Celebrity, Aspiration and Contemporary Youth: Education and Inequality in an Era of Austerity

Description

Celebrity, Aspiration and Contemporary Youth uses the lens of celebrity to explore how young people think about their futures under austerity. Based on an interdisciplinary study, the book offers fresh insights into contemporary youth aspirations and inequalities. It helps us to understand young people’s transitions into adulthood at a time of socio-economic ‘crisis’. Drawing on original data, the authors examine what it means for young people to be forming their aspirations within the context of ‘austere meritocracy’. The book addresses three central questions: What kinds of futures do young people desire and imagine for themselves? What is required of young people in the process of achieving these futures? And how are inequalities embedded and reproduced within these? Using young people’s ‘celebrity talk’ to explore their aspirations, the authors challenge stereotypes of young people as a fame-hungry, get-rich-quick generation. Instead, they show how young people engage critically with celebrity and its discourses. Key chapters focus on how young people talk about youth, work, authenticity, success, happiness, money and fame in relation to their own lives and those of celebrities. Each of these chapters contains a case study of an international celebrity, including Beyoncé, Will Smith, Bill Gates, Prince Harry and Kim Kardashian. The authors conclude with possibilities for social change. They show that celebrity offers an important way of working with young people to critically explore what futures are possible and for whom. Cover Half Title Series Title Copyright Contents Illustration Acknowledgements 1 Introduction Aspiration, education and meritocracy Youth in a post-crash landscape: A lost generation? Making sense of austere meritocracy: Just neoliberalism as we know it? Turning to celebrity Introducing the study Outline of the book 2 Youth ‘You get all these like accusations’: Negotiating the discourse of problem youth ‘There’s a lot depending on us’: Bearing the burden of hope in austere meritocracy ‘Off-the-rails’ child stars and ‘exceptional’ role models: Negotiating youth through celebrity talk Conclusion 3 Work ‘I know if I work hard, I can do anything I want to do’: The centrality of work to aspiration Obama shows us that ‘we can get everything we want if we try hard’: Hard work and celebrity talk ‘What did she do to get famous?’ Class, gender, race and the uneven ascription of hard work ‘I don’t think you can judge people’: Struggles over hard work Conclusion 4 Authenticity ‘I can’t really remember like a day where I decided I wanted to do it’: Career pathways as self-realization ‘she had faith in what she’d done, and she believed it could go somewhere, and it did’: Celebrity, authenticity and making it a ‘Fake means that they’re literally not themselves, like some of their body parts just aren’t real’: Class, gender, race and ina ‘You should have another role model’: Clashes between authenticity and aspiration Conclusion 5 Success ‘He’s really successful because of what he created’: The entrepreneurialism success discourse ‘We’re not people who can fly’: Negotiating the entrepreneurial success discourse ‘A good and steady life’: The stability success discourse ‘Maybe the best I can isn’t what I want to do’: Hedonism and resisting success ‘My granddad’s a welder. . . . He’s quite a successful man’: Manual labour and resisting ‘success’ Conclusion 6 Happiness ‘I think Will Smith is happy because I’ve seen his family’: Happy families and happy celebrities ‘When she was pregnant, she released an album as well’: Happy careers and happy celebrities ‘She’s strong-minded, she knows what she wants’: Feminist happiness and unhappy celebrities ‘It might be difficult to achieve your dreams if you don’t have any’: Letting (un)happiness happen Conclusion 7 Money ‘I think no matter how much I don’t want to say, money is a big part of it’: Managing the contradictions of money in austere me ‘I think money destroys them really’: Celebrity consumption and illegitimate wealth ‘She doesn’t flaunt her money around’: Thrift, ordinariness and legitimate wealth ‘Every year he gives like a 100 million to charity’: Legitimate wealth, entrepreneurship and philanthropy Conclusion 8 Fame ‘If you’ve done something amazing, you have the right to be there’: Deserved success and the right kind of fame ‘I wouldn’t like to be overly famous, like just if people knew who I was that’s just enough’: Young people aspiring to fame ‘They’re self-made . . . they’ve done it all themselves’: YouTubers, new worker subjectivities and contemporary capitalism Conclusion 9 Conclusions What have we have learned from this study? How can we use this book? Where are we right now? Postscript Bibliography Index