting these efforts represents the third major issue shaping connections between youth, media culture, and learning today.

Issue 3—Youth, Media Learning, and Media Education

Media literacy education refers to learning “a set of competencies that enable one to interpret media texts and institutions, to make media of [one’s] own, and to recognize and engage with the social and political influence of media in everyday life” (Hoechsmann & Poyntz, 2012 , p. 1). We might debate this definition, but the larger point is that since at least the mid-1990s, media literacy education has made many gains in school curricula and among community groups and social movements, as noted previously (Skinner, Hackett, & Poyntz, 2015 ). At the same time, the challenges facing media literacy education are significant. For instance, the massive and relentless turn to instrumental forms of technical and creative learning in the service of job markets and competitive global positioning in formal schooling has mitigated the impact of critical media education.

Over the past two decades, a broad set of changes in schooling environments around the world have increasingly put a premium on preparing teenagers to be globally competitive, employable subjects (McDougal, 2014 ). In this context, the lure of media training in the service of work initiatives and labor market preparation is strong; thus, there has been a tendency in school and community-based media projects and organizations to focus on questions of culture and industry know-how (i.e., knowing and making media for the culture industries), as opposed to the work of public engagement and media reform. This orientation has been further encouraged by a return to basics and standardized testing across educational policy and practice, which has encouraged a move away from citizen-learning curricula (Westheimer, 2011 ; Westheimer & Kahne, 2004 ). These developments have led to efforts to redefine media education in the English curriculum in the United Kingdom, in ways that discourage critical media analysis and production (Buckingham, 2014 ).

In like fashion, the pressure to return to more traditional forms of learning has led to education policies in the United States, Australia, and parts of Canada that are intended to dissuade critical and/or citizen-oriented learning practices in schools (Poyntz, 2015 ; Hoechsmann & DeWaard, 2015 ). Poyntz ( 2013 ) has indicated elsewhere how this orientation shapes the projects of some community media groups working with young people, but the upshot is that instrumental media learning has come to complicate and sometimes frustrate how media literacy education is used to intervene in relationships among youth, media culture, and learning (Livingstone, 2009 ; Sefton-Screen, 2006 ).

This situation has been complicated further as the field of media literacy education has evolved to become a global discourse composed of a range of sometimes contradictory practices, modalities, objectives, and traditions (McDougall, 2014 ). The globalization of media literacy education has been a welcome development and is no doubt a consequence of the globalization of communication systems and the intensification of consumerism among young people around the world. But if the result of this development has been an outpouring of policy discussions, policy papers, and pilot studies across Europe, North America, Asia, and other regions (Frau-Meigs & Torrent, 2009 ), this has at the same time also produced a complex field of media literacy practices and models that have led to a generalization (and even one suspects a depoliticization) of the field. This has happened as efforts have emerged to weave media literacy education into disparate education systems and media institutions (Poyntz, 2015 ).

As the proliferation of media literacies has been underway, a raft of new media forms and practices—including cross-media, transmedia, and spreadable media (Jenkins, Ford, & Green, 2013 ) have also encouraged the production of a myriad of discourses about “ digital literacy, new media literacy [and] transmedia literacy” (McDougall, 2014 , p. 6). These and similar developments have ensured that media literacy education remains a contested field of objectives and meanings. While this can be interesting for academics, it may be less than encouraging for young people, educators, and others eager to draw on media education to affect contemporary relationships between youth, media culture, and learning. And let it be noted that the impact of these developments is not only relevant to the ways that youth negotiate media culture, but also to the future of democracy itself.

Concluding Thoughts

Media cultures have come to play a significant role in the way that young people go about making meaning in the world; this is especially true of how knowledge is shared and acquired. As a result, media are part of the continual shaping and reshaping of what learning resources look like. Both inside and outside the classroom, young people are increasingly able, even expected, to utilize the vast number of resources now available to them. Yet, many of these resources now foster worry rather than learning. The fact that “Google it,” for instance is now a common phrase referring to the act of information seeking is in itself telling; a distinct culture of learning has emerged from the development of the Internet and other media technologies. In fact, many young people today have never experienced learning without the ability to “Google it.” Yet this very culture of learning is indistinguishable from an American multinational technology company that is not beholden to the idea of a “public good.” If the project of education is not just to be for the benefit of a select few, but for society and a healthy democracy as a whole, however, then these contradictions must be engaged. So while media cultures are a significant feature of young people’s lives, it is becoming clear that media cultures have augured complicated relationships between youth and education in ways that are not easily reconciled.

The project of media education is not without its own set of challenges and contradictions, including those highlighted in this article. But it remains indispensable if educators, parents, and researchers are to support young people in navigating learning environments and imagining democratic futures.

Acknowledgments

Parts of this article have been adapted from Hoechsmann et al. ( 2012 ).

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Youth Culture

Introduction, theoretical interventions.

Life-Cycle Shifts
Socialization
Language Use and Identity
Subcultures
Linguistic Style and Slang
Schooling and Education
Class and Labor
Gender, Sex, and Sexuality
Race and Racialization
Modernity and Globalization
Migration, Immigration, and Transnationalism
Activism and Politics
Violence and the Law
Commodities
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Youth Culture by Shalini Shankar LAST REVIEWED: 28 May 2013 LAST MODIFIED: 28 May 2013 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199766567-0081

The anthropological study of youth began as part of broader inquiries about life cycle, ritual, personhood, and generation (e.g., Margaret Mead’s 1952 classic Coming of Age in Samoa ). Such early studies were generally interested in childhood and adolescence insofar as they offered further insight about a society and adult notions of personhood. “Youth culture,” the term widely used in academic and popular circles today, emerged in the 1950s and 1960s as a post–World War II phenomenon in the United States, Canada, and western Europe. A product of extended secondary schooling, delayed entry into the workforce, and the proliferation of consumer culture, youth culture has taken multiple forms with unique trajectories. Youth culture studies now include children, teenagers, and young people in their twenties, and have placed these individuals at the center of the inquiry, rather than as a liminal period before adulthood. This shift has led to productive understandings of broader anthropological questions of interest—such as race, gender, sexuality, class, globalization, modernity, education, and cultural production—while it also shows how youth action is a site of agency, resistance, identity construction, and social change. Scholarship examining style, adornment, and identity construction has made excellent use of the concept of subculture, while practice-based models have further considered the significance of leisure activity, such as consumption of media, commodities, and digital technologies, in young lives. Several other prominent areas have emerged, including childhood and socialization; psychologically informed approaches to child development; schooling as a lens to dynamics of race, gender, and class formation; and language use, identity, and subjectivity. In the past two decades or so, increased emphasis on the ways in which youth mediate globalization, modernity, migration, and transnationalism have come to the fore, as have studies that foreground issues of activism and politics. The potential of youth to be the initiators of social change, however measured, has been productively explored; so too have the struggles of youth as they cope with racism, poverty, abuse, violence, armed conflict, and other social ills. Methodologically, anthropological work on youth is marked by long-term, rigorous fieldwork using ethnographic and sometimes sociolinguistic approaches, and this in situ fieldwork has led to substantive insights about identity and subjectivity, while also attending to history and political economy. Such research has enabled youth to be regarded as significant contributors to the social worlds in which they operate, as well as how they may be poised to inherit and transform these worlds.

