This article considers how the study of youth cultural practice in Eastern Europe informs theoretical and empirical debate about youth culture. It charts the trajectory of academic writing on East European youth cultures and suggests the region's state socialist past (which made social inequalities relatively insignificant at a time when, elsewhere, youth cultural studies were dominated by class-based readings) combined with the explosion of inequality in the post-socialist period (by which time class-resistant post-subcultural theories led anglophone academic discussion), makes it an interesting vantage point from which to reconsider academic paradigms. Drawing on empirical examples of youth cultural practice in (post)-socialist Eastern Europe, it argues for a perspective that integrates structural and cultural factors shaping young people's lives. It suggests moving forward western theoretical debates -often stymied in arguments over nomenclature ('subculture', 'postsubculture', 'neo-tribe') -by shifting the focus of study from 'form' ('subculture' etc.) to 'substance' (concrete cultural practices) and attending to everyday communicative, musical, sporting, educational, informal economy, and territorial practices. Since such practices are embedded in the 'whole' rather than 'subcultural' lives of young people, this renders visible how cultural practices are enabled and constrained by the same social divisions and inequalities that structure society at large.
ABSTRACT. The article focuses on consumer strategies of Russian urban youth during a financial crisis aggravated by European and North American sanctions against Russia. Prices on natural resources (namely, the drop in global oil prices) as well as the sanctions imposed by the countries that do not support Russia's policy toward Ukraine have become major causes of the 2015 crisis. This article offers a brief outline of the academic debate on youth consumption with a focus on post -and subcultural, problematised and lifestyle-related lines of research. We touch upon such topics as informed and stimulated consumption actualised by the crisis. The analysis of urban youth consumption draws on the data of a research project; its empirical basis consists of sixty semi-structured interviews conducted with two generations of young people in St. Petersburg (20-25 and 30-35 years old) with different job tenure (no more than five years and about ten years) and from different fields of employment: the public sector (budget-funded organisations), the private sector (commercial companies) and self-employment (freelancers). Our particular attention to the changes in young people's financial and time budgeting practices stems from the hypothesis that they are the main manifestations of youth's first reactions to the crisis. The key questions of the analysis are as follows. How do young people with different work experience spend their time and money? Does the ongoing crisis establish new consumer behaviour patterns among urban youth in modern Russia?
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