‘Fine for Poets, Anathema for Scientists’: Youth Culture and the Role of Metaphor in Youth Research

Abstract

Through the twentieth century there has been a vast program of empirical research into young people's lives. This work (partially summarised for example in Boss et al) developed from a range of disciplines including sociology, education, psychology, criminology, and cultural studies. It has been done by and for people working in professions like social work, teaching, youth work, and community work. It examined a range of aspects of young peoples lives from their family life, their peer-relations, and their experience of employment and training to their health, education, sexuality and their leisure pursuits. This research has a symbiotic relationship both with media representations of young people and with an extensive regime of state interventions that has sought to regulate young people's development, education, health, sexuality and leisure activities. One persistent feature of youth-related research has been a preoccupation with youth cultures'. Without suggesting that research on 'youth cultures' encompasses all youth-related research, it is still possible to see in this research (on youth cultures), important themes and assumptions which are found in other youth and educationrelated research. As I show here, research into so-called youth cultures' has its own history of successive theoretical paradigms operating in the variety of disciplinary projects. This genealogy of representations of youth has been well analysed. What has received less attention has been an approach to the rhetorical techniques operating in those research traditions. Among the many characteristics of our intellectual culture since the 1970s has been an emphasis on reflexivity signified by a commitment to 'post-structuralism', 'deconstructionism' and 'anti-foundationalism'. Post-modernism has since the 1970s