The shift to move youth from the margins to the center of anthropological inquiry has been a slow process. Still somewhat sidelined in the discipline overall, as Hirschfeld 2002 notes, theoretical interventions via review articles that define youth as a field of study help give it more of a presence. For instance, Bucholtz 2002 looks at youth culture with a practice-based approach that also considers language use. Korbin 2003 considers childhoods with violence, and Levine 2007 covers numerous contours and debates of this field. Revising approaches to theorizing youth, such as Durham 2004 , and considering issues of methodology and representation as shown in Best 2007 , keep critical focus on this field of inquiry. Sloan 2007 turns a focus on minority youth in particular (see also Shankar 2011 cited under Linguistic Style and Slang ). Undoing misconceptions about the ways that youth have been assessed in schools is also of major concern, especially to those working on the anthropology of education (see McDermott and Hall 2007 , as well as the citations under Schooling and Education ).

Best, Amy, ed. 2007. Representing youth: Methodological issues in critical youth studies . New York: New York Univ. Press.

A thoughtful collection of essays that examine the benefits and challenges of doing ethnographic fieldwork with children and youth.

Bucholtz, Mary. 2002. Youth and cultural practice. Annual Review of Anthropology 31:525–552.

DOI: 10.1146/annurev.anthro.31.040402.085443

This review article offers in-depth coverage of about three decades of youth culture studies. It establishes the work of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in the 1970s as setting the stage for a practice-based approach, and draws in more recent work from anthropology and related fields.

Durham, Deborah. 2004. Disappearing youth: Youth as a social shifter in Botswana. American Ethnologist 31.4: 589–605.

DOI: 10.1525/ae.2004.31.4.589

Argues that youth should be considered less as a fixed category and more as a set of shifting relationships, and thus as a “shifter” in the indexical sense of indirectly pointing to broader social meanings.

Hirschfeld, Lawrence A. 2002. Why don’t anthropologists like children? American Anthropologist 104.2: 611–627.

DOI: 10.1525/aa.2002.104.2.611

Those working on youth culture may find the title question to ring true, as anthropology has largely marginalized youth as a legitimate field of inquiry and instead considered them primarily as a precursor to adulthood. This article offers reasons for these theoretical and ethnographic gaps and critiques anthropology’s overwhelming emphasis on adults.

Korbin, Jill E. 2003. Children, childhoods, and violence. Annual Review of Anthropology 32:431–446.

DOI: 10.1146/annurev.anthro.32.061002.093345

An overview of numerous types of violence children face and are recruited into, including armed conflict, bullying, abuse, violent rituals, and neglect. Also considers the violent behavior of youth as a form of agency.

Levine, Robert A. 2007. Ethnographic studies of childhood: A historical overview. American Anthropologist 109.2: 247–260.

DOI: 10.1525/aa.2007.109.2.247

A survey of approaches from Mead and Malinowski to twenty-first contemporary ethnography of children, with an emphasis on developmental and psychological perspectives.

McDermott, Ray, and Kathleen D. Hall. 2007. Scientifically debased research on learning, 1854–2006. Anthropology & Education Quarterly 38.1: 9–19.

This intervention documents problematic classroom practices, testing, and teacher training brought about by the No Child Left Behind Act, and calls for less standardized testing and more individual case studies.

Sloan, Kris. 2007. High-stakes accountability, minority youth, and ethnography: Assessing the multiple effects. Anthropology & Education Quarterly 38.1: 24–41.

DOI: 10.1525/aeq.2007.38.1.24

Illustrates the value of ethnography in offering a counterpoint to dominant perspectives on minority youth schooling, including curriculum, pedagogy, and student experiences.

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Youth culture: a case study

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Popular entertainment, particularly movies, television series and the news media have focused on some of the more spectacular cultures: punks, skinheads, surfies and bikers. Sociologists have noted a wider range still, such as cultures constituted on an ethnic or gender basis. In this chapter, the author draws attention to even more specific cultural formations, built out of neighbourhood and school contexts, as well as class, gender and ethnic relations. Soccer is the province of migrant groups, especially the Greeks, and the sporting activities are not much integrated, thus reinforcing differences of ethnic culture. The official agencies tended to be professionalised, run by people who lived outside the area, and lacking roots in local culture and community life. The methodology stemmed from an attempt to identify cultures in the school (in Year 10) and investigate their impact on social relations, individual development, and the operation of the school.

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Youth Cultures Scenes, Subcultures and Tribes

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Youth Cultures offers a comprehensive outline of youth cultural studies in the twenty-first century, with reference to a range of new research case studies. Featuring both well known and emerging scholars from the UK, the US and mainland Europe, the book addresses core theoretical and methodological developments before going on to examine key substantive themes in the study of young people's identities and lifestyles. These include questions of commerce, power and politics, issues of gender and ethnicity, uses of place and space and impacts of new media and communications. Simultaneously offering an accessible introduction and a range of new contributions to the subject area, Youth Cultures will appeal to both students and academics within a range of disciplines, including sociology, media and cultural studies, youth studies and popular music studies.

Paul Hodkinson is Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Surrey, UK. Wolfgang Deicke is Tutor in Politics at Ruskin College, Oxford.

