Cultural Perspectives on Adolescence

SW848, Section 001

This course examines the concept of adolescence in historical, cultural, and political context. We begin with the "invention" of adolescence as a sociocultural category and explore shifting popular and professional constructions of adolescence throughout the 20th century. We will draw on classic and contemporary theoretical and ethnographic accounts of adolescence in exploring the multiple and contested meanings given to this "flexible" time and space between child and adulthood. We will pay particular attention to current preoccupations with the pathologies of adolescence, the ways in which understandings of troubled and troubling youth are culturally constructed, and the ways in which representations of pathology map onto those of gender, race, class, nation and sexuality. Finally, we will consider the social participation of young people themselves and the ways in which youth are making their own ways in the world both because and in spite of the forces defining and constraining them.

Course Codes