A tale of two teens: disciplinary boundaries and geographical opportunities in youth consumption and sustainability research

Our understanding of how and why young people consume, and thus how easy it might be to encourage more sustainable modes of consumption amongst this group, is currently patchy and somewhat hampered by the preoccupations of those who have concerned themselves with this subject so far. This paper substantiates this claim by presenting two caricatures of how youth consumption has previously been framed. We suggest geographical studies are well placed to establish the degree to which each holds true in specific spatial and material contexts and thereby demonstrate how such studies could usefully contribute to wider scholarship on this topic.