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Youth Cultures and Subcultures

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A special issue of Societies (ISSN 2075-4698).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (30 June 2019) | Viewed by 31118

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Dear Colleagues,

The study of youth cultures and of youth subcultures has a long and articulated tradition in social sciences. The concepts of “youth cultures” and “subcultures” date back to the mid-1940s, in the wake of the way opened by the Chicago School two decades before—but a lot of studies conducted before the terms were coined had also been dedicated to the analysis of phenomena subsequently identified through these categories. Throughout the long history of this field of study, a huge amount of research has been done on very different phenomena and varying interpretative perspectives have been developed. Nevertheless, “youth cultures” and “subcultures” today continue to represent relevant and useful concepts, and analytical perspectives, in the analysis of several social forms characterized by a significant presence of young people.

The purpose of the Special Issue, “Youth Cultures and Subcultures”, is to reflect on the study of youth cultures and subcultures in today’s society. What different theoretical and methodological approaches can be adopted in this study? How have the two concepts and the related analytical perspectives changed over time? What are the limitations and potential of each approach? How can these two concepts and the different analytical perspectives be useful in the study of today’s empirical phenomena? What alternative concepts and perspectives could be adopted? These are only some of the possible questions that this Special Issue aims to address through theoretical, methodological, and empirical articles. We therefore look forward to your submissions covering any of the aforementioned topics.

Dr. Carlo Genova Guest Editor

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S Afr J Psychiatr
PMC11079370

Demographic and mental health profile of youth in a gender service: An African case series

Simon d. pickstone-taylor.

1 Department of Psychiatry, Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa

Eugene L. Davids

Graham n. de bever, petrus j. de vries, associated data.

Data are available upon reasonable request from the corresponding author S.D.P.-T.

Despite a massive global increase in research on gender-diverse youth, there have been no studies in Africa on gender-diverse children and adolescents presenting to health services.

This study aimed to present the first African findings of the demographic and mental health profile of youth who have presented at a gender service in South Africa.

A specialist mental health outpatient service, consisting of psychiatry, psychology and nursing input, for gender-diverse child and adolescent patients in the Western Cape.

All consenting youth seen at a gender service, consisting of psychiatry, psychology and nursing input, in state and by the same clinician in private practice between January 2012 and May 2019 were participants of a retrospective, sequential case series study. Data of interest, including gender identity and sexuality, mental health history and social information, were extracted from the psychiatry files of participants.

Thirty-nine participants were part of the registry and qualified for the study: 72% self-identified as white, 15% as coloured and 13% as black African. The rate of co-occurring psychopathology was high (64%) and included high rates of autism, particularly in trans males (26%), suicidal ideation in 31% and a history of suicide attempt(s) in 10%.

Conclusions

This first study describing gender-diverse youth seeking support relating to their gender identity in Africa showed they had remarkable similarities to those studied internationally.

Contribution

Establishing that transgender youth of all major racial groups in the province with similar demographic profiles to other parts of the world are presenting to services in South Africa and in need of mental health support and interventions.

Introduction

Over the years, there have been many debates and discussions around gender identity. Gender identity and gender roles have been considered as the behaviours, attitudes and personality traits in a particular social and historical period that are prescribed or attributed to persons of a particular gender. 1 However, more recent references to ‘gender identity’ are concerned with how an individual perceived his or her or their gender, which may or may not correspond with the sex assigned at birth. 2 When the gender perceived and identified with, corresponds with birth-assigned sex, the term gender-conforming or cisgender is typically used, while the opposite would be gender nonconforming. Children and adolescents who are gender nonconforming or gender-diverse may identify as transgender, genderqueer, or off the gender binary completely. 3

Many children and adolescents who are transgender or gender-diverse form part of a vulnerable group of children and adolescents with high rates of psychopathology. 4 , 5 Many of these young people often access healthcare that is not gender-affirming or might even avoid accessing it because of stigma and discrimination. Gender-affirming healthcare provides the child and adolescent with the care that is developmentally appropriate ‘orientated towards understanding and appreciating the (young person’s) gender experience’. 6

An exploration of the landscape of studies examining gender-affirming healthcare for children and adolescents shows that most studies have been conducted in high-income settings, such as Canada, 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 the Netherlands, 7 the United Kingdom, 13 , 14 , 15 the United States, 16 , 17 Finland, 18 Italy 19 and Spain. 20 Very few studies to date have presented findings from low- and middle-income settings. One study was conducted in Brazil, 21 with a dearth in the literature on other low- and middle-income settings providing gender-affirming healthcare. To date, no studies have been published with data from the African continent in gender-diverse children and adolescents accessing healthcare, although there has been some research at the experience of gender-diverse youth attending schools in South Africa. 22 The Professional Association for Transgender Health South Africa (PATHSA) highlighted the vulnerability of children and adolescents in the country and made clear their opposing view to a healthcare practitioner who challenged the credibility of gender-affirming healthcare for children and adolescents. 23

Transgender and gender-diverse children and adolescents often have higher burdens of depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation and self-harm in comparison with their cisgender counterparts. 24 The burden of psychopathology and psychiatric health is exacerbated by experiences of familial rejection, bullying, violence and discrimination. 24 In South Africa, there are limited trained clinicians and long waiting lists for access to gender-affirming healthcare. 25 This puts even more strain on the health and well-being of gender-diverse children and adolescents. There is also very little research on gender identity and gender diversity. To date, gender identity has not been included as an item or considered in many national surveys. 3 This study, therefore, will be the first to describe the demographic and mental health profile of children and adolescents who have presented at a Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) in South Africa. These findings will allow clinicians to better understand the profile and needs of transgender youth in South Africa and aid in the establishment of appropriate services for them.

Research methods and design

The study aimed to examine the demographic and mental health profile of children and adolescents who presented at gender identity services, where the services are in line with PATHSA and World Professional Association of Transgender Health (WPATH) guidelines at a tertiary child and adolescent mental healthcare setting in Cape Town, South Africa. A retrospective, sequential case series was employed to gather the data to address the aim of the study.

