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Abstract
Often thought to be deviants, young "Punks" today are often at the forefront of social consciousness. They take part in social movement organizations such as Food-Not-Bombs, Animal Defense League, and many other groups. The populations of young people (self identified punks) I study are, compared to "average" kids, highly active politically. My ethnographic study, which uses both participant observation and interviews, sets out to discover why this is. Over several years I have chronicled the activities of youths who have been working to open a social center that features music concerts, art exhibitions, free bike repair, and free classes and educational seminars. My interest, in a nutshell, is in how it is exactly that these suburban youths come to take on activist identities. The answer to the question of social movement mobilization has often been "networks of affiliation." In other words people join groups because they have friends who have joined. But my work provides is insight as to how people become members of social movement groups as well as how their very sense of self develops through the collective experience of culture. This work also highlights how the shared cultural history of participants (in this case punk culture) works to pre-socialize participants and shape their sense of self before they even think to join the movement group itself. This view is a departure from previous accounts where researchers would study the group itself to learn about its members, rather than analyzing the culture members' shared before they decided to join. In total, this work draws on literature from the sociology of youth, deviance, social movements, suburban studies, and culture.
