The legacy of Resistance Through Rituals

Abstract

Since its initial publication in 1976, Resistance Through Rituals has become one of the most influential – and criticised – texts in the academic study of youth culture. Criticisms fall into two broad camps: the perceived shortcomings of the study itself, notably its lack of attention to issues of gender and ethnicity, its Anglo-centric focus and the absence of empirical data to support its central claims vis a vis the significance of subculture as site of working-class youth resistance; criticisms of the concept of subculture itself and the proposing of new conceptual frameworks, notably, scene, lifestyle and neo-tribe. Beyond such criticism, however, there are also other questions to consider in assessing the 50-year legacy of Resistance Through Rituals. How has the concept of youth culture itself changed over the last 50 years? How have such changes been influenced by factors such as post-industrialisation, digital technologies and shifts in understandings about age and age-appropriate behaviour? Taking such considerations into account, this article will discuss the extent to which Resistance Through Rituals reads in the current context as a largely historical text and, conversely, what aspects of the work continue to have relevance (or perhaps revived relevance) for the study of youth in a contemporary context?

Introduction

Since its publication in 1976, Hall and Jefferson’s (eds) Resistance Through Rituals has become one of the most influential texts in the academic study of youth culture. Comprising a series of essays by scholars affiliated with Birmingham University’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS), the influence of Resistance Through Rituals can be largely measured in terms of its presentation of a new model of subcultural theory which continues to inform a significant portion of youth cultural scholarship to this day (Bennett, 2011). Taking its lead from the concept of deviant subcultures introduced in the work of Chicago School theorists such as Matza and Sykes (1957) and Becker (1967) during the mid-20th century, the CCCS introduced a cultural Marxist dimension into subcultural theory based on Gramsci’s concept of hegemony (Harris, 1992). This Marxist adaptation of subcultural theory cast post-war working class British youth as part of a class struggle and a form of resistance to the dominant hegemonic order (Frith, 1984).

Although Resistance Through Rituals constituted a significant point of departure in youth cultural studies at its time of publication, the book has also attracted significant criticism. Such criticism falls into two broad camps: first, the perceived shortcomings of the work itself, notably its lack of attention to issues of gender and ethnicity (Jensen, 2018; McRobbie, 1990), its Anglo-centric focus (Salasuo and Poikolainen, 2016) and the absence of empirical data to support its central claims vis a vis the significance of subculture as site of working-class youth resistance (Cohen, 1987; Waters, 1981); second, criticisms of the model of subcultural theory proffered by the CCCS and proposal of new conceptual frameworks for understanding youth culture based on alternative theoretical models, notably, scene, lifestyle and neo-tribe (Bennett, 1999; Miles, 2000; Straw, 1991). Beyond such criticism, however, there are also other questions to consider in assessing the 50-year legacy of Resistance Through Rituals. Specifically: how has the concept of youth culture itself changed over the last 50 years; how have such changes been influenced by factors such as post-industrialisation, digital technologies and shifts in understandings about age and age- appropriate behaviour? Taking such considerations into account, this article will discuss the extent to which the claims made in Resistance Through Rituals now read as outdated and, conversely, what aspects of the work continue to have relevance for the study of youth in a contemporary context?

A turning point in the study of youth culture

In the context of the mid-1970s, Resistance Through Rituals marked a significant turning point in the study of youth culture. Amidst a scholarly landscape in which British studies of youth culture were frequently slanted towards crime and deviance (see, e.g. Patrick, 1973), the collection of essays presented in Resistance Through Rituals broke new ground through applying a cultural Marxist perspective to interpret the everyday use by young people of the stylistic commodities placed at their disposal by the youth consumer market of the post-Second World War era (see Chambers, 1985). Books such as Laing’s (1969) The Sound of Our Time and Melly’s (1970) Revolt into Style had already begun to document the impact of popular music and fashion on post-war British youth culture. However, Resistance Through Rituals announced a new chapter in the study of post-war British youth through its attempt to conceptually situate the spectacular youth styles of the 1950s and 1960s as new articulations of a class struggle that had continued since the beginning of the industrial revolution during the mid-18th century (Clarke et al., 1976). In that context, the stylistic revolt of post-war youth was doubly articulated as both a statement of age and a statement of class.

