102 open up questions about what counts as politics, and what political practices are
possible for young women at the present moment. In this exploration, Harris 2008 argues that contemporary young women’s use of media-technology
signifies a shift away from conventional civic and political spheres and into a virtual public sphere where young women often position themselves as neoliberal
consumer subjects, but where they can also develop new modes of political activism and subjectivity. As Harris 2008, p. 492 notes, “it is important to
recognise the ways that simply participating in online cultures and networking is a form of developing citizenship skills, regardless of any specific involvement in
political causes”. However, while this nascent literature gives insights into the new modes to which young people are turning to be civically engaged, Morozov 2011
argues, that we should not romanticize the role of the Internet as many young people are still mostl
y using it to watch pornography. In fact, the Internet “makes it harder, not easier to get people to care, if only because the alternatives to
political actions are so much more pleasant and risk free Morozov, 2011. pp. 74- 75”. To be certain, the use of such media, however social it may be, and despite
its potential to be a democratizing agent, is still practiced from the confines of an individual and private space, one that,
as Gibson 2000, p. 262 argues, “continues to pose a serious challenge to the project of building progressive social-democratic
movements, since historical experience indicates that genuinely oppositional practices must at some point connect with alternative social movements to become
politically effective”. Therefore, the political exploration of media use must be linked to actual, by which I mean non-digital, practices. This is something I will
attempt to do in the empirical chapters of this thesis.
3.5 Lessons relevant for this thesis
The literature concerning youth covers a vast array of topics and spans several disciplines. By reviewing and critiquing studies that focus on youth
identity construction, the effects of media culture on youth cognition and subjectivity, and youth civic and political participation, several useful lessons
emerge. Among these are, first, that descriptions of identitycultural construction need to avoid a neo-romantic emphasis on agency, and be situated within the
wider political-economic context within which identities are constructed. Without meaning to sound irreverent, the fact that young people actively construct their
103 identities by making use of available discourses is so well established that it
borders on sociological cliché, and offers few insights into young people’s awareness of their central roles as agents of social reproduction or social change.
Second, psychological and socio-cognitive inspired approaches to audience readership and effects need to also be situated within wider political-economic
contexts. The discourses presented to, and relentlessly pushed onto, young people by the omnipresent media consumer culture are not ideologically neutral. As I
have discussed in Chapters 1 and 2, they are the direct product of the neoliberal paradigm, and serve to spread and reify neoliberal hegemony. And third, an
exploration of young people’s politics and political use of media should, in addition to the investigation of the various political practices that young people
engage in, also explore young people’s political-economic knowledge and attempt to uncover the relationship between the two, if one exists.
One of the major reasons why culture is such an important terrain for young people is because it is one of the few ‘social facts’ that they have some
autonomous and relative control over. They do not get to pick which families, political, or economic systems they are born into, and in many instances, and for
the majority of their youth, they cannot even choose which schools to attend. While it is true that they do not have control over which culture they are born into
either, they do have a choice over which cultural forms to accept or reject regardless of the culture they were born into. Contemporary media-
communications technology has facilitated this choice for the majority of Western young people, giving them several options to use to combat the alienation incurred
by the on-going corporatization of their culture and geography. How far these hybrid, fluid, and fragmented cultural forms and corresponding identities serve as
explicit political tools with which to challenge societal oppression and work for social change, or are meaningful, but ultimately apolitical expressions aimed at
battling alienation, which do not threaten the perpetuation of oppressive ideologies and social structures, will be explored in this thesis.
104
Chapter Four Methodology
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So far in this thesis, I have described some of the key mechanisms and practices that constitute and maintain the contemporary neoliberal societies of the
UK and the US, focusing specifically on their implications for the socio-cultural environment young people inhabit. By combining a critical political-economic
analysis, derived from the Frankfurt and Birmingham Schools, and the works of Althusser and Bourdieu, with some of the presuppositions and insights from recent
developments in cognitive and social-psychology, I have suggested that the hegemony and durability of neoliberalism depends on the convergence of power
elite interests in addition to structural and socio-cognitive factors. I have noted, in particular, that contemporary UK and US young people are subject to an
omnipresent barrage of neoliberal discourses, which can, in theory, interpellate them in ways that can predispose them to enact discursive practices that reproduce
neoliberalism. However, I have also noted that the sociological and psychological literature on identity construction and socio-cognition suggests that, while durable,
a person’s self-identity and associated cognitive schemata are not fixed and static, but are subject to change given exposure to different socio-environmental
experiences and reflective thought Barbosa, 2008; Bohner Dickel, 2011; Cerulo, 2010; DiMaggio, 1997; Kesebir et al., 2010; Maqsood et al., 2004. The
purpose of this thesis is not to offer yet another pessimistic and totalizing account about the hegemony of neoliberalism, nor to overemphasize the agentic and
creative manipulation of self-identities and cultural artefacts by young people. Rather, this thesis is concerned with a third way that offers an exploratory account
on how neoliberal discourses are influencing, or being contested by, contemporary urban UK and US young people who are entering adulthood, and who will have to
deal with the more negative consequences of ongoing neoliberal policies and practices.
In this chapter, I will synthesize the lessons derived from the approaches discussed in the previous chapters, and explain how they have informed my
methodological approach. The chapter is divided into three main segments. The first segment deals with the overall research framework, and explains my
105 ontological position, political stance, and approach to designing the research. The
second segment deals with the process of fieldwork, including my choice of research sites, how I negotiated access and entry, how I selected participants, my
relationships with them, the interview process, and ethical considerations. The third segment discusses the process of data analysis and interpretation.
4.1 Methodological Orientations: Critical This and That
