Search

While research on youthful drinking is extensive, the literature has been geographically skewed towards urban settings. As a potential corrective to this, our focus in this paper is on youthful drinking in rural Denmark. Based on 22 in-depth interviews with young drinkers, this paper explores the drinking practices of rural youth. More specifically, drawing on Antonsich's [2010. "Searching for belonging–an analytical framework." Geography Compass 4 (6): 644–659] notion of place-belongingness, we examine how sentiments of belonging relate to locally embedded drinking practices. We highlight the extent to which rural drinking places are characterized by the participation of young men, whose educational and professional aims are predominantly tied to the local community and activities within it. In so doing, we show that these contexts are primarily associated with 'drinking a single', as opposed to drinking to intoxication like their urban peers. We argue further that these 'lighter' but frequent forms of alcohol use, which we term 'congenial drinking', are related to accomplishments of place-belongingness and stand out as a gendered, classed and place-bound phenomenon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The primary educational objective in Denmark is to ensure ‘education for all’, and one decisive logic within educational policy is that young people's transitions through the educational system and into the labour market should be accelerated and streamlined. This logic presupposes a normal transition with regard to young people's educational choices and a view of educational choice as ‘rational’ and individual. Drawing on an understanding of educational choice as socially embedded, this article focuses on ‘youth at risk’ in education, post-15 educational choices and educational transitions. The main focus of this article will be the relationship between the subjective narratives of young people and dominant political storylines on education. I shall ask how political storylines on education can be traced in young people's narratives, and if and how they affect the narratives and transitional processes of the young people in question. I shall argue that the normal transition, which is currently held up as the political ideal, risks further marginalising young people who are already on the periphery of the educational system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analytical concepts such as 'bounded consumption' or 'controlled loss of control' have been applied to characterise contemporary youth intoxication. This article argues that this kind of cultural diagnosis benefits from being related to a focus on differences in social class. It is shown that in order to fully understand differences in the drinking and partying practices of young people, such practices must be related to the youngsters' general life and values, especially aspects such as rule-setting and school culture. Moreover, such practices including drinking attitudes are used by young people to construct social class-related identities: mainstream youngsters continually confirm their taken-for-granted normality, and mainstream breakers resist the mainstream hegemonic (school) culture which usually defies them. In conclusion, bounded consumption, corresponding with contemporary ideals of self-realisation, mostly seems to be a mainstream practice. For mainstream breakers unbounded intoxication practices can be observed and analysed as part of a counterculture. The study draws on five months of fieldwork and 24 qualitative focus-group interviews with pupils attending ninth grade (14-16 years of age) and their parents in a provincial Danish school. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]