In this important sense, Resistance Through Rituals was the culmination of work that had commenced in the late 1960s and continued into the early 1970s as a series of working papers produced by CCCS researchers. These included Phil Cohen’s (1972) ‘Subcultural Conflict and Working Class Community’, whose concept of ‘magical recovery’ had a far-reaching influence on many aspects of the work presented in Resistance Through Rituals. Indeed, the book occupies a unique place in the scholarly history of youth culture, presenting a thematically unified set of essays at a point in time when cultural studies was rapidly gaining momentum underpinned by a robust body of work authored by British cultural theorists including Raymond Williams, Richard Hoggart and Stuart Hall. Although many scholars have argued that Resistance Through Rituals is flawed through what they consider to be a reductive interpretation of subculture as a microcosm of ‘half-formed’ radicalism (Waters, 1981) born of class frustration, in another sense the book undoubtedly captures the spirit of an age in which youth found a new voice, though style, music and other commodities, and in doing so became culturally distinct from the parent culture in ways that saw youth pilloried and represented by the media as folk devils at the centre of a new moral panic (Cohen, 1987).

This folk-devilisation of youth was not, in itself, a new phenomenon. As various historical studies of youth illustrate, for centuries the presence of youth gangs in cities has been a source of antagonism for the authorities and moral guardians (see, e.g. Pearson, 1983). But the ‘youthquake’ (Leech, 1973) of the mid-20th century elevated the feared spectacle of youth to new heights. For the first time, youth was being targeted as a distinctive market, characterised by mass produced items of fashion and musical genres that were specifically aimed at youth (Bennett, 2000). At a point in time when the world was still recovering from the second of two world wars fought during the first half of the 20th century, the new visual and sonic resources flaunted by youth critically accentuated its shock value. In its classic re-reading of post-war youth culture’s antagonistic stance, the CCCS argued that while on the surface this appeared directed towards the parent culture, youth resistance in many ways mirrored the frustration and struggle of a disenfranchised working class youth, an observation vividly captured in Jefferson’s (1976) depiction of working class teddy-boys as being ‘all dressed up’ but having ‘no-where to go’. Jefferson is here suggesting that the teddy boys, like their parents, are trapped within the constraints of their working-class existence, with neither the economic nor educational capital to escape from that existence.

In this regard, the CCCS also took issue with the then political consensus that the post-war affluence, generated by near full employment, would lead to a withering away of class (Zweig, 1961). Taking issue with this viewpoint, the CCCS theorists argued that increasing affluence merely served to accentuate inequalities of opportunity created by the class system. Affluence alone it was argued did not alter the life chances of working-class youth and their parent culture. This was a key point of Cohen’s (1972) study of working-class families relocated from traditional working-class neighbourhoods that had suffered bomb damage during the Second World War to new housing estates. According to Cohen, the youth of these displaced working class communities sought to engage in a ‘magical recovery’ of working-class community through the creation of youth subcultures.

The post-subcultural turn

Highly influential though Resistance Through Rituals was, many scholars contested that the book’s lack of empirical evidence to support its weighty claims about subculture as a class-based phenomenon was problematic. A further aspect of the CCCS interpretation of subculture that garnered criticism was its failure to account for different levels of attachment among young people to subcultures. Frith (1983) argued that youth across the social strata participated in the post-war youth market and displayed varying levels of commitment to the ethos of resistance central to the CCCS interpretation of subculture. Redhead (1990) went further, suggesting that the very concept of subculture was a work of analytical fiction, created by subcultural theorists rather than the other way around.

By the late 1990s, a new school of thought was being applied to youth culture, one that took issue with the class-centred interpretation of youth subcultures established in Resistance Through Rituals and moved the debate in new directions informed by post-structuralist theory. This new body of work, rather than relying purely on theoretical abstraction in its reading of youth style, strove the recast the study of youth culture through empirical investigation of youth cultural practices and gatherings. Bennett (1999, 2000) applied French sociologist Michel Maffesoli’s (1996) concept of neo-tribe in research on electronic dance music. Central to Bennett’s work was a criticism of subculture as a concept too limited due to its fixity around a class-based analysis of youth and one that also depicted young people as tightly bonded into rigidly demarcated styles. Rather, argued Bennett, youth cultures can be more effectively conceptualised as forming temporal collectives with fluid boundaries.