Participants

All children and adolescents seen in the GIDS between January 2012 and May 2019 were invited to provide consent for their data to be included in a research registry, after appropriate consent was collected. The GIDS was set up within the Red Cross War Memorial Children’s Hospital’s Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry in 2012 to evaluate and support gender-diverse youth up to the age of 18 years and their parents. Children and adolescents with concerns about their gender identity are referred to the service. Gender-diverse youth are assessed by lead author and psychiatrist with parents or carers being part of the assessment. They and their parents are offered an evaluation, understanding and support for their gender diversity. The gender-diverse youth are referred on to endocrinologists, psychologists and other healthcare providers as appropriate, along WPATH guidelines. The Red Cross Children’s Hospital is part of the public health system and is based in Cape Town. It was opened in 1956 and became the first dedicated children’s hospital established in sub-Saharan Africa. It is affiliated with the University of Cape Town and is one of two main hospitals in the Western Cape province of South Africa to provide tertiary and quaternary child healthcare. The GIDS is open to all children and adolescents in South Africa needing to access specialist support. All the children and adolescents seen at the GIDS have been evaluated by the lead author. To date, most of the children and adolescents who have accessed the GIDS have been from the Western Cape, South Africa. The registry also includes gender-diverse patients who are seen by the lead author in his private practice. These patients and families approached the GIDS but chose to be seen in the lead author’s private practice in order to access an assessment sooner and as they had private insurance or funds enabling them to do so. They received the same assessment by the lead author as those seen at the GIDS. Where a referral for hormones was appropriate, they were all referred on to the same endocrinology service in the state sector. This study does not discuss the services accessed after assessment by participants, only the demographics at assessment. Participants were seen between January 2012 and May 2019.

Data collection methods and analysis

All participants were children and adolescents who had been seen with their parents or carers by the lead author at the GIDS or in his private practice. He had completed a gender assessment and a general psychiatric assessment and produced a written assessment report on each of these children and adolescents. This document, as well as other information reported in the young person’s medical file, was used to collect data.

For the purpose of this study, the research team developed a data extraction sheet containing all data fields of interest including gender identity and sexuality, physical and mental health history, family-related information, schooling and social information, as well as medication history and referrals. Anonymity was ensured as these data were not linked to individuals.

After all relevant approvals, medical records of patients’ records in the GIDS registry that were assessed between January 2012 and May 2019 were accessed and data were extracted.

Data were double-checked for accuracy, and any uncertainties or missing data were clarified by the lead author, who referred to the original file or spoke to the families as necessary. Extracted data were tabulated and presented using frequency and percentages for all relevant domains of interest (demographic details, sexual orientation, mental health profile).

Ethical considerations

Permission was sought from the University of Cape Town Faculty of Health Sciences Human Ethics Committee (HREC Reference: 254/2018) and the Red Cross War Memorial Hospital (RXH:RCC 139) to access the medical records and registry of children and adolescents who accessed the GIDS. All parents or caregivers of the children and adolescents accessing the GIDS and evaluated by the lead author in private practice provided written, informed consent for their information to be stored in a registry that would be used to advance gender-affirming GIDS research and clinical services. Children and adolescents also completed assent forms, having had the process explained to them in an age-appropriate way by the lead psychiatrist. The consent to have their information be part of the database was a separate process from consent to healthcare and lack of consent had no impact on access to healthcare. Almost every child and family gave consent. The study was conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki and all ethical principles were upheld through the data collection and extraction, analysis and write-up.

Demographic findings

As shown in Table 1 , the study sample was made up of 39 children and adolescents, 30 of whom had been seen by the lead author at the GIDS at Red Cross Hospital and 9 of whom had been seen in his private practice. Their ages ranged from 4 years and 2 months to 18 years and 1 month. When examining home language, 30 participants spoke English (77%), followed by Afrikaans ( n = 6; 15%) and isiXhosa ( n = 3; 8%). The religious affiliations of participants showed that 21 (54%) were Christian, 9 (23%) were Atheist, 3 (8%) Agnostic, and 2 (5%) were Muslim, Jewish or unknown. Participants self-identified their ethnic groups, where 28 (72%) were white, 6 (15%) were coloured and 5 (13%) were black African. Of the participants, 15 (38%) were assigned male at birth and 24 (62%) were assigned female at birth. Of the participants, 21 (62%) identified as trans male, followed by 14 (36%) as trans female, 3 (8%) as nonbinary and 1 participant as cis male (2%). Of the 39 participants, 28 (72%) had gender expressions that matched their appearance, 9 (23%) were androgynous and 2 (5%) whose gender expression did not match their appearance. When considering participants’ names, 19 (49%) kept their birth names, while 8 (21%) had changed to a feminine name, 10 (26%) to a masculine name and 2 (4%) to a gender-neutral name. More than 59% ( n = 23) of the participants experienced bullying, 21% ( n = 7) in a relationship or past relationship, 8 participants had family members who identified as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and others (LGBT+), while 9 participants had relatives who identified as LGBT+, 62% ( n = 24) had family members who were supportive, close to 64% ( n = 25) did not have access to health insurance and 54% ( n = 21) attended a public (government) school.

Demographic details of participants in the study ( N = 39).

Demographic variable		%

Childhood	6	15
Adolescence	33	85

English	30	77
Afrikaans	6	15
isiXhosa	3	8

Christian	21	54
Atheist	9	23
Agnostic	3	8
Muslim	2	5
Jewish	2	5
Unknown	2	5

White	28	72
Coloured	6	15
Black African	5	13

Male	15	38
Female	24	62
Intersex	0	0

Trans male	21	54
Trans female	14	36
Nonbinary	3	8
Cis male	1	2

Identity matched appearance	28	72
Androgynous	9	23
Identity did not match appearance	2	5

Birth name	19	49
Changed to feminine name	8	21
Changed to masculine name	10	26
Changed to gender-neutral name	2	4

Yes	23	59
No	15	38
Missing	1	3

Current relationship	7	21
Previous relationship	7	21
None	19	58

LGBT+ family member	8	21
LGBT+ relatives	9	23

Very supportive	24	62
Somewhat supportive	8	21
One parent supportive, rest of family not	4	10
No familial support	2	5
Resistant because of religious reasons	1	2

Comprehensive medical insurance/aid	10	26
Hospital plan	4	10
None	25	64

Public school	21	54
Private school	11	28
Home school	6	15
Not in school	1	3

Note: Age (range) = 4 years 2 months – 18 years 1 month.

Sexual orientation

Participants’ sexual orientation by gender identity is presented in Table 2 . The results suggest that of the participants who were 13 years and older, 44% ( n = 14) identified as heterosexual (of which 8 were trans female and 6 trans male), followed by pansexual (4 trans male, 2 nonbinary and 1 trans female) with the least prevalent sexual orientation being asexual accounting for 6% of the participants ( n = 2; 1 trans female and 1 nonbinary).

