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Resumo

Research approaches to 'youth' and 'adolescence' in many disciplines have been shaped by the western construction of adolescence as a period of inevitable 'Storm and Stress', although researchers in anthropology and cultural studies have questioned the value of this model. British research on youth cultures and subcultures during the 1970s presented a critique of dominant representations of (particular groups of) young people as 'troubled' or 'troubling'. The 1980s saw a decline in this work due in part to the rise of the New Right, postmodern critiques of ethnographic research and cuts in social science research funding, especially for radical qualitative studies. The 1990s saw something of a resurgence of radical youth research, and a transformed cultural studies approach remains central to this endeavour. The 1990s also brought the construction of a 'new Europe' following the demise of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. At the turn of the century, youth research began to engage with theories of globalization and the notion of global youth culture(s). This article discusses the importance of maintaining a critical perspective on these questions, and the possibility of a fruitful debate between globalization theory and youth cultural research. Examples from recent youth studies are considered as possible means of developing a continued critique of the 'youth as trouble' paradigm in the context of an engagement with globalization theory.

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