Scene Thinking

In ‘Postmodernism’, Fredric Jameson famously posited a ‘new (and hypothetical) cultural form’ he called ‘cognitive mapping’ (1991, p. 51). Like signs guiding us through ‘total spaces’, such as airports, university campuses and luxury hotels (p. 39), cognitive mapping would allow individual and collective subjects to feel their way through the increasingly opaque and complex ‘spaces’ of postmodern societies. It perhaps goes without saying that one only needs way finding aids when in unfamiliar territory, where the path is not self-evident; one only needs a map, that is to say, when lost.

Theories and concepts are also a kind of map. They mark the contours of a domain, identifying its constituent parts and their relationships. They give us an idea of what to expect, and we use them to orient our way through the world of immediate social experience. They not only describe the paths we take but also help us figure out where it is we want to go. But it seems as though our maps have become less useful, less reliable, and less relevant today.

On the one hand, turn after turn within social and cultural theory has left many of us incredulous towards formal, grand theories. The postmodern critique was necessary, calling attention to the will to power lurking within theoretical paradigms that once seemed settled – and to the exclusions inherent in declaring something settled. But in its extreme forms postmodernism's standpoint epistemologies left us suspicious of truth claims attempting to transcend personal and idiosyncratic experiences of the world, threatening to delegitimize any conceptual maps whatsoever.

On the other hand, many of the assumptions about the social world undergirding our inherited concepts need to be re-examined. Chief among these is the tidy identification of ‘cultures’ and ‘societies’ with nation-states. Such assumptions are increasingly untenable in the era of robust globalization: the processes that constitute ‘local’ phenomena are almost always transnational, as communication systems and commodity chains entangle us with global others in countless ways. Meanwhile, boundaries between domains of inquiry are increasingly porous. As a consequence, it now seems obvious and unavoidable that the cultural is the social is the political is the economic, and so on.

Thus, the contemporary situation is not merely postmodern but also in important respects ‘post-society’. Nonetheless, most of us still have some ambition to say things about the conditions under which we live. As meaning-making animals, we could hardly do otherwise. Indeed, risking performative contradiction, we rarely hesitate to do so in everyday life, reaching for familiar, ready-to-hand concepts to describe or explain some feature of our experience. But, while we are surrounded by the remains of premodern philosophy and modern social science, the contexts in which they were originally embedded, and from which they drew their logic, are no longer our context. Thus, the notions we intuitively deploy may not mean what we think they mean.

It is in this context that we see an ongoing need to interrogate our old concepts, refining them when possible and developing new ones when they are found lacking. The cultural studies tradition – theoretically and methodologically catholic, open to both imaginative theorizing and empirical testing – is particularly well positioned to generate new ways of characterizing our collective situation. It is in this spirit that we have assembled this special issue on scenes. It has three main objectives. The first is to collect empirical case studies of a variety of cultural scenes, showcasing the concept's utility across a range of domains of social life. Second, we want to advance an analytical stance we call ‘scene thinking’. In each of the cases explored by our contributors, naming a group or cluster of activity a scene says something about how these concrete practices and spaces disclose the social's inherent relationality. Third and finally, we hope that this revisiting and interrogation of scene models a theoretical practice that can rise to the challenge of social inquiry and cultural analysis in these times.

The scene perspective

Although Blum (2003) has read the scene concept all the way back to antiquity, arguing that Socrates’ circle of Athenian dilettantes was the ‘original urban scene’ (p. 176), a more manageable genealogy would arguably begin with the Chicago tradition of sociology. For Park (1925, p. 1), like the Socrates of The Republic, the city was a complex, structured and structuring apparatus: ‘The city is not, in other words, merely a physical mechanism and an artificial construction. It is involved in the vital processes of the people who compose it; it is a product of nature, and particularly of human nature’. It is in this sense that we make the urban environment, and it in turn makes us. Perhaps more importantly, the Chicago urbanists worked to disaggregate the city through careful field studies that acknowledged the distinct social and cultural character of (classed and racialized) neighbourhoods and communities.

Later developments in American sociology were also influential. Goffman's (1959) dramaturgical theory points to scenes’ theatrical or performative character. Scenes are not only places to do certain kinds of activity, but places to be seen doing them by significant others. Drawing inspiration from the youth slang of the 1960s to describe ‘what one is “into”’, Irwin (1977, p. 18) not only used the term explicitly but definitively pushed it into the sociology of leisure.

