The Subcultural Imagination: Theory, Research and Reflexivity in Contemporary Youth Cultures

The Subcultural Imagination explores the consequences of the ‘reflexive turn’ on subcultures research via an interrogation of how collective histories, social structures and personal biographies interrelate to create a set of distinctive subcultural experiences and subjective possibilities. We suggest a re-visitation of C. Wright Mills’ work in the Sociological Imagination (1959) in order to explore how researchers within the field of subcultural studies are able to respond reflexively. C. Wright Mills asked for sociologists to revisit the methodological choices they made
in order to avoid presenting the research field in a vacuum that is devoid of historical and spatial references, and of an understanding of complex processes of historicity that make only specific readings of research fields accessible to the researcher, and that, therefore, restrict the possible conclusions they will be able to draw.