Youth Identities in the Global Cultural Economy

• Published in: European Journal of Cultural Studies
• Main Author: Kjeldgaard, Dannie
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: SAGE Publications 2003
• Subjects: Greenland
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/13675494030063002; https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/13675494030063002

Based on a qualitative study among high school students from metropolitan and rural areas in Denmark and Greenland, the article discusses the identity discourses of young people in the global cultural economy and how young people's position in structures of centre and periphery is generative of certain discourses of identity. The discourses are to a large extent generated in relation to consumption and consumer culture, in particular among those who live on the periphery of the global cultural economy. Here, consumer culture is generative of a discourse of `peripheral consciousness', the logic of which is the lack of consumption opportunities - opportunities that are imagined to be available in the centre.