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This book offers a vivid, critical exploration of young adults’ experiences of the contemporary night-time economy, drawing on rich ethnographic research from Stoke-on-Trent. Adopting recent conceptual advancements in ultra-realism, critical criminology and psychoanalytic theory, it examines how young people navigate relationships, substance use, violence and consumer culture through their night-time leisure rituals.
Advancing our understanding of social harm, the book also exposes the deeper political-economic forces that shape youth behaviours, identity and the many corrosive subjectivities that have flourished under late neoliberal capitalism. Engaging with timely concerns around mental health, individualism and the nature of desire, the book provides a powerful theoretical and empirical contribution to contemporary criminology and sociology.
'Hodgkinson and Bushell have produced an unflinching ethnography of Britain’s ‘post-leisure’ night time economy. Drawing on cutting edge ultra-realist theory, this is a stark and unsettling account of desire and disillusion in the urban night.' Oliver Smith, University of Plymouth
'Hodgkinson and Bushell take the reader on a night out they won’t forget. A nuanced and timely analysis of harm in the contemporary night-time economy.' Anthony Lloyd, Teesside University
Owen Hodgkinson is an independent social researcher based in the North Midlands, UK
Mark Bushell is Assistant Professor in Criminology and Sociology at Northumbria University.
1. Introduction
2. Stoke: A Potted History
3. Consumerism and its Discontents
4. Love and Other Drugs
5. On Violence
6. Final Thoughts