As a construct of my generation, the hipster must also be affected by and affecting the forces of globalization and the post-modern condition (Harvey 1989). So what do international students perspectives on the hipster reveal about our generation, our social concerns, and our place in a world so often defined by the seemingly undefinable and inescapable forces of post-modernism and globalization? Despite the generalized use of hipster in American youth culture, and the supposed globalizing of American culture, the international participants in my study highlighted the local boundaries of subculture. Some of the basic signs and symbols of hipster do not change across cultures; however, the distinctly American (or at most American-European) concepts and consequences of identity which are essential to hipster, like individualism, race, and class, cannot transfer across cultures homogeneously.
2012 Doing Scene: Identity, Space and the International Accomplishment of Youth Culture. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography (41): 695-716.
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