Without discounting the importance of these early developments, the concept as it is used most frequently today undoubtedly owes its currency to its adoption within the field of popular music studies. In particular, in a 1991 issue of this journal, Will Straw published the essay, ‘Systems of Articulation, Logics of Change: Scenes and Communities in Popular Music’, which advanced a Bourdieusian theory of musical scenes as a social space of circulation. Three years later, Barry Shank (1994) published his work on the history of the Austin, Texas, music scene as Dissonant Identities. Although they were not the first scholars to take up the ordinary-language concept of scene, Shank and Straw popularized it as a way of talking about the roles of place, participation and circulation in the production of popular music. While not quite a paradigm or school, some have nonetheless identified this as a ‘scenes perspective’ (Bennett 2004), and Anahid Kassabian named scene one of popular music studies’ distinctive theoretical concepts (cited Hesmondhalgh 2005).

Rather than focusing on aesthetic or cultural criticism of musical texts, the emergent scene perspective drew attention to the field of social relations in which music circulated. Thus, a bar or club was as important as a record label, and audience members were as important as musicians, for they all made the scene together. As Pepper Glass puts it, ‘members, through their everyday interactions, collectively produce these settings’. ‘Doing scene’ is thus both extraordinarily creative and an ordinary, practical accomplishment (2012, p. 696).

From popular music studies, scene was quickly picked up by other scholars interested more generally in youth cultures. Through this work, scene became one of a number of concepts competing to replace the Birmingham School's subcultural theory within the ‘post-subcultures’ debates of the late 1990s and early 2000s (see Muggleton and Weinzierl 2003, Bennett and Kahn-Harris 2004, Bennett 2011). In a constellation with concepts like subculture, club culture (Thornton 1996, Redhead 1997), Bund (Hetherington 1998), and (neo-)tribe (Maffesoli 1996, Bennett 1999), it became much easier to think of scenes as a kind of social group and not only the place where one hangs out. Around the same time, Straw (2001, 2004) returned to the concept, gradually expanding it to embrace a greater variety of cultural activities unfolding in urban environments. This expansion has enabled its transition from a simple, ready-to-hand descriptor for a kind of neighbourhood or clique to a complex theoretical object, referring equally to micro-level interactions and global cultural flows. Interestingly, the term seems agnostic to the nature of its subjects, applying equally to collections of people, spaces, practices, and modes of participation, yet people are able to use it intuitively:

In everyday life we speak regularly about scenes, and it is in such ways that the scene first appears to and for us. Then we ask, what are we talking about when we address the world in these ways, is there a persistence underlying this diversity? (Blum 2003, p. 165)

Not surprisingly, we contend that there is indeed a real persistence underlying diverse uses of scene in both everyday discourse and academic theorizing.

Summarizing and synthesizing some of their common features, we note that scenes are a basic part of the social imaginary of urban life. They are typically understood as loosely bounded social worlds oriented to forms of cultural expression. They provide systems of identification and connection, while simultaneously inviting acts of novelty, invention and innovation. Scenes are set within the fabric of everyday life but also function as an imagined alternative to the ordinary, work-a-day world. They can be utopian in moments, especially when scenes allow otherwise ignored or disappeared communities and subjects to find a home, but problems of institutionalization and coordination often push back against utopian aspirations. A scene may endure in one form or another for many years or it might quickly give way to the next big thing or hip neighbourhood. Sensitive to the particularity of immediate geographical and institutional settings, it nonetheless recognizes that locally enacted practices may be oriented to trans-local or virtual collectivities (Bennett and Peterson 2004). The concept is thus supple enough to capture both the continuity and the constant transformation that characterize the social worlds formed around culture. It prioritizes neither production nor consumption, recognizing that both ‘moments’ are constituted relationally by participation and circulation. Finally, scene does not imply a restrictive model; the classification of a phenomenon as a scene is a starting point and not an ending point for investigation. For these reasons, we contend that scene can do important work for the cultural analyst.

