Text of a talk given to Birkbeck College Department of Literature June 2016

Introduction: the youth question then and now

In this talk I am going to be taking a line of thought for a walk in two directions at once. I will stepping back from the present, to   retrace an argument  about the youth question which I first articulated in the late 1960’s and 70’s  at a time when Mods,Rockers  and Skinheads, Beats and Hippies were highly visible signs  of a deeper  shift in the tectonic plates of the British class  system.… Read the rest

…  since Neolithic times  we have been marking down representations on cave walls, in the dirt, on parchment, trees, lunchplates, napkins, even on our own  skin-all so we could remember  where we have been, where we want to be going, where we should be going. There is a deep impulse ingrained in us to take these directions, coordinates, declarations out of the mush of our minds  and actualize them in the real world.… Read the rest

In this talk, given to a number of  conferences and seminars in Germany, Sweden and the UK in  2005/6 I discuss a number of theoretical and methodological issues related to a research project on early  childhood memories of civilian bombing  in World War Two.

View the text here:  Born To Flying Glass

… Read the rest

This video is a short extract from a lecture ‘ Young heads,Old Shoulders’ given  to a conference of youth workers and educationalists in Hamburg.
It is included to illustrate some of the issues raised by translating issues from one national context and field of discourse  to another. This Anglo-German dialogue on the Youth question was pursued further in the context of a collaborative research project  looking at young people’s sense of place, and identity in London and Hamburg.… Read the rest

This video illustrates some of the innovative methods used in a research project which explored young people’s sense of place and identity  in two deprived neighbourhoods in London’s Docklands. The aim was to provide a  space of representation in which the young people felt free to express their fears and anxieties, whether through artwork, or the  stories they told about the everyday  incidents of their lives.… Read the rest

In the West, during the ‘heroic’ 19^th century   phase of nation and empire building ^‘youth’  was placed rhetorically and actually in the front ranks of violent confrontation. Young men were cast as the main protagonists of class war and civil war, not to mention the ‘war of generations’, the struggle of the forces of modernity against tradition. In the process young women were effectively sidelined.… Read the rest