Advancing this debate, Muggleton (2000) argued that given the proliferation of stylistic resources, including retro fashions, the age of subculture had, by the 1990s, given way to what he referred to as a post-subcultural era in which young people make individual decisions concerning image and style rather than adhering to a rigid subcultural dress code. Aligned with this assertion was Muggleton’s suggestion that how young people read the meaning and significance of style is now characterised by a discernible element of individual choice and aesthetic sensibility rather than exclusively determined by class and other structural factors such as gender and ethnicity. In a study that mapped similar trends in youth fashion, Miles (2000) applied the Weberian concept of lifestyle in studying the style choices of youth. As with Muggleton, Miles suggested that the rigid notion of stylistic choice and meaning as a product of class was not supported by his own empirical findings which illustrated how, in choosing stylistic commodities, young people exhibit a significant degree of individual choice and reflexivity in fashioning their identity.

Beyond the post-subcultural turn

Even compared to the early 2000s, the youth cultural landscape of 2026 is markedly different. And compared to 1976 it is barely recognisable, both stylistically and in terms of the sheer array of commodities now available to young people. Indeed, it needs to be noted that even at its point of publication, Resistance Through Rituals did not present a wholly contemporaneous snapshot of the youth cultural landscape in Britain but appeared dated in several important respects. Strikingly, there was no reference in any of the studies contained in Resistance Through Rituals to the then dominant British glam rock phenomenon or the burgeoning heavy metal scene. Such styles, it can be argued, never aligned neatly with the CCCS definition of subculture. Critical in this regard is that neither glam nor heavy metal commanded exclusively working-class audiences (as illustrated by the cross-class appeal of ‘serious’ glam artists such as David Bowie and Roxy Music and the ‘Heavy Metal Societies’ established at many British universities and polytechnics during the 1970s and 1980s, see Chambers, 1985).

The same was undeniably the case with punk. Although claimed by many scholars (see, e.g. Hebdige, 1979) to be a continuation of the working-class subcultural legacy of the 1950s and 1960s, punk had both working class and middle-class followers. This was clearly exemplified by the infamous ‘Bromley Contingent’ (Wilkinson, 2015), which produced several successful punk artists including Siouxsie Sioux and Billy Idol, and the fact that many punk and new wave musicians had art school backgrounds (Frith, 1997).

Moving forward 50 years, even if one continues to invest conceptually in the idea of subculture, it is very difficult to discern what the current youth subcultures are. Rather, in a purely empirical sense, the cultural landscape of youth appears increasingly post-subcultural, or perhaps even post post-subcultural. Diversity, both in terms of the sheer array of stylistic commodities available to young consumers and the highly nuanced nature of their embodied cultural representation has carried on apace since the early 2000s when the concept of post-subculture was first applied. Indeed, it is frequently the case today that there exists no obvious relationship between a young person’s stylistic choices, musical taste and other aspects of their lifestyle. Due in no small part to the platformisation of music in the digital era (Barna, 2017), youth in the main now has constant access to a wide variety of music, with the result that personal playlists may encompass a range of different musical genres, from different eras and from different countries (Bonini and Magaudda, 2024).

And in that context, the perceived necessity of demonstrating one’s musical allegiance(s) through mode of dress has also become far less prevalent and to a greater degree redundant. While certain staple youth styles remain in current circulation – notably elements of goth, punk, hardcore, emo and hip hop – these have inevitably acquired a different status and meaning over time. Obviously, none of these historically embedded styles denote a new development in youth culture as they once did. Nor do they signify ‘youth’ as such, that is to say these styles are no longer the exclusive purview of youth but are instead multi-generational in nature (Bennett, 2013; Bennett and Hodkinson, 2012). And the blending of style into increasingly more subtle combinations has also become a centrally defining feature of youth and post-youth cultures in the early 21st century. Clothing stores such as Urban Outfitters are the contemporary embodiment of Hebdige’s (1979) incorporation thesis, ¹ re-presenting a sartorial history of youth style including punk, hip hop, slacker and grunge, as a homogenised brand of ‘urban style wear’.

