Browsing by Subject "Nuorisokulttuuri"

A former warehouse and shelter for the homeless was occupied in Helsinki in 1979. The place became known as Lepakkoluola (‘Batcave’) and served as a central space for the Helsinki music, art and other youth culture scenes. For the following two decades, the space hosted a variety of culture. Some of the participants of the space’s early years grew with the space and developed lives and careers in the production of youth and other culture. Their life courses were constructed via their own agency without the help of particular training or other societal institutions. This thesis asks how participation in youth cultural practices has formed into a life-long career in culture. The so-called concept of DIY (‘do-it-yourself’) career is a recent opening in the research of youth culture and subcultures. Through this concept, the thesis reflects a growing academic interest in how youth culture participation relates to ageing. The central method of the study is life course analysis and its five principles: agency, accumulation, timing, linked lives and the historical time and place. The work treats the data produced by interviews as oral history, which emphasises the interviewees own experience of the events they relate. The data has been deconstructed and reconstructed with the help of grounded theory’s tools for coding, categorisation and explication. The primary data for this study is seven interviews by five interviewees. The secondary data is provided by two books books in which the voices of participants in Lepakkoluola and Radio City are heard. The study reveals that a DIY career is made up of four consequential life-course stages. The first stage, or ‘first contact’, happens during childhood and adolescence when the person becomes acquainted with youth culture and possibly with youth cultural practices. The second, or ‘immersion’, happens in emerging adulthood as the person begins to increasingly participate in youth culture while at the same time looking for their place in society. The third stage, or ‘realisation’ happens when the person gets a – more or less – fully-fledged and stable form of employment in the production of youth culture. In the fourth stage, ‘maintenance’, the person continues and maintains their life course based on the earlier stages.