Sexual orientation by gender identity.

Sexual orientation	All		Trans. female	Trans. male	Nonbinary
Sexual orientation		%	Trans. female	Trans. male	Nonbinary
Heterosexual	14	44	8	6	0
Pansexual	6	18	1	4	2
Gay and lesbian	5	16	1	2	0
Bisexual	5	16	1	4	0
Asexual	2	6	1	0	1

Trans., transgender.

Mental health profile

The mental health of the 39 participants is presented in Table 3 . The results show that among the transgender and/or gender nonconforming participants, 87% ( n = 34) presented for gender dysphoria, and the most prevalent new diagnosis made by the child and adolescent psychiatrist was autism spectrum disorder (26%; n = 10), 64% ( n = 25) had a psychiatric history that included one or more diagnosis, and 79% ( n = 31) had a family psychiatric history, where major depressive disorder was the most prevalent familial psychiatric history diagnosis ( n = 19). Of the participants presenting at the GIDS, 8% ( n = 3) had a learning disorder and 5% ( n = 2) an intellectual disability. Those with a history of suicidality had a suicide attempt(s) (10%; n = 4) and suicidal ideation without attempt(s) (31%; n = 12); and those with a history of self-harm either engaged with self-harm with suicidal ideation (21%; n = 8) or nonsuicidal self-injury (5%; n = 2). Of all participants, 38% ( n = 15) used psychotropic drugs at the time of presentation, of which Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor (SSRI) ( n = 12) was the most prevalent. Only six of the participants had a history of substance use, 5% ( n = 2) used alcohol only, 3% ( n = 1) used cannabis only, and 8% ( n = 3) used both alcohol and cannabis. In terms of mental status examination of the participants at initial assessment at the GIDS, presenting as euthymic and apsychotic was the most common finding in 64% ( n = 25).

Mental health profile of participants in the study.

Mental health variable		%

Gender dysphoria	34	87
Suicide attempt	2	5
Major depressive disorder with suicidal ideation	1	3
Second opinion	1	3
Suitability for orchidectomy	1	3

Autism spectrum disorder	10	26
Major depressive disorder	2	5
Obsessive compulsive disorder	1	3
Generalised anxiety disorder	1	3

One or more diagnosis	25	64
No diagnosis	14	36

One or more diagnosis	31	79
Major depressive disorder	19	58
Anxiety	11	28
ADHD	4	10
Bipolar disorder	6	15
Alcohol use disorder	6	15
Other substance use disorder	4	10
Dementia	2	5
Suicide	3	8
Autism spectrum disorder	3	8
Psychosis	2	5

Yes	3	8
No	36	92

Yes	2	5
No	37	95

Suicide attempt(s)	4	10
Suicidal ideation without attempt(s)	12	31
None	23	59

Self-harm with suicidal ideation	8	21
Nonsuicidal self-injury	2	5
None	29	75

Yes	15	38
SSRI	12	31
SNRI	1	3
Methylphenidate	4	10
Antipsychotic	3	8
Melatonin	1	3

Alcohol only	2	5
Cannabis only	1	3
Both alcohol and cannabis	3	8

Euthymic and apsychotic	25	-
Depressed and apsychotic	9	-
Anxious and apsychotic	4	-
Euthymic and psychotic	1	-

SSRI, Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor; SNRI, Serotonin and Norephinephrin Reuptake Inhibitor; ADHD, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder.

In this study, we set out to describe, for the first time in an African context, the demographic and mental health profile of children and adolescents who presented at a gender-affirming GIDS at a tertiary child and adolescent mental healthcare unit in Cape Town, South Africa. Using a sequential case series design, 39 children and adolescents were included. The results showed that the children and adolescents who presented were largely identified as being trans male, heterosexual, with gender expression matching their identity, and had family that was supportive. Overall families had little to no access to health insurance. Study’s findings also identified that most of the participants experienced bullying and had at least one psychiatric diagnosis and a family history of a psychiatric diagnosis. Given the significant lack of any gender identity developmental data in an African context, the study provides a baseline for comparison to other African, low and/or middle-income and international findings.

Demographic profile

Gender identity can be defined as children and adolescents’ ‘internal felt sense of self’. 26 In this study, 90% of the children and adolescents’ gender identity was either trans male or trans female. Transgender children and adolescents form part of an underserved and underresearched population who have unique physical and mental health needs. 24 , 26 This study, therefore, aimed to present an initial profile of children and adolescents who presented at a GIDS in Cape Town, South Africa, to outline the demographic and mental health profiles. The participants in the study largely experienced bullying as a result of their identification as trans- or gender-diverse; it has been reported that bullying among trans- and gender-diverse children and adolescents hampers their mental health and well-being. 27 , 28 , 29 One of the factors that was seen as protective of mental health has been the care and support of transgender and gender-diverse children and adolescents. Close to 60% of the participants in this study perceived their parents as supportive. About 90% of parents chose to support gender-affirmative interventions along WPATH guidelines following assessment (outcomes not reported here, but further studies into outcomes would be helpful).

Many of the participants who accessed the GIDS did not have access to health insurance (medical aid); Tordoff and colleagues 27 have highlighted that many transgender and gender-diverse young people who lack health insurance coverage are able to access state-funded healthcare services that are gender-affirming and would otherwise be seen as a barrier to care if not available. Nahata et al. 2 found that many transgender and gender-diverse children and adolescents are limited in their access to appropriate care when having limited to no health insurance. When health insurance becomes a barrier to accessing healthcare among a marginalised group of young people who are prone to mental health challenges, self-injurious behaviour, as well as stigmatisation, and victimisation occur. Healthcare professionals need to lobby and work together with policymakers to provide equitable healthcare and advocate for health insurance reform. 2 Although a state-funded service, the majority of young people seen came from middle class backgrounds, reflecting which populations tend to access care, rather than the demographics of the Western Cape. Sadly, it is likely that many gender-diverse youth from poorer communities never make it to the GIDS. As a powerful anecdote, the lead author gave a talk in September 2018 to mental healthcare workers providing psychological counselling and support to youth in one of the poorer townships of Cape Town and was told by two clinicians that they had known three transgender teenagers in the previous 3 years and that all of them had died by suicide.

