Race in Australia’s youthful urban leisure scenes

Within the context of hyper surveillance and panic over young people’s political and creative forms of participation, we draw on biographical interviews to explore how young people from socio-economically disadvantaged and migrant backgrounds of Sydney's Western suburbs participate in Slam Poetry scenes. Slam poetry is a global cultural activity, with a strong base in places like Western Sydney where young people from minority backgrounds collectively develop a shared language of resistance. Indeed, it is argued that neo-tribal leisure scenes are important sites for understanding how young people construct their identities as “pleasure citizens” in collectivist terms (Riley, S., Y. Morey, and C. Griffin. 2010. “The ‘Pleasure Citizen’ Analyzing Partying as a Form of Social and Political Participation.” Young 18 (1): 33–54). We aim to build on this argument, considering how categories of ethnicity, class and gender are embodied by our informants within youthful forms of sociality.