# Transcript

INTERVIEWER
Let me just bring you in here, Shawn. I mean, you've researched youth culture and private space in the United Kingdom. To what extent do the young people in your study regard their bedrooms, or speak about their bedrooms as extensions of themselves? The idea, this is me, this is where I am?
SHAWN
Yeah. I mean, I think Jason's sort of example of arriving back to his home and seeing his room is quite significantly changed does sort of highlight some of the kind of key uses of bedrooms by young people. Of course, the bedroom is one of the first spaces that they have any control over, one of the first spaces that they can call their own. Even if their bedrooms are shared, often, young people do find a way of actually kind of marking out that space and being able to use the resources that they have available to them to say, this is me. This is my corner of the room. This is my space sort of within the house. It's one of the first spaces in terms of who young people can actually let into the room. One of the first spaces that they can regulate.
INTERVIEWER
Some people-- I've read about once, people even have love doorbells on their rooms before people get in, or signs, keep out.
SHAWN
Absolutely. And you know, this is a very kind of physical marker of kind of marking out that this is your space. And certainly, in my research, which comes from a more ethnographic background, a number of my participants did use those sorts of things. So literally, doorbells on the front of their bedroom doors that their parents had to ring before they entered it.
INTERVIEWER
And this growth in the teen bedroom culture, I mean, would you link it to the idea of the rise of the concept of adolescence as part of almost a new invented name for part of the life cycle?
SHAWN
Yes, absolutely. I mean, I think that's a really sort of critical sort of idea that certainly unites Jason's work and my more sort of contemporary work. And the sort of recognition of adolescence and teenage as sort of social categories in their own right, you know, that this is a different period in your life. It's not about being a child. It's not about being an adult. It's a very turbulent period in a young person's life. When they're having to work through sort of new emotions, physical changes, new friendships, numerous transitions, it's probably one of the most sort of turbulent periods in one's life. And so the idea that they ought to have a space where they can have time to work through some of these changes--
INTERVIEWER
So you can argue, in a way, for separate space. Because you've now got a separate category called the adolescent. And adolescents, therefore, need a separate space.
SHAWN
Absolutely. And also, if you sort of think about the post-war context as well, when we start to see the rise of the teen markets, when sort of popular cultural products are being made specifically for teenagers-- particularly in relation to music and to magazines-- rock and roll music, for example. This is something that was very alien to these teenager's parents. So in many ways, those resources were kind of feeding into what we now understand as bedroom culture-- you know, listening to this weird music, reading these strange magazines that weren't accessible to them in the context or in the confines of their