As with other studies internationally, this group showed a far higher level of diversity in sexual orientation than in other populations: 44% were heterosexual, 16% gay and lesbian and 34% bisexual (16%) or pansexual (18%). It is important that clinicians are mindful of this greater diversity and do not assume a certain sexual orientation. Some of this greater diversity is probably accounted for because of the high incidence of participants being on the autism spectrum, where more diversity of sexual orientation has been reported. Perhaps having had to explore their gender identity, unlike most cisgendered children, these youth have been more open to exploring and accepting more sexual orientation diversity in themselves as well.

Transgender and gender-diverse children and adolescents experience a unique health burden, particularly related to their mental health. 24 , 27 The mental health of transgender and gender-diverse young people is often hampered as a result of diminished social support, heightened stigma and discrimination. 25 More than half of the transgender and gender-diverse children and adolescents in this study had at least one psychiatric diagnosis, highlighting the unique mental health burden of these young people. Previous studies have reported poor mental health outcomes and the presence of a psychiatric diagnosis for transgender and gender-diverse young people. 27 , 30 , 31 The mental health burden of transgender and gender-diverse children and adolescents indicates the need for more gender-affirming medical and mental health interventions to assist in the unique mental health challenges experienced by these young people.

In this study, transgender and gender-diverse children and adolescents initially accessed the GIDS because of gender dysphoria; upon further investigation and screening, many of the participants also received a new diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder. Previous studies have reported heightened autistic traits in transgender and gender-diverse young people, 32 , 33 which has clinical implications for mental healthcare that is gender-affirming and adequate to the neurodiverse needs of trans- and gender-diverse young people. Additional mental health concerns seen in this study and reported by Tordoff et al. 27 include self-harm, suicidality, anxiety and depression. These mental health concerns highlight the unique mental health burden of transgender and gender-diverse children and adolescents who are often underserved in terms of mental and physical health as well as underresearched.

Study limitations

It is likely that there are large numbers of transgender youth who are never referred to GIDS services, whether in government or private settings, particularly in poorer and more conservative communities. This could be for many reasons including lack of funding to get to health services, lack of awareness of the service and parents who would not access such services because of their own transphobic and homophobic views. Community-based studies, for example, townships and rural communities, may provide far more representative data on rates and profile of transgender youth in South African and African contexts. While this study established that a significant sample of the transgender youth were coloured (15%) or black (13%) population, overall numbers were very low. Ongoing and larger-scale studies are therefore required to expand and ensure the representativeness of all our communities.

This study is also limited given that it was only from one South African province, the Western Cape. However, there are no other well-established gender clinics currently seeing transgender youth in Africa. There are a handful of clincians in South Africa supporting gender-diverse youth. Similar studies of the patients they are seeing or at gender clinics hopefully to be established in other parts of South Africa or Southern Africa in the future would help address this limitation.

Patients attending the GIDS filled in a standard demographic data form; however, there were no standardised assessment tools (e.g. ADOS-2 or similar) used in this study. However, each of the gender-diverse youths and families was seen by the same senior clinician who produced a detailed assessment report on each patient. The clinical diagnoses, for example, of autism spectrum were made by the clinician without a formal assessment tool, for example, Autism Diagnostic Observation Scedule-Second Edition (ADOS-2) or Diagnostic Interview for Social and Communication Disorders (DISCO). However, of the 10 patients diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), 5 were able to afford to access a DISCO evaluation, and all 5 of them had autism spectrum confirmed. The lead author and clinician making the diagnosis is part of a clinical team that specialises in evaluating and treating youth with autism spectrum and has thus had special training and experience in this area. Further studies evaluating all patients for autism spectrum using the same standardised gold standard measures would be helpful.

The focus of this study was on risks, vulnerabilities and clinical needs, not on resilience and other positive attributes of young people. This is a limitation of this study, but an important area for future research.

This study established that gender diversity is present in all the different linguistic, racial and religious groups typically seen in the Western Cape. In spite of the high degree of differences in cultural, linguistic, socioeconomic profiles and culture-sexual histories in Africa from youth in other parts of the world, this study of South African transgender youth reported similar demographics and clinical profiles seen in transgender youth seen in other parts of the world. Significantly high levels of ASD, particularly in trans males, were noticed in this sample and further studies are needed to explore this in more diverse local samples.

More education on gender diversity and appropriate referral routes is needed for clinicians working with people living in poorer communities, as well as for the members of these communities themselves. Appropriate healthcare services for transgender youth in other parts of South Africa need to be established and ways to improve access for black and Coloured youth need to be considered.

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to all families who were willing to participate in this study.

Competing interests

The authors declare that they have no financial or personal relationship(s) that may have inappropriately influenced them in writing this article.

Authors’ contributions

Conceptualisation of the project and protocol development by S.D.P.-T., G.N.D.B. and P.J.D.V. Literature review, methods development and data collection by G.N.D.B. Data analysis and interpretation by S.D.P.-T, G.N.D.B and P.J.D.V. Drafting the manuscript by G.N.D.B. and E.L.D. All the authors contributed to the draft manuscript and approved the final version of the article.

Data availability

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and are the product of professional research. It does not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any affiliated institution, funder, agency, or that of the publisher. The authors are responsible for this article’s results, findings, and content.

Funding Statement

Funding information This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for profit sectors.

Research Project Registration:

Project Number: RXH:RCC139

How to cite this article: Pickstone-Taylor SD, Davids EL, de Bever GN, et al. Demographic and mental health profile of youth in a gender service: An African case series. S Afr J Psychiat. 2024;30(0), a2160. https://doi.org/10.4102/sajpsychiatry.v30i0.2160

Youth Cultures in a Globalized World

Developments, Analyses and Perspectives

© 2021
Gerald Knapp 0 ,
Hannes Krall 1

Institute of Educational Sciences and Research (IfEB), Alpen-Adria-University, Klagenfurt, Austria

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Shares developments and analyses across cultures
Looks at life-world perspectives of youth
Shows how youth scenes and activities can be seen as political, social or cultural responses

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About this book

This book examines the relation between the phenomenon of globalization, changes in the lifeworld of young people and the development of specific youth cultures. It explores the social, political, economic and cultural impact of globalization on young people. Growing diversity in their lifeworlds, technological development, migration and the ubiquity of digital communication and representation of the world open up new forms of self-representation, networking and political expression, which are described and discussed in the book. Other topics are the impact of globalization on work and economy, global environmental issues such as climate change, political movements which put “nationalism first”, change of youth`s values and the significance of body, gender and beauty. The book highlights the challenges of young people in modern life, as well as the way in which they express themselves and engage in society – in culture, politics, work and social life.

