Chillaxing in the City? How Young People Negotiate Place, Space and Crime.

• In Event: Ethnographic engagements: Insiders and outsiders in diverse criminological sites

Abstract

The stereotyping of youth cultures and teenagers has consistently been shown to be unhelpful and detrimental to actual understandings of youth (for example Buckingham 2006, 2007, 2008, Livingstone 2009, 2002). Instead of constructing a fixed and ready-made homogenous entity called ‘the young’, Buckingham & Willett argue that it is imperative that we approach such groups in relation to their own individual heterogeneous voices, conceptions and productions (2006:11). “Chillaxing’ in the City?’ embraces these arguments by prioritizing teenage voices, opinions, and productions into the research process to ensure that it is led by, and for, the young people involved in it. This is achieved through adopting a visual ethnography and contributes to the growing debate on the use of the visual in Criminological Research. This paper reports groups of year 9 pupils’ journey’s to, from and around their schools in London. The recording of their individual and collective experiences and how the students create new spaces through their own narrations, productions and reflections of these journeys, informing the ‘adult audience’ how young people negotiate place, space and crime.

Author

• Carrie Anne Myers, City University London