This article revisits the central impulse behind early advocacy for ethnographic approaches to hip hop--that critics should try as much as possible to limit their own certainties around what hip hop can and might mean. While ethnographic approaches can engender the kinds of personal dislocations that allow for this negotiation, they do not…

In this paper, I trace three traditions and bodies of work: The Chicago School of Sociology, the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies and the New Sociology of Education. Each of these traditions evolved in distinct though overlapping ways. Taken together, they offer a productive set of resources for thinking through the complexities of popular…

Background/Context: As the economy grows ever more tight, the school (K-16) is increasingly important in relation to life choices and outcomes, and researchers who focus on youth culture, often in and out of school contexts, can no longer afford to ignore such traditional educational institutions. If school credentials do not "guarantee" social…

Examined how two urban teens used key popular texts to construct a sense of place by mobilizing the texts in very specific ways (finding specific thematic links between and across them and using them to index their relationships with family in this city and "down South"). Highlights the complex, emergent, and "messy"…

Discusses Henry Giroux's, Alan Block's, and John Devine's differing viewpoints on how cultural incorporation and routinization of schooling undermine its capacity to address the needs of contemporary youth. They all maintain that schooling has become a site of symbolic and physical violence which students experience in multiple ways. The paper…

Looks at how young people use historical knowledge, gained from media sources, to deal with current situations. A group of young African Americans draw on behavioral examples from the film, "Panther," instead of school-based learning, to give them ways to deal with the Ku Klux Klan in their neighborhood. (DAJ)