Thinking through scenes

Scene's own ambiguities draw our attention to the dual nature of cultural life: It appears ephemeral, expansive, and elusive, yet it ‘comes off’ through routine – even dull – practices that are somehow greater than the sum of their parts. Ricoeur's (1967) aphorism that the symbol gives rise to thought is instructive here. For observers as much as participants, scenes have become part of the taken-for-granted social reality of life in the city. Thus, the idea of the scene – the scene as symbol of a particular mode of effervescent sociability and as a mutually oriented-to object of social action – leads us to new ways of thinking about cultural activity. We argue that such ‘scene thinking’ can map (always incompletely, to be sure) how social and cultural life are lived in space, in time and in relation with others whose participation as consociates in the scene (Schutz 1967) makes them always already significant.

This is more than a question of terminology. Thinking in terms of scenes enables us to pick out objects of study from the on-going flow of everyday life and to sense the larger structures of power, temporality and hope that gird our lives. Scenes ‘emerge from the excesses of sociability that surround the pursuit of interests’ (Straw 2004, p. 412). In this way, they are experiential and productive of what Ricoeur would call a ‘surplus of meaning’, an excess through which it becomes possible to chart the social imaginaries of a specific time and place.

Scene thinking seems to entail a view of the sociocultural domain as made up of agents in relationship around shared practices of meaning-, place- and community-making. Our challenge is to see this domain as members do, beginning from the lived experience of a complex but coherent whole, and understanding how that whole comes into being. It is in this sense that this concept pushes us to take a ‘scenic view’: tracing the pathways and connections feeding into cultural activity in its myriad forms in order to develop a genealogy of the actors, spaces, material objects, discursive and tacit knowledges, and affects that give shape and character to our asymmetrical worlds.

Scene thinking and network talk

It is perhaps clear from the foregoing that what we have in mind is no longer simply a catch-all label for vaguely defined clusters of cultural activity. We have greater designs on scene. In advancing it as a key concept for social research and cultural analysis, we are not asking that researchers and others abandon their research sites for a city's bohemian enclaves. Rather, we are advocating an analytical stance that takes the culturally constituted world of social experience as a scene.

It may be instructive to compare scene thinking with another concept that, on the surface, appears to do similar things. In recent years, another way of describing dispersed and yet apparently organized and structured chains of action has become ubiquitous and even commonsensical: We call it ‘network talk’. This discursive formation comprises not only explicit network approaches among academic theorists – such as the Actor-Network Theory (ANT) of Latour, Callon, Law and others, Castells's network society thesis or the methodological innovations of social network analysis – but also looser, more metaphorical uses of network among laypeople. Almost 20 years of Internet hype have rendered networks a commonsense way of thinking about social relationships. Indeed, networks have become a metonymy for the social itself.

But where network talk is certainly useful for describing the coordination of diverse actors and the production of intended and unintended consequences through complexly mediated political-economic processes, it is freighted with cyberutopian ideologies of the ‘transcendence’ and ‘substitution’ of space (Graham 1998). Indeed, in its cruder forms, network talk often reduces to technological determinism. These accounts, moreover, seem to flatter the scholastic habitus as much as the transhumanist imagination, promising that pure thought can conquer, abolish, or otherwise overcome the constraints of ‘meatspace’. As a result, network talk has had little to say about the embodied, intentional and affective dimensions of human life. What we mean by this in short is that network talk lacks a robust conception of action:

ANT is interested in the celebration of human agency in terms of its entanglement with technology, and not any other dimensions of human agency – all this, in spite of the fact that from other perspectives networks are at most the infrastructure of human action, not its dynamic content. (Couldry 2008, p. 101)

Pushing back against network talk's dominance is entirely in keeping with the humanist core that distinguishes cultural studies as a mode of analysis. Rather than stopping once we have described how actants are enrolled into a network, we would rather ask how individual and collective human agents invest these networks with meaning and use them to accomplish practically constituted goals.

Like networks, scenes enable, mediate and constrain action, emphasize the relationality of their members, and have an emergent, decentralized order. But the latter concept also avoids many of the limitations of network approaches. The language of networks reduces the meaningful and value-laden world to a jumble of nodes and links in a featureless, mathematical space. Where network talk captures the linear processes of transmission through its architecture, scenes evokes the totality of circulation and exchange of cultural energies. Where networks are structured by more or less central nodes, scenes may also include passing memberships and ephemeral connections. Where networks promise to transcend space, scenes invest spaces with meaning, anchoring social and cultural practices in particular places.