Youth and Globalization: Changing Trajectories of Culture and Politics

Cultures, Transitions, and Generations: The Case for a New Youth Studies

Introduction: Ibero-American Youth in the Twenty-First Century

Youth Studies
Youth Culture
Globalization
Lifeworld of Young People
Youth Cultures Worldwide
Global Research on Youth Cultures
Developments Across Cultures
Digital Youth Cultures
Postmigrant Generation
Intergenerational Justice
Youth in the Anthropocene
Transformation of Youth in Europe
Youth Cultures in China
Youth Cultures in the 21st Century
Cultures of Australian Youth
Adolescence and Migration
Children’s Economic Engagement

Table of contents (18 chapters)

Front matter, youth cultures, lifeworlds and globalisation—an introduction.

Hannes Krall, Gerald Knapp

Youth and Globalisation

The north american notion of youth: creating a transformative and critical youth pedagogy for leadership.

Shirley R. Steinberg

Social Transformation of Youth and Youth Cultures in Europe: Trends, Theories and the Relevance of Youth Cultural Scenes

Gerald Knapp, Natalia Waechter

Adolescence and Migration: On the Importance of Orders of Belonging

Britta Hoffarth, Paul Mecheril

The Nature of Youth. Or: On the Assumed Disappearance of Youth in the Present Society

Michael Winkler

Lifeworlds and Political Participation

Lifeworlds and cultures of australian youth in a globalised world.

Anita Harris, Sherene Idriss

Globalising Local Voices: Youth Cultures and Participation in Democratic Processes in Uganda

Janestic Mwende Twikirize, Laban Musinguzi Kashaija, Stanley Wobusobozi, Harriet Gimbo

Youth in the Anthropocene: Questions of Intergenerational Justice and Learning in a More-Than-Human World

Reingard Spannring

Youth Cultures, Right-Wing Extremism and Violence

Hannes Krall

Identity and Cultural Diversity

Research on chinese youth’s values in the new era.

Yuhang Wang, Hang Yu

Opening up Localities to the Wider World and the Postmigrant Generation: New Forms of Resistance and Self-Assertion

Anita Rotter, Erol Yildiz

Body, Gender and Beauty: Modified Bodies Between Youth Culture Designs, Constructed Identity Models and Coping Strategies

Julia Ganterer

Youth and Interculturality in Vienna: Gaming Intervention in Intercultural Contexts—Two Project Cases

Gerit Götzenbrucker, Vera Schwarz, Fares Kayali

Digitalisation, Economy and Work

“glocalized” digital youth cultures.

Natalia Waechter

Consumption, Middle Class and Youth

Dieter Bögenhold, Yorga Permana, Farah Naz, Ksenija Popović

Editors and Affiliations

Gerald Knapp, Hannes Krall

About the editors

Ao. Univ. Prof. i.R. Mag. Dr. Gerald Knapp, Institute of Educational Science and Research (IFEB), Alpen-Adria University of Klagenfurt, he was the founder and head of department for Social Pedagogy and Former President of the Carinthian network against poverty and exclusion. His research focuses on international youth and youth culture, poverty and inequality research and critical social pedagogy studies.

Ao. Univ. Prof. MMag. Dr. Hannes Krall is working at the Institute of Educational Sciences and Research (IfEB), Alpen-Adria-University of Klagenfurt. His research focuses on violence and trauma of children and young people, counselling, psychotherapy and supervision. He is Trainer for supervision at the Austrian Society of Groupdynamics and Grouptherapy (ÖAGG) and Lecturer for psychodrama at the University of Innsbruck and the Sigmund Freud University in Vienna. He is Chair of the FEPTO Research Committee and receiver of an “Excellence Award”.

Bibliographic Information

Book Title : Youth Cultures in a Globalized World

Book Subtitle : Developments, Analyses and Perspectives

Editors : Gerald Knapp, Hannes Krall

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65177-0

Publisher : Springer Cham

eBook Packages : Education , Education (R0)

Copyright Information : The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021

Hardcover ISBN : 978-3-030-65176-3 Published: 07 March 2021

Softcover ISBN : 978-3-030-65179-4 Published: 08 March 2022

eBook ISBN : 978-3-030-65177-0 Published: 06 March 2021

Edition Number : 1

Number of Pages : X, 290

Number of Illustrations : 4 b/w illustrations, 17 illustrations in colour

Topics : International and Comparative Education , Youth Culture , Sociology of Family, Youth and Aging , Sociology of Education

