Discourse Constructions of Youth Identities

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.

Monica Heller, University of Toronto, Canada:
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.