International conference ' Urban youth cultures: solidarities, creativity, activism '

On November 30 - December 1, 2017 the international conference 'Urban youth cultures: solidarities, creativity, activism' will be held at HSE.

Youth (sub)cultural practices and communities are often stigmatized by the state, those working in education and parents as a source of danger and threat. The goal of the conference is to analyze the diversity of youth cultural activities and to explore them as a space for education, maturation, experimentation, protest, creative activity and communication. In particular, the conference will focus on the following:

• new agents, practices and meanings of youth cultural scenes,
• youth (sub)cultures, solidarities, scenes: in search of new approaches,
• methods and rhetoric of the deproblematization of youth and their cultural activities,
• conflict-free areas, processes and practices in youth cultural scenes,
• development of urban public spaces by youth cultural communities,
• youth cultural scenes as places for conflict and interaction across gender, generational, class, religious and ethnic divides, and as places for overcoming these differences,
• global and local youth cultural forms, Russian youth in a comparative perspective,
• young migrants in youth cultural spaces.

We expect an inter-disciplinary and international group of empirical researchers to participate, which will allow discussion of the latest methods, approaches and findings in the field of youth (sub)cultural practice.    

The conference is hosted by the Centre for Youth Studies at the National Research University Higher School of Economics, which has conducted a large number of projects in the area of youth studies. Some of the main thematic areas of work for the CYS are:  youth cultures and solidarities, citizenship and historical memory, youth activism, youth employment and consumption, corporeal identities of young people, ethnic and religious youth, and nationalism and xenophobia amongst young people. The conference is organised as part of the project ‘Creative fields of inter-ethnic interaction on youth cultural scenes in Russian cities’ (2015-17, supported by the Russian Science Foundation), conducted by the Centre for Youth Studies in four cities of Russia: St Petersburg, Ulyanovsk, Kazan, and Makhachkala.

Confirmed speakers at the conference:

• Prof. Hilary Pilkington, Dr. Ajmal Hussain (Manchester university, UK) ‘The challenges of multicultural living for young people in post 7/7 Britain'
• Prof. Elena Omelchenko (CYS NRU HSE, Russia) ‘Regional differences of urban youth cultural scenes in Russia’

The languages of the conference: Russian and English 

Submitting an abstract:

If you would like to present a paper, please submit an abstract of up to 350 words along with a covering letter that includes your institutional affiliation, position, email address, and telephone number. Submissions are accepted in Russian or English. The deadline for abstracts is 28^th May 2017.

Successful applicants will be informed by 11^th June 2017.

Unfortunately, the organisers are unable to cover travel and subsistence expenses for participants.

For further information, please contact: youth.hse.spb@gmail.com.