The cultural phenomena we describe as scenes could also be diagrammed as networks, but in doing so, important features of those phenomena – the things that make them specifically cultural – drop out of view. We lose the subjective viewpoints of members and how they use a whole array of cultural practices actively to produce and maintain social structures. Conversely, attempts to add texture, context and substance back into networks will arguably make them more like places or communities – more like scenes. Blum (2003, p. 165) suggests that scenes are places ‘that contribute to making the city itself a place’, and people's investments of time and emotional labour in their networks provide a way of inhabiting the social. Studying the ‘nodes’ that produce a surplus of creative energy and the pathways that connect scenes to the environments we inhabit, we move away from the totalizing discourse of network talk, towards a generative sociology of action.

Scene as a sensitizing concept

This is asking a lot of a humble concept like scene. Is it up to the task? In a trenchant article reviewing several theorizations of youth cultures and popular music, Hesmondhalgh (2005, pp. 28–29) critiques scene as ‘ambiguous’ and ‘downright confusing’. He acknowledges that ambiguity is typically numbered among the concept's strengths, but concludes that ‘the term has been used for too long in too many different and imprecise ways […] to be sure that it can register the ambivalences that Straw hopes it will’ (p. 30).

If one suggested that it names a class of objects that are simply ‘out there’ in the world, then Hesmondhalgh has a point: it is impossible to operationalize something with such an underdetermined conceptual definition. We, however, are not making that suggestion. Indeed, we believe Hesmondhalgh's criticism is based on a category mistake, treating an epistemological category as if it had ontological substance in a straightforward, realist sense. But, as Blum (2003, p. 165) suggests, scene is given as an object of discourse, a way of describing and addressing ourselves to certain characteristics of the world of everyday social experience. That is to say, scene has always been better understood as a ‘sensitizing concept’, one that enables researchers (and others) to be responsive to the world, to pick out ‘the proliferating co-presence of varied textual/cultural forms in all their mobility and mutability’ (Straw 2010, p. 26), without falling prey to the belief that our concepts are ontologically equivalent to things in themselves.

We make the distinction between definitive and sensitizing concepts with reference to the work of Blumer (1954). Blumer noted a fundamental problem in social theory: its concepts. Mainstream sociologists of his day mostly believed that their concepts represented social facts. However, these supposed facts failed to reliably and validly denote the things of the empirical world:

[Social-scientific concepts] do not discriminate cleanly their empirical instances. At best they allow only rough identification, and in what is so roughly identified they do not permit a determination of what is covered by the concept and what is not. Definitions which are provided to such terms are usually no clearer than the concepts which they seek to define. (p. 5)

Of course, this was not a new criticism, recapitulating as it did earlier debates over the nature of the cultural sciences and, especially, between ‘positivist’ and ‘interpretive’ traditions within them. But Blumer argued that his colleagues’ impulse to correct this by refining particular concepts and measuring them better was wrong-headed, because they were overlooking the epistemology of social-scientific concepts in general – namely that, they are sensitizing concepts.

Whereas definitive concepts, like those of the natural sciences or pure logic, ‘[refer] precisely to what is common to a class of objects, by the aid of a clear definition in terms of attributes or fixed benchmark’, sensitizing concepts only give ‘the user a general sense of reference and guidance in approaching empirical instances’ (Blumer 1954, p. 7). For example, it is very difficult to set out a clear, universally valid definition of social rules, but that does not mean that we do not know a rule when we see it – and cannot, with practice, get better at identifying them and saying something about how they work. Sensitizing concepts are less like rubrics or definitions, in other words, and more like models or exemplars. Keeping them in mind teaches us to think in particular ways, sensitizing us to certain problems.

All this is to say that scene does not name a thing, or even a class of things, but an orientation to things. The ‘scene perspective’ is literally a point of view, a way of seeing the world, and ‘scene thinking’ represents a decision to treat a set of individuals, institutions and practices as if they constitute a scene. Arguably, this is what members themselves do, sweeping discrete people, places, events and artefacts up into what comes to be called a scene. Focusing on the scene switches figure and ground, bringing taken-for-granted conditions of possibility to the fore. In the hands of different analysts, these might include spaces, organizations and infrastructures; affects, emotions and structures of feeling; or routes, networks and practices that make a particular scene part of the texture of a place. But to identify any or all of these as constitutive features of a scene sensitizes us to the ways they provide the setting for action.

