(Im)Mobile Youth?: Globalisation, Leisure and Social Change in Scotland and Hong Kong

In recent years, the 'global' question has become central to debate in the social sciences. For some, processes of globalisation have increased mobility of people, culture and technology; for others, access to 'global' culture remains sharply stratified by access to resources, with those at the margins rendered increasingly immobile, both spatially and socially. At the same time, however, the globalisation of ‘mobile’ technology has opened up corridors of dialogue and interaction between disparate cultures and communities in ways that are both emergent and inchoate. These new ‘geographies of mobility’ strike at the heart of debates surrounding the lived experiences of globalisation: the tension between ‘spaces of place’ and ‘spaces of flows’. These debates have a particular resonance for young people, whose lives are lived at the precarious frontier of the global economy, and the leading-edge of global consumer culture.

This paper will engage with these debates through reflection on emergent findings from an ongoing comparative study of youth leisure, funded by the ESRC, in two geographically and culturally diverse research sites: Scotland and Hong Kong. The study adopts a historical and cross-cultural comparative design, building on landmark research carried out in both study locations by the pioneering sociologist Pearl Jephcott; involving concurrent fieldwork and data-collection in communities in both locales - including ethnographic observations, stakeholder interviews, focus group discussions, oral history interviews, and on-line data-collection. While methodologically rooted in these ‘spaces of place’, the paper will engage with the new configurations of power, identity, scale and mobility thrown up by the emergent ‘spaces of flows’ that compose the lived experience of youthful global modernities.