Barry Down

Digital Youth Subcultures is a collection of essays draws on ethnographic case studies across multiple geographic locations and contexts to investigate the ways in young people engage in transgressive activities in digital social spaces (DSS) including Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. The book underscores the pervasiveness and unprecedented extent to which young peoples’ lives and identities are constituted in and through social media spaces. The editors have assembled a group of leading international scholars to provide a rich body of evidence, largely from the point of view of young people themselves, to understand how subcultures arise online, how they are constructed and experienced, and why it matters to them.

Sometimes a book comes along that demands to be read. John Smyth’s defiantly entitled book The Toxic University: Zombie leadership, academic rock stars, and neoliberal ideology is one of them. John Smyth who has spent the best part of forty years working inside universities is a critical sociologist of education, prolific author and academic dissident. Ironically, it has been in academic ‘retirement’ that Smyth has found the time to write this carefully crafted critique of what’s happening to modern universities and those who inhabit them...