This course explores conceptions of youth across a range of cultural and historical settings. In doing so, the course examines differences between contemporary Western understandings and definitions of youth and those found in other cultural and historical contexts. Case studies from twentieth-century Great Britain, North America and Australia (eg, teddy boys, bodgies and widgies, mods, skinheads, hippies, punks, ravers, ferals and assorted other 'folk devils'), Papua New Guinea (Sambia puberty rites), Nepal ('teenagers' in Kathmandu), Africa (Masai age sets), preindustrial Europe (the 'discovery' of childhood in the seventeenth century) and classical Europe (the absence of 'adolescence' in Greco-Roman society) will be employed to illustrate course themes. The central aim of the course will be to problematise many of the taken-for-granted assumptions about youth that exist in contemporary Western academic, state and popular discourses (eg, 'delinquency', 'deviance, 'resistance') through cross-cultural and historical comparison.

Two hours of lectures and one hour of tutorial per week