In the context of this greatly expanded ‘supermarket of style’ (Polhemus, 1997), it is also significant to note that many of the original post-war youth styles, notably teddy boy, mod, and rocker barely register. Instead, they appear to have acquired a new vocabulary of meaning, as the cultural property of ageing generations from the 1950s and 1960s. Through gatherings such as the popular ‘mod weekends’ seen in Brighton and other parts of the UK, and ‘classic bike afternoons’, these eras of youth culture and the artefacts that characterised them have taken on a form of generationally inscribed heritage status. Once considered as episodes in an ongoing succession of youth cultural ephemera, terms such as mod and rocker are now firmly inscribed in the cultural memory of those who lived out the years of their youth as either fully committed stylists (as per the character of Jimmy in The Who’s (1973) rock operatic album Quadrophenia and its 1979 film adaptation) or as weekend warriors.

And here, an interesting conundrum has emerged. As angry and disenfranchised youth in the 1950s and 1960s, teds, mods and rockers were easily moulded into the subcultural agents of working-class resistance that the CCCS wanted them to represent (Bennett, 2015). Some 60 years on, for many of these individuals the benefits of sustained employment, post-youth educational qualifications and social mobility have served to problematise the original CCCS thesis of working-class youth as all-dressed up and nowhere to go. Many ageing mods, rockers, teddy boys and teddy girls broke though the class ceiling of working-class youth entrapment and now reflect upon their youth identities not as a period of hapless, half-understood resistance as envisaged in Resistance Through Rituals, but as a galvanising force that has shaped and inspired their ongoing lives even as these lives exhibit a more economically empowered and often middle class status (O’Neil, 2024).

It is also fair to say that the nature of youth culture has shifted significantly in more recent decades. In the pre-digital age, the collective cultural practices of youth were still primarily face-to-face interactions manifested in physical settings, a facet of youth culture that also made for the relatively simple equation of youth culture as a spectacular extension of neighbourhood ties and community belonging observed in much of the CCCS’s scholarship on subcultures included in Resistance Through Rituals. However, since the early 2000s, the focus of youth cultural gatherings and collective practice has increasingly shifted to online spaces (Bennett, 2004; Bennett and Robards, 2014). This is not to suggest that physical manifestations of youth culture no longer exist, but it is certainly the case that youth culture in a contemporary sense is both an online and offline phenomenon (Bennett and Robards, 2014; Robards and Bennett, 2011).

It is also the case that the increasing prevalence of digital technology in youth cultural practices has displaced to a fair degree the once central significance of music, with music now being one among a range of commodities through which young people forge their identities and find connection to others. Indeed, it is accurate to say that young people now typically spend as much time playing inter-active video games and watching content on YouTube, Instagram and other digital media platforms as they do listening to music (Subrahhanyam and Greenfield, 2011). ² Or, at the very least music listening is rarely a distinct pursuit in its own right but is now an integrated part of these other activities (Donnelly et al., 2014). The changed significance of music has also had an impact on the ways it informs interaction between young people. Although commonality in musical taste may continue to play some part in how young people forge connections with others, equally important are other forms of connectivity that manifest and are maintained through social media platforms and other forms of digital technology such as online gaming (Ringrose and Harvey, 2017).

Revisiting Resistance Through Rituals

Through its bold interpretation of spectacular styles as the literal embodiment of working-class youth resistance to the structural confines its existence, the collection of essays contained in Resistance Through Rituals contemplates neither the evolution and diversification of youth culture beyond the few rigidly demarcated styles of the post-war era, nor the biographical transitions of many of those who were depicted as arch ‘subculturalists’ beyond the neighbourhoods and street corners of their teenage years to adulthood (Bennett, 2006). Nor could Resistance Through Rituals have anticipated how the rise of digital technology would impact and influence the key qualities and characteristics of youth culture in the early 21st century. Are there still ways then in which a book such as Resistance Through Rituals resonates with youth in the 21st century? Arguably the connective thread here resides in the notion of resistance. Notwithstanding the aforementioned problems identified with the CCCS’s interpretation of resistance as braided into an ongoing class struggle, the identification of post-war youth style as part of an evolutionary moment in defining youth as a distinct part of the life course warrants some further scrutiny when defining the legacy of the CCCS.

Although much was made in Resistance Through Rituals about the symbolic significance of youth style in an ongoing class war, perhaps the greater contribution of the book was in introducing a new debate about how the resisting qualities of youth, as a life stage in the midst of biological and cognitive development, were given new avenues of expression via targeted forms of cultural consumption (Warde, 2014) that, as Laing notes, afforded young people the opportunity to ‘construct an identity through the appropriation selected elements from commercial youth cultures’ (Laing, 1994: 188). In the decades immediately following the Second World War, youth’s practices of cultural consumption were largely focussed on fashion and music, these commodities being a dominant focus for the post-war youth market (Bocock, 1993). But as opportunities for cultural consumption have increasingly widened and latterly taken on digital dimensions, so the ways in which youth can resist through collective rituals of practice tied to cultural consumption have also broadened (Osgerby, 2020).

