YOUNG

This study analyses the specificities of youth identity construction in Brazil in the context of global transformations and the particularities of the Brazilian model of development. Poor urban Brazilian youngsters’ demands to consume, as a ‘mode of inclusion’ in society, achieve short-term gains that narrow down prospective visions of the self. A ‘logic of survival’ hypothesis is proposed to account for the process of identity construction whereby encapsulated and rigid, rather than hybridized and creative, identities are constituted. The hypothesis is illustrated with a discussion of the cases of the drug dealer, the religious fanatic and the labourer. New cultural forms of consumer culture also convey claims for recognition and justice, shown by the musical expressions coming from the peripheries of big cities. It remains to be seen whether musical and artistic expressions, as possible factors that can enhance self-respect and group solidarity among poor youth, will not be consumed just as a new item of the culture industry.

The use of the term ‘whore’ is commonly directed at young women, and has, for this reason, been widely debated in the Swedish media and elsewhere. In the article, I focus on Latina girls’ experiences of being called ‘whores’ in Sweden. Individual interviews and focus group discussions were used for generation of data. Their narratives are analysed from a perspective that highlights how gender and ethnicity intersect in this highly sexualized word. In my analysis, I explore the diverse meanings of the term ‘whore’, and how discursive categories such as ‘immigrants’ and ‘Swedes’ are elaborated. The study suggests that meanings of the term ‘whore’ shift within a multiplicity of relationships and contexts and might, among other things, be associated with toughness. In conclusion, while women of diverse backgrounds are called ‘whores’, the connotations of the term depend on how this sexualized issue interacts with local constructions of ethnicity and femininity. These different constructions also shape the girls’ possibilities of negotiating their subject positions.

The article has a double aim. First, to study the relation between education, schooling and the construction of identity as it is played out in everyday life and school among young girls in secondary schools in Eritrea, Nepal and Denmark; second, to explore challenges and opportunities for an ethnographic comparison of schooling cutting across cultures and contexts. Inspired by contributions on globalization and education the article focuses on the consequence and implications of schooling. With the point of departure in girls’ narratives, individual responses and resistance to national projects on education and the making of future citizens are explored.

The article presents the comparative results of research on 16-17 year-old Estonian adolescents’ and 9-12 year-old children’s creative thinking in connection with their social environment. Creative thinking has been defined through three components: fluency of thought, originality and flexibility of thinking. The aim of the empirical research on which this article is based was, firstly, to find out whether there is a connection between the child’s creative thinking and the parents’ profession, the family’s economic status and the child’s place of residence; and, secondly, to carry out a comparative analysis of two age groups, 9-12, and 16-17, regarding manifestations of creativity in connection with the factors described above. The results of the study demonstrate that the creative thinking of the 16-17 year-old adolescents is higher in the group where one or both parents have university education, work as top executives or specialists, where the families cope well economically and live in the capital. The creative thinking of the 9-12 year-old children is higher in the group where the mothers have a higher education and where they live in a rural area. Even though the correlation between social factors and the creative thinking of the adolescents treated in the study occurs only at the older age level, it is likely that the influence of cognitive and personality components of the child’s creativity begins at a much earlier age.

The aim of this article is to contribute to the rethinking of the notion of subcultural capital as coined by Sarah Thornton. Drawing on Bourdieu, I argue that Thornton’s original work on the notion is flawed by a reluctance to devote analytical attention to the social position and other socio-structural variables of the participants in the subculture. With my fieldwork among underprivileged young men of non-Danish ethnic origin as the point of departure, I reason that a sociological grasp on hierarchical differentiation and intersections between different socio-structural variables is necessary to explain and understand subcultures and subcultural capital adequately. The relation between the subculture and its surroundings is best understood by focusing on what is appreciated within the subculture (i.e. subculture capital) and at the same time analytically situating the subculture in terms of class, gender, ethnicity and ‘race’.