Youth culture work

Young people would probably not use the term “youth culture”. It is also questionable whether they would still assign themselves to a specific youth culture today, as was common in the 1990s. Nevertheless, there are still “typically youthful” scenes and activities that appeal to most young people more than a visit to a museum or classic literature. These include rap, graffiti, skateboarding and gaming or platforms such as TikTok, Instagram and YouTube.

Youth cultures enable alternative concepts of life and society

Young people's enthusiasm for youth cultural scenes and forms of expression is often rooted in the emancipatory aspects of youth cultures. These allow young people to reinvent themselves and search for alternative concepts of life and society. In this way, they form an alternative to the adult world and set themselves apart from older generations in terms of style, culture and values. Youth cultures therefore always have a political content and are politically contested. The thematic focuses vary depending on the youth culture and differ both internationally and historically. Hip-hop, for example, is a subculture that has regularly addressed racism since its inception. However, while the focus in the USA is on police violence, ghettoization and structural racism in the justice system, the hip-hop community in Germany is more concerned with anti-Muslim racism. Graffiti, on the other hand, is a legal hobby for many young people in Germany today. For the first sprayers in the GDR and later in the East German states, graffiti meant the self-determined appropriation of public space. The situation is different in Libya, Egypt and Syria: Here, graffiti was an essential part of protest culture from 2011 onwards. Such emancipatory potentials of youth cultures can and should be used pedagogically. Cultures Interactive e.V. picks up on this in its youth culture approach.

Trying out new things and learning new skills

Youth cultural work emerged in the 1980s as part of open youth work. At that time, youth clubs, especially in the cities, were increasingly confronted with young people in difficult circumstances who no longer felt addressed by traditional leisure activities. As a result, youth cultural interests and subcultures received increased attention. Since then, youth cultural work has become increasingly established and diversified in various educational contexts. However, the youth culture approach is still rarely found in political and historical education or the promotion of democracy.

Cultures Interactive e.V. has been using the youth culture approach since it was founded in 2005, combining human rights-oriented political education with an examination of youth cultures. This includes dealing with the history of youth cultures and their origins as well as their practical implementation.  The topics that are dealt with via youth cultures represent a springboard into political education and the confrontation with ideologies of inequality - for example with regard to Islam-based extremism, conspiracy ideologies and sexism in rap, right-wing extremists in the hooligan or gaming scene, depression and bullying in YouTube videos or the concerns of “Fridays for Future”. The youth-cultural approach makes it easier for young people to enter into socio-political discussions without becoming superficial. This has the advantage that young people feel that their interests are taken seriously from the outset. This is because the political discussion focuses directly on the issues and experiences that move them. This also gives them the opportunity to act as experts who are well informed about current discourse in the rap scene, for example. This also applies to young people who have difficulty reading or writing or are not yet confident in the German language. In addition, many youth cultures are represented internationally and in some cases also see themselves as an international community. This aspect of youth cultures is usually particularly attractive to young people who themselves have family ties abroad.

The practical learning of individual youth cultural forms of expression is central to the workshops offered by Cultures Interactive e.V.. Young people can try themselves in rapping, dancing, graffiti, parkour or the production of social media content, for example. This allows them to try out new things, learn new skills and practice collaborating with others. They experience that they can become creatively, culturally and politically active themselves. This promotes solidarity and civic participation as well as the assumption of responsibility.
Youth cultures are still often dominated by boys and men. Reflecting on this and taking it into account when selecting methods and team members is an important prerequisite for successful youth culture work. For example, hip-hop workshops can be deliberately designed to empower girls, feminist youth cultures can be used to address stereotypical gender roles or young people can be given new experiences if the workshops on skateboarding and heavy metal are led by female teamers.

Youth cultures in the prevention of group-focused enmity

With their diverse range of identities and opportunities to try things out, youth cultures represent a fundamental alternative to ideologies such as those of the far right or Islam-based extremism. In the prevention of right-wing extremism, it has also been shown that young people with an affinity for the right in particular are extremely suspicious of possible educational influence. They often find political institutions and their actors boring, outdated and unappealing. This is another reason why they are less accessible to traditional prevention or political education programs. Such young people, who cannot be addressed by other educational - and especially political education - formats, or only with great difficulty, can only be reached through a lifeworld-oriented educational approach based on the interests of young people.

However, using youth cultures in the prevention of group-focused enmity and processes of turning to anti-democratic movements also makes sense because this is also where battles for young supporters take place. Actors on the far right and Islam-based extremism, as well as conspiracy ideologues, use youth cultures to gain access to young people. This appropriation and infiltration can be illustrated for young people using specific youth cultures, as can successful defensive struggles and counter-movements in the subcultures.