Indeed, the resistance through rituals of contemporary youth are neither class specific, nor specifically grounded in stylistic preferences and musical taste (Bennett and Bennett, 2024). This is not to argue that style and music no longer figure at all in the rituals of resistance engaged in by contemporary youth cultures. But, as noted above, they now form part of a broader repertoire of commodities and resources available to young people in the creation of their own identities, identity politics and negotiations with socio-economic and political structures. In that respect, it is also clear that through the repertoire of commodities now at their disposal, youth on the whole has become more proactive in its strategies of resistance. For the CCCS, resistance was a half-understood and largely passive mode of practice, style being a form of visual shock tactics and a means of attracting attention but with little in the way of purpose beyond the aim of creating a spectacle. That period of youth is now confined to history although, as noted earlier, accounts of ageing individuals who lived through those years as mods, rockers and so forth suggest that even at that time a more nuanced understanding of the meaning of style was prevalent among young people themselves (O’Neil, 2024).

In the 21st century, armed with digital media youth’s capacity for resistance has assumed a different resonance. Digital media platforms such as YouTube, Instagram and TikTok provide avenues for youth to create content, including critical content, and to connect trans-locally in ways that were not possible, or even conceivable, in the pre-digital era (Osgerby, 2020). While hard copy forms of alternative analogue media such as zines (Duncombe, 1997) serviced a limited and relatively niche audience during much of the 20th century, in the early 21st century digital media have far expanded the horizons for the dissemination and consumption of subversive content. The impetus for such subversive use of digital media by youth is rooted in a DIY (do-it-yourself) ethos that has been a facet of youth culture since the post-Second World War era, as manifested in musical styles such as skiffle where mundane household objects were refashioned as musical instruments (Bennett, 2018). Although not directly documented in the CCCS work, skiffle formed an important sonic backdrop for British youth, appealing to teddy boys in the years prior to the arrival of rock ‘n’ roll in Britain and establishing important roots for the rocker culture of the late 1950s and early 1960s (Stratton, 2010).

In the early 21st century, the resistant qualities of such DIY youth cultural practices have taken on a more centre-stage presence, providing a foil to the mainstream hegemonic production of culture and media at manifold levels (Bennett and Guerra, 2019). For example, in a study of TikTok Literat and Kligler-Vilenchik (2023) argue that this platform ‘is a valuable space for youth activism, enabling young people to experiment with their political voice in richly creative ways’ (2023, p. 1). Literat and Kligler-Vilenchik’s (2023) observation adds to a growing body of work that denotes the significance of social media as a space that transforms a decades long legacy of youth resistance through allowing new forms of connectivity and presence in the global mediascape (Appadurai, 1996). If the cultural resistance of youth was once inextricably bound up with a monolithic mainstream media discourse that represented youth as unequivocally anti-social, it is no longer possible for the media to project such a biased lens onto youth. Rather, it is the case that youth itself is now in the process of evaluating and re-interpreting mainstream media content on an increasingly broad spectrum of issues, ranging from politics to austerity and the environmental crisis.

Recasting resistance

As the foregoing account suggests, as part of any discussion that examines the changing nature of youth, we must also consider the radically different world in which youth of the early 21st century find themselves. In the 50 years since the publication of Resistance Through Rituals, and again indeed in the 25 years since the first examples of post-subcultural scholarship began to appear, there have been some significant changes in the world at large. Such changes are manifold but can be broadly categorised as socio-economic, environmental, technological and, more recently, pandemic. The CCCS interpretation of subculture positioned youth resistance in a context of oppression and inequality framed by what were, at the time, considered to be monolithic structural forces, including the confines of class, community, education and work. Indeed, the British class system at that time still provided clear pathways into work and employment based on educational achievement and underachievement (see Willis, 1977) and an expectation that careers for both blue- and white-collar workers would be long-term, offering steady and uninterrupted employment from entry into the labour market until retirement and with embedded benefits such as paid sick leave and a work pension.