Approaching scene in this way does more than simply add yet another concept to our theoretical toolbox. Rather, scene thinking ought to animate every stage of research: alerting researchers to possible sites of inquiry; helping us pose questions that bring into focus the unseen or overlooked in everyday life; and suggesting categories based on the meaning of circulation and flow, rather than what presents itself as permanent and thus somehow more significant. This is what Swedberg (2012), drawing on C.S. Peirce, refers to as ‘theorizing in the context of discovery’, where theorizing is an active practice that generates questions, suggests methods and analytical approaches, and drives further theory-building. Fully metabolizing the concept, we would produce – not studies of scenes or studies that use scene – but scene-based analyses, analyses sensitized to the on-going, relational constitution of culture. This bias towards research practice means that the best way to understand what we mean by scene thinking and scene-based analysis is to look at some examples of the concept at work.

How to read this issue

This is the part of an introduction, where we describe the issue's organization, explaining how each article will build on the one that came before to provide a conceptual trajectory through the issue. We have elected to order the contributions alphabetically by author and to provide a series of different pathways through them. Each of these ‘tours’, through the issue, is organized around a different set of comparisons and contrasts and a different set of key theoretical concerns.

There and back again

A first way to read these essays illustrates the expansion of scene as a concept, tracing its application across a growing range of research sites, starting with accounts of the cultural spaces most commonly recognized as scenes: Deveau on alternative comedy in Toronto's Queen West neighbourhood, Eichhorn on New York's downtown arts scene, or Darroch on artistic interventions in Detroit and Windsor. Participants in these scenes are or were likely to see the scene itself much as the researcher might, identifying the central role played by particular places and people.

These essays also exemplify the most common methodological approaches in the scenes literature, focusing on published accounts by journalists and participants. Contributions from Quader and Redden on the underground music scene in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and Drysdale on Sydney's vanishing drag king scene also describe familiar sorts of subcultural scenes. However, they are written in a more explicitly social-scientific voice and add new data sources drawn from interviews, participant-observation and focus groups.

Moving further afield, Silver and Clark challenge the exceptional nature of scenes by taking a scenic view of the amenities in literally every neighbourhood in the United States and Canada, Grimes's essay on the Playstation game franchise LittleBigPlanet interrogates the idea of space in relation to a ‘virtual’ scene, and Yoshimizu attempts to locate constitutive absences in a former red light district. These articles not only move us away from the more conventional scenes but also explore different ways of approaching them, from ‘big data’ to auto-ethnography.

Scene thinking has encouraged all these authors to trace connections that may be unseen to the people involved. This is true whether we are talking about artists using photocopiers in their local bodegas, video gamers creating their own custom levels in LittleBigPlanet, or the traces of the global sex trade left behind in a neighbourhood.

Across the macro–micro divide

A second route through this collection of essays is the question of scale. In the theoretical literature, it is noted that scene may equally refer to both ‘our favourite bar and the sum total of all global phenomena surrounding a subgenre of Heavy Metal music’ (Straw 2001, p. 248). Indeed, the ‘same’ scene may extend across several dimensions simultaneously. Describing it at any particular level invites a certain degree of structural comparison with the other levels at which the scene may operate. When one considers a popular music scene, such as the Bangladeshi rockers studied by Quader and Redden, for example, it is apparent that the local scene is often connected to regional, national and global scenes, whether through relationships of affiliation or distinction.

Like the larger scenes literature, the authors in this collection are operating at a range of levels. Despite this diversity of scope, scenes always remain their unit of analysis. Deveau and Drysdale examine single performance venues (Toronto, Ontario's Rivoli and the Sly Fox Hotel in the Newtown area of Sydney, Australia, respectively) and their relationships to a set of cultural practices (sketch comedy and drag kinging). Silver and Clark and Yoshimizu both look to neighbourhoods as the site of scenes, whereas Darroch and Quader and Redden describe whole cities as their hosts. Eichhorn concentrates on a tight cluster of neighbourhoods in New York City, but also looks at the ways that photocopiers enabled artistic and activist organizations to circulate beyond them. Finally, as Grimes shows, LittleBigPlanet uses a global, virtualized network of game consoles to connect private bedrooms and living rooms. Reading these articles, whether from the micro to the macro or vice versa, we can appreciate how cultural activity organized through scenes occupy both the smallest, most intimate spaces and the broadest, most public ones.