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COMMENTS

Cultures, Transitions, and Generations: The Case for a New Youth Studies
Abstract. Youth studies is made up of many perspectives. While built around a sociological core, it is interdisciplinary. It draws contributions from geography, history, anthropology, education, cultural and media studies, and even critical strands of adolescent psychology and economics. Its topics range widely from the criminological study of ...
Youth Culture and Social Change
John Street, Peter Webb, Matthew Worley. Provides new perspectives on why young people rebel, revolt and riot. Focuses on the specific role played by forms of youth culture in acts of disobedience and deviancy. Examines a wide range of case studies, from the private spaces of the teenage bedroom to the public streets of riot-torn Bristol.
Youth and Media Culture
In its early development, media education tended to position schools and teachers as the defenders of traditional culture and impressionable youths. Early relationships among youths, media cultures, and education were framed around a reactionary stance that implored educators to protect youth from the media. F.
'Speaking of Youth Culture': A Critical Analysis of Contemporary Youth
Youth, identity and the Internet, In A Bennett & K Kahn-Harris (eds), After Subculture: Critical Studies in Contemporary Youth Culture, Basingstoke: Palgrave (162-172). Google Scholar Bennett A (2005) In defence of neo-tribes: A response to Blackman and Hesmondhalgh, Journal of Youth Studies, 8 (2): 255-259.
(PDF) A Study of Popular Culture and its Impact on Youth's Cultural
The current study examines the growth and development of a new culture in society based on experience and perception that strengthens the youth group's identity. The methodology used in the ...
The Oxford Handbook of the History of Youth Culture
Taking a global approach and beginning in early modern Europe, the essays in the Oxford Handbook of the History of Youth Culture provide broadly contextualized case studies of the ways in which the meanings and expressions of both "youth" and "culture" have evolved through time and space. The authors show that youth culture has been ...
A case study examining the influence of youth culture and college
A case study examining the influence of youth culture and college experience on student persistence among underserved African- American students, 2016. Author . Okoli, Sonya S. Decade . 2010-2019. Abstract
Youth Cultures
Youth Cultures offers a comprehensive outline of youth cultural studies in the twenty-first century, with reference to a range of new research case studies. Featuring both well known and emerging scholars from the UK, the US and mainland Europe, the book addresses core theoretical and methodological developments before going on to examine key substantive themes in the study of young people's ...
Youth Cultures: Scenes, Subcultures and Tribes
Youth Cultures offers a comprehensive outline of youth cultural studies in the twenty-first century, with reference to a range of new research case studies. Featuring both well known and emerging scholars from the UK, the US and mainland Europe, the book addresses core theoretical and methodological developments before going on to examine key substantive themes in the study of young people's ...
Full article: The role of music in adolescent development: much more
For instance, Fitchen (Citation 1931) presented a case study on the music development of a child. Overall, as ... These musical subcultures develop a youth culture identity and provide informational and ... developmental correlates of music can be situated within an integrative roadmap. Second, there is a flagrant lack of cultural studies ...
Impact of social media on Youth: Comprehensive Analysis
The positive impact of social media on youth is evident in enhanced. communication and connectivity, fostering a sense of community and belonging. Social media. platforms provide a wealth of ...
PDF Pop-Music as а Case-Study of Youth Culture
On the basis of own researches and the secondary analysis of results of sociological polls of other scientists the author analyzes a place and a role of popular music in youth subcultural communities. The youth culture in this case acts as the system of values, installations, ways of behavior and vital styles of a certain group differing from ...
Youth Culture
A thoughtful collection of essays that examine the benefits and challenges of doing ethnographic fieldwork with children and youth. Bucholtz, Mary. 2002. Youth and cultural practice. Annual Review of Anthropology 31:525-552. This review article offers in-depth coverage of about three decades of youth culture studies.
PDF 'Speaking of Youth Culture': A Critical Analysis of ...
Youth cultural studies in context Although the phenomenon of youth culture has attracted the most widespread attention, academically and otherwise, during the period of ... Indeed, it is very often the case that in much of the formative work on youth culture, so-called youth subculturalists appear to have no life outside the one that is created ...
PDF What Works in Youth Participation: Case Studies from Around the World
where she teaches courses on the sociology of childhood and youth and on inter-cultural communication. International Youth Foundation® The International Youth Foundation (IYF) was established in 1990 to bring worldwide resources and attention to the many effective local efforts that are transforming young lives across the globe.
Youth culture: a case study
In this chapter, the author draws attention to even more specific cultural formations, built out of neighbourhood and school contexts, as well as class, gender and ethnic relations. Soccer is the province of migrant groups, especially the Greeks, and the sporting activities are not much integrated, thus reinforcing differences of ethnic culture ...
Youth Culture and Media Case Study
Youth Culture is the way adolescents live and the norms, values and practices they share. In this case study, I will explain the growth of youth culture during ...
Youth Cultures Scenes, Subcultures and Tribes
Youth Cultures offers a comprehensive outline of youth cultural studies in the twenty-first century, with reference to a range of new research case studies. Featuring both well known and emerging scholars from the UK, the US and mainland Europe, the book addresses core theoretical and methodological developments before going on to examine key substantive themes in the study of young people's ...
Societies
Special Issue Information. Dear Colleagues, The study of youth cultures and of youth subcultures has a long and articulated tradition in social sciences. The concepts of "youth cultures" and "subcultures" date back to the mid-1940s, in the wake of the way opened by the Chicago School two decades before—but a lot of studies conducted ...
Youth Cultures, Lifeworlds and Globalisation—An Introduction
Lifeworlds are shaped, on the one hand, by globalisation and digitalisation. On the other hand, as a cultural productive force, young people themselves act upon processes of globalisation and digitalisation. They are an active part in this globalised world, in which they create their ideas of identity and self-representation, use multiple forms ...
Youth‐Subcultural Studies: Sociological Traditions and Core Concepts
The study of youth subcultures has rich histories in the USA and UK, yet has remained a marginal subfield within cultural sociology. In this article, I begin by reviewing the significance of the Chicago school, strain theory, Birmingham school and post-subcultural studies traditions of youth-cultural and youth-subcultural research.
Demographic and mental health profile of youth in a gender service: An
Community-based studies, for example, townships and rural communities, may provide far more representative data on rates and profile of transgender youth in South African and African contexts. While this study established that a significant sample of the transgender youth were coloured (15%) or black (13%) population, overall numbers were very low.
Youth Cultures in a Globalized World
About this book. This book examines the relation between the phenomenon of globalization, changes in the lifeworld of young people and the development of specific youth cultures. It explores the social, political, economic and cultural impact of globalization on young people. Growing diversity in their lifeworlds, technological development ...

Article contents

Introduction

Teen Screens

Youth as a Distinct Life Stage

Early Mass Media and Youth Audiences

Youth Markets and Media Panics

The Media as Learning Portal

Public Service Announcements

Entertainment Education

Culture Jamming

Media Education and Direct Interventions in Youth Learning

Literacy and Production

Contemporary Issues in Youth Media Culture and Education

Issue 1: Surveillance, Branding, and the Production of Youth

Issue 2—Creative Media and Youth Producing Politics

Issue 3—Youth, Media Learning, and Media Education

Concluding Thoughts

Acknowledgments

Further Reading

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Youth Culture by Shalini Shankar LAST REVIEWED: 28 May 2013 LAST MODIFIED: 28 May 2013 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199766567-0081

Youth Cultures Scenes, Subcultures and Tribes

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Demographic and mental health profile of youth in a gender service: An African case series

Eugene L. Davids

Conclusions

Contribution

Introduction

Research methods and design

Participants

Data collection methods and analysis

Ethical considerations

Demographic findings

Sexual orientation

Mental health profile

Demographic profile

Study limitations

Acknowledgements

Competing interests

Authors’ contributions

Data availability

Funding Statement

Youth Cultures in a Globalized World

Institute of Educational Sciences and Research (IfEB), Alpen-Adria-University, Klagenfurt, Austria

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Youth and Globalization: Changing Trajectories of Culture and Politics

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