Last update:
9 February 2010
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Discourse Constructions of Youth Identities
2003. viii, 343 pp.
Publishing status: Available
Hardbound
– In stock
978 90 272 5352 1 / EUR 120.00 978 1 58811 355 9 / USD 180.00
e-Book
– Available from e-book platforms
This volume sets out to foreground the issues of youth identity in the context of current sociolinguistic and discourse research on identity construction. Based on detailed empirical analyses, the twelve chapters offer examinations of how youth identities from late childhood up to early twenties are locally constructed in text and talk. The settings and types of social organization investigated range from private letters to graffiti, from peer group talk to video clips, from schoolyard to prison. Comparably, a wide range of languages is brought into focus, including Danish, German, Greek, Japanese, and Turkish. Drawing on various discourse analytic paradigms (e.g. Critical Discourse Analysis, Conversation Analysis), the contributions examine and question notions with currency in the field, such as young people's linguistic creativity and resistance to mainstream norms. At the same time, they demonstrate the embeddedness of constructions of youth identities in local activities and communities of practice where they interact with other social identities and factors, in particular gender and ethnicity.
Table of contents
“Discourse Constructions of Youth Identities is an important contribution not only to our understanding of 'youth' as a social category, but also to current explorations of discursive constructions of social categories in general. The papers are full of rich ethnographic detail and fine-grained analyses of language practices across a wide range of sites and forms of discursive production, set within a theoretical framework linking conversation analysis, discourse analysis and ethnography.”
Monica Heller, University of Toronto, Canada
“This volume is a needed and highly qualified international presentation of the studies, of youth language in (post-)modern societies. An excellent group of scholars offer a range of insights into some of the most intriguing questions of social uses of language by contemporary youth. The adolescents in particular offer very useful data, which illustrate how, through language use, variation and creativity, they (re)construct their social and cultural world. This opens up opportunities for documenting the continuously and rapidly changing social conditions of finding,
“Die Beiträge in 'Discourse Constructions of Youth Identities' leisten insofern einen wichtigen Beitrag zur Weiterentwicklung in der Jugend(sprach)forschung, weil sie eindrucksvoll die Konstruktion von ganz verschiedenen Identitäten zeigen. [...] Besonders positiv hervorzuheben ist auch die internationale Reichweite der Beiträge, weil dadurch Gemeinsamkeiten und Unterschiede der Identitätskonstruktion über die Ländergrenzen hinweg herausgestellt werden können. [...] Man kann insgesamt sagen, dass es den Herausgebern mit dieser Auswahl methodisch, analytisch, thematisch und situativ sehr verschiedener Beiträge gelungen ist, einen umfassenden Überblick über 'Discourse Construction of Youth Identities' zu Beginn des 21. Jahrhunderts zu geben.”
“I recommend this book to researchers who appreciate good ethnography, collecting rich data from multilingual, multicultural and mult-ethnic settings coupled with detailed analysis on the mirco-level combined with macro-lecel interpretation.”
“This is an excellent book. It is certainly one of the best contributions to the wider adolescence literature from scholars of language and communication. [...] probably the greatest contribution made by this volume is its sophisticated handling of identity throughout.”
“It serves as a valuable reader both for scholars of language and identity and for those interested in youth culture.”
Subject classification |
Linguistics