Introduction: Youth culture research in Australia

In 2012, we convened a two-day symposium on youth subcultures in Australia. When we organised the event (with Chris Driver, who co-convened the symposium), we didn’t quite know what to expect; however, we did know there was a critical mass of research being done on youth culture in Australia at the time. We seized on the opportunity to bring some of it together – or to at least put the voices in the field together in the same room to see what would happen. The result was two days of stimulating research and an exchange of ideas that we think we have effectively captured in this edited collection. We intentionally scheduled time for lengthy discussions following each panel, and those discussions helped to reshape the papers presented over those two days (or to spark entirely new lines of thinking) that are now committed to the pages of this book.