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

Research approaches to 'youth' and 'adolescence' in many disciplines have b een shaped by the western construction of adolescence as a period of inevit able '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 'tr oubling'. The 1980s saw a decline in this work due in part to the rise of t he New Right, postmodern critiques of ethnographic research and cuts in soc ial science research funding, especially for radical qualitative studies. T he 1990s saw something of a resurgence of radical youth research. and a tra nsformed cultural studies approach remains central to this endeavour. The 1 990s also brought the construction of a 'new Europe' following the demise o f 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 impor tance of maintaining a critical perspective on these questions, and the pos sibility of a fruitful debate between globalization theory and youth cultur al 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.