Since the late 1980s, the epistemology of cultural politics that derives from British cultural studies and contemporary critical social theories-referred to as the 'the cultural turn in social sciences and humanities'-has been taken seriously in Anglophone human geography. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the recent progression in youth studies, especially after the deep impact of the cultural turn in Anglophone human geography, and how to apply it in the Japanese context.
The author will present four themes concerning geographies of youth: (1) Youth, cultural politics and positionality, (2) home, school and regional community around youth, (3) the progression from production to consumption society and youth in urban spaces and (4) problematizing youth and privatization of public spaces, all of which focus on cultural politics intertwined among various times and spaces.
Presenting various research points, the author will identify three significant theoretical aspects in which the geographies of youth mainly rely: the question of the social construction of subjects, the cultural politics of place and identity, and the ethics behind subject positions. The author insists that Japanese human geographers should consider these issues, despite the difficulties involved in their direct introduction into Japanese empirical studies and, that, furthermore, this is necessary in order to explore research practices regarding the studies of youth in the future.
