Gavan Titley

In contemporary societies and public discourses, the term `culture' has become a powerful and commonly held currency. Long regarded as one of the most complicated concepts in the human and social sciences, it increasingly takes on the appearance of a floating signifier attached to ways of life and life practices, collectivities based on location, nation, history, lifestyle and ethnicity, systems and networks of representation and meaning, and realms of artistic value and heritage.

This ubiquitous deployment of culture as a way of framing human activities is always an evaluative act, and frequently a political one. In a range of European contexts culture conceived in relation to nation, multiculturalism and globalisation is a site of struggle over identity, belonging, entitlement and legitimacy. While contemporary cultural theory emphasises the mobility and fluidity of culture as a concept, its political usage tends towards the surveillance of boundaries, even in apparently pluralistic models of multiculturalism and interculturalism. This publication contends that culture is an idea that now obscures as much as it clarifies. Its descriptive power struggles with divergent modernities and realities; its prescriptive senses may marginalise issues of gender, class and the complexity of multiple allegiances and identities.

The interdisciplinary contributions to Resituating Culture combine overviews of relevant cultural theory with the research and perspectives of the individual contributors. It features essays by Avtar Brah, John Tomlinson, Alana Lentin and John Wrench as well as researchers from all over Europe. Emerging from the Council of Europe European Commission partnership on youth research, this publication is of particular import for students of sociology and cultural studies, and for youth workers, trainers and researchers active at local, national and European levels.