Maps in motion

Another significant feature of scene-based analyses is how scenes offer a means to study spaces and places that refuse more traditional ‘mapping’ techniques. Researching cultural life is often made far more difficult by the fact that the people and groups producing it are frustratingly nomadic. However, people and things ‘do not just move through (or around) the city’; sometimes, the people and places producing scenes ‘coalesce into momentary and temporary collectives’ (Boutros and Straw 2010, p. 11). These temporary collectives can be studied in and of themselves, or they can be understood as the residuum of culture's restless energies. How, then, does one map a social space that is continually re-inventing itself and re-drawing its own boundaries?

Contributors have each, perforce, addressed this challenge, using scene to explore the emergence of cultural activity in space and time. This may involve studying scenes which have moved from one neighbourhood to another, as in Deveau, or which have dissipated, as in Drysdale or Yoshimizu.

Brief snapshots – such as Silver and Clark's index of neighbourhood amenities, Eichhorn's archival research, or the qualitative fieldwork of Quader and Redden or Drysdale – can help us characterize scenes in a particular moment. Yet, scene-based analysis reminds us of the impermanence of the things we study: by the time we can identify a scene, it may have moved on, mutated into something else, or become far too mainstream for the tastes of its founding members.

Policing the culture

As Straw (2001, p. 248) notes, scene often connotes a sense of ‘cozy intimacy’, yet anyone who has participated in a scene knows they have their hierarchies and politics. Beyond personal grudges and feuds, there is the Bourdieusian struggle to impose one's own definitions of the field and its boundaries. Thus, a fourth thematic strand running through this issue is the question of power in scenes.

This is most obvious in Yoshimizu's treatment of Koganecho in Yokohama, Japan, where this brothel district was quite literally policed out of existence in a major raid and its subsequent Floridian re-invention as a creative hub. Despite efforts to erase the memory of Koganecho's migrant sex workers, traces remain in nearby shops and restaurants and in the memories of area residents. The question of who gets to define public space is important for Darroch as well. Competing scenes seek to claim the city of Detroit – on the one hand, as a crumbling wasteland for the urban explorers or, on the other hand, as a radical workshop for cultural entrepreneurs and artists.

Drysdale's informants seem quite attuned to the transformations that were dismantling the Sydney drag kinging scene. This involved them recognizing that spaces were being redefined around them. Conversely, Deveau explores how a moment in a scene's history – uniting a certain set of actors (the Kids in the Hall) in a certain place (the Rivoli) – can continue to function as a rhetorical source of legitimacy many years afterwards.

Grimes shows a more governmental side of these processes; the LittleBigPlanet network is privately controlled, and player conduct is regulated by its terms and conditions. But, just as importantly, the games’ publisher, Media Molecule, shapes player participation by provisioning virtual objects – all of which share their aesthetic and some of which are branded with media tie-ins – for players to construct their own environments.

These analyses powerfully remind us that, however familiar a scene is and no matter how stably ‘coalesced’ it seems, it is a social object defined by the discourses and practices of its members.

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In putting together this collection of essays, we were not simply looking for intriguing social activities that are generally recognizable as scenes. We were looking for case studies where scene thinking could add something new. Our contributors have used this sensitizing concept to orient themselves to their research objects in new ways, and we hope the results will push readers towards a similar revisiting of other concepts: to what do they sensitize us and where might they lead us?

Notes on Contributors

Benjamin Woo is Assistant Professor of communication studies in the School of Journalism and Communication at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. He was recently a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Calgary. His current research project examines creative labour and working conditions in the comic-book industry. Previous research examined the practical grounds of ‘nerd culture’ in an urban scene.

Jamie Rennie is a Doctoral candidate in Social Justice Education at OISE, University of Toronto. His research explores media and technology in Canadian education, including both formal and informal sites of teaching and learning. Jamie teaches Communication Studies in Canada, and writes about pop culture online. He is currently completing his dissertation, and watching some very good television shows.

Stuart R. Poyntz is an Associate Professor in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University. He is the lead editor of Phenomenology of Youth Cultures and Globalization (Routledge), co-author of Media Literacies: A Critical Introduction (Wiley-Blackwell), and has published widely in various journals, including, the Journal of Youth Studies, and the Review of Education, Pedagogy and Cultural Studies, as well as numerous edited collections.