Style and Identity in Youth Cultures
ANTH 290
Spring 2024
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01
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This course focuses on young people's engagements with commercially provided culture and their implications for identity formation. We begin in the postwar United States, when producers of symbolic goods, such as movies, music, and clothes, began aggressively tailoring products for young people; over the rest of the 20th century and into the 21st, new youth-oriented cultural commodities and sites of consumption have been used by young people in diverse ways to define themselves in relationships to adult society and to other young people. We will examine young people's intensifying involvement with the cultural market, with attention to both the diversity of youth-cultural formations that have emerged within the United States and to the global circulation of Euro-American youth culture. Using case studies, we will consider the ways in which young people's consumption practices have both reinforced and transgressed intersecting boundaries of class, race, gender, and nationality. An overarching concern in the course will be to assess whether or to what extent particular cultural practices may help prepare young people for positions of privilege, reconcile them to structural disadvantages, or provide them with resources to challenge the dominant society. |
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| Credit: 1 |
Gen Ed Area Dept:
SBS ANTH |
| Course Format: Lecture / Discussion | Grading Mode: Student Option |
| Level: UGRD |
Prerequisites: None |
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Fulfills a Requirement for: (AMST)(ANTH)(EDST)(STS) |
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Past Enrollment Probability: 50% - 74% |
| SECTION 01 |
Major Readings: Wesleyan RJ Julia Bookstore
writings in anthropology, sociology and cultural studies, including works by, Dick Hebdige,Paul Hodkinson, Angela McRobbie, Bill Osgerby, , Sarah Thornton, Joe Austin, Jennifer Tilton, C.J. Pascoe, Sunaina Maira, Amy Wilkins, Oneka LaBenet, Eric Anderson, Stanley Thangaraj, Savannah Shange, danah boyd, and others.
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Examinations and Assignments:
Two short essays on assigned topics; final project on student-selected topic. |
Additional Requirements and/or Comments:
Participation in a student-led discussion |
| Instructor(s): Traube,Elizabeth Times: ..T.R.. 02:50PM-04:10PM; Location: FISK122; |
| Total Enrollment Limit: 24 | | SR major: 2 | JR major: 8 | | |
| Seats Available: 10 | GRAD: X | SR non-major: 4 | JR non-major: 4 | SO: 6 | FR: X |
| Drop/Add Enrollment Requests | | | | | |
| Total Submitted Requests: 8 | 1st Ranked: 0 | 2nd Ranked: 1 | 3rd Ranked: 1 | 4th Ranked: 0 | Unranked: 6 |
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