Collapsing contexts: social networking technologies in young people’s nightlife

In the latest discussions of children and young people’s new geographies of leisure and pleasure, one controversial issue has been how digital technologies co-produce and reconfigure young people’s everyday worlds. This article draws on semi-structured interviews with 40 young people who regularly use social networking technologies in their nightlife experiences in Zurich and Lausanne, two nightlife hubs in Switzerland. Informed by Danah Boyd’s concepts of ‘collapsing contexts’ and ‘imagined audiences’, this article enables a critical engagement with young people’s emerging understanding of their nightlife contexts, which are increasingly permeated by networking technologies. I show how social networking spaces facilitate the coming together, or collapse, of various social contexts which induce young people to imagine multiple audiences, including authority figures, in their nightlife practices. These collapsing contexts and imagined audiences, I argue, present new perspectives on debates about control and surveillance in young people’s contemporary urban nightlife.     

Club Carib: a geo-ethnography of seduction in a Lisbon dancing bar

Over the last three decades, nightlife has become one of the most important time–spaces for the reproduction of human relationships. In this paper, we examine Club Carib, a particular nightlife space in Lisbon’s Bairro Alto neighbourhood. Our focus is on the flirting strategies that occur during dance sessions. We examine the ways in which these seduction strategies operate in relation to particular constructions of race, class, cultural capital and gender. Particular attention is paid to the ways in which young adult straight males use their bodies to negotiate the dance space. We describe how the dance space is an environment in which the (hetero)normative and patriarchal character of Lisbon’s nightlife is often reinscribed, but also at times contested.     

The juridification of nightlife and alternative culture: two UK case studies

Nightlife, the night‐time economy and ‘alternative’ culture have been a source of academic contestation over recent years, with differing views as to the direction and meaning of the contemporary drift of law and policy that serve to regulate this area of social and cultural life. Further, there have so far been few attempts to theorise the nature of change. This article aims to highlight some key theoretical underpinnings that can facilitate an understanding of the kinds of regulatory innovation that pervade nightlife and alternative cultural forms. Using two case studies – free or alternative festivals and Form 696 – it specifically draws on the concepts of disciplinary power and juridification as a way of theorising both the acceleration of regulatory forms and its impact on the production of alternative culture.     

Producing Vancouver's (hetero)normative nightscape

The article argues, through an examination of Vancouver's entertainment district as an actively produced ‘civilizing’ space dominated by private enterprise, that it is important to understand the ‘mainstream’ as a grounded site which produces, maintains and reiterates the moral contours of heterosexuality (among other things) within the city. Nightclubs in particular, experienced as spaces of hypermasculinity and hyperfemininity, offer a prime example of how the union of governmentality, surveillance and private enterprise work together in the maintenance and regulation of social conformity. Drawing upon an ethnographic study from 2005 to 2006, I explore the entertainment district and highlight young adults' perceptions of its nightlife economy and how space, hegemonic sexuality and nightlife collide.