K-Pop, Afrobeats, Hustling Waithood, and the N-Po Generation: Youth Cultures As Theory from the South

The sociological study of youth cultures traces its lineage from the Chicago School to the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, where young people's symbolic practices were analysed as sites of class reproduction, socio-economic mobility, and resistance to dominant orders. The sociology of youth cultures in 2027 however reckons with a profoundly changed landscape and can no longer remain Eurocentric for fear of misreading the present and having nothing useful to say about the future.

The Korean wave, South Korea's cultural industries - K-pop, webtoons, and their associated fan ecosystems - have produced youth cultural forms that circulate globally while remaining embedded in local structures of aspiration, precarity, and gendered performance. They force us to ask what 'resistance' means when it is commercially mediated at scale.

Youth cultures across the African continent - Afrobeats, hustling waithood, and technological leapfrogging from Lagos to Nairobi - have emerged as globally influential while rooted in contexts of postcolonial constraint. Here, youth cultures function not merely as expressions of resistance but as engines of economic improvisation.

The stakes are both theoretical and political. Theoretically, incorporating Korean and African youth cultural formations into the comparative canon forces a genuine reckoning with universalist assumptions about what youth cultures are for, and who they speak to. Politically, it has the potential to drive Southern theory into the centre. This open session therefore invites papers engaging with youth cultures outside of the West, individually or comparatively, to beter understand our turbulent world.