However, within a decade of the publication of Resistance Through Rituals, post-industrialisation had significantly eroded these once clearly defined pathways to work leading towards a new era of uncertainty that was ultimately termed by Beck (1992) as risk society. Although the concept of risk continues to be stridently debated (see, e.g. Atkinson, 2007) the key take-home idea of the risk society thesis retains credence when attempting to map the fractures in the CCCS concept of subcultural resistance as class-based. Specifically, within a 50-year window youth as a life stage has become uncertain and precarious, a feature that pertains in the case of both working class and middle-class youth as each struggle in a labour market that is characterised by casualisation and ‘Mac Jobs’ (MacDonald, 2011) in what has been referred to as the ‘gig economy’ (Woodcock and Graham, 2020). Woodman (2012) has gone as far as to suggest that such a precarious labour market has forced a temporal disruption on youth whereby, faced with the need to take whatever work, and working hours, they are offered, young people now find it much harder to access the synchronous leisure time that fostered the kind of youth cultural bonds typical of the post-war era. Elongated transitions from school to work (Wyn and Whyte, 2020), a cost-of-living crisis and austerity, along with environmental challenges and more recent concerns around superbugs and pandemics all contribute to a situation of polycrisis (Henig and Knight, 2023).

In such a situation of mounting uncertainty, the global project of youth culture is not only invested in resisting the existing status quo but also in looking for new ways to thrive in an increasingly precarious situation. One potent example of this was seen during the recent COVID-19 pandemic when young music-makers, suddenly prevented from touring and performing live in physical venues and at festivals sought alternative means of maintaining an income from music, including live-streaming performances from home (Howard et al., 2021). At the same time, however, young music-makers also sought to use music in other ways, specifically as a means of protecting their mental health and well-being in the face of growing isolation due to social distancing, curfews and lockdowns (Bennett et al., 2025). Using digital technology, young music-makers connected with each other on music projects (Levstek et al., 2021) while other young people shared pandemic themed playlists online (Hansen et al., 2021).

Youth have also exhibited new sensibilities of resistance in other ways during the turbulent times of the early 21st century, notably in relation to climate change. While the credibility of climate change assertions and future predictions of environmental disaster continue to be debated among scientists, politicians and industry, younger generations are increasingly focussed on the implications of how even small changes in the earth’s climate will impact their future. Among the measures taken by youth on a global scale to bring attention to this is climate strike movement (Bowman and Germaine, 2021), a global youth movement that proactively lobbies for environmental policies that will reduce climate change and provide the conditions for environmental sustainability. Examples such as this demonstrate how patterns of resistance continue to characterise youth culture today and have assumed new and more widespread resonance as young people organise themselves translocally to protest about and focus attention on issues that will ultimately impact their own future and those of generations to come.

Conclusion: Rituals of resistance and contemporary youth

In the 50 years since its publication Resistance Through Rituals has garnered a rich legacy as a book that has both fundamentally shaped the academic study of youth culture and produced a series of ongoing debates concerning subculture and post-subculture. In addition to documenting the significance of Resistance Through Rituals in regard to subcultural theory and the criticisms levelled against it in this respect, this chapter has also sought to understand if there are other ways in which the legacy of the book can be understood and applied in a contemporary context. As a part of this it has been argued that the concept of style-based youth resistance is now far less easy to discern given that youth styles are, on the whole, both more eclectic and less defined by fads and fashions. Similarly, it has been shown that if once there was a clear relationship between visual style and musical taste, today youth’s musical preferences are often as eclectic as their fashion sense. It has also been argued that many styles once firmly associated with youth are now far less so, having assumed a more multi-generational and in some cases post-youth significance bound up with cultural memory and generational belonging.

Turning to a consideration of what links Resistance Through Rituals with contemporary youth, it has been argued that the ongoing resonance of the book is rooted in its notion of resistance, an arena of youth cultural practice that is as visceral and vibrant in the current context as it was during the post-war era. Whereas between the 1950s and the 1980s youth’s primary cultural resources were style and music, from the 1990s onwards new forms of connectivity facilitated through digital media have increasingly characterised youth’s rituals of leisure and their rituals of resistance. Moreover, rather than merely adopting a symbolic level of resistance though items of fashion, the forms of resistance now engaged in by young people assume a more proactive stance through creating new trans-local avenues for debate and pushback in the face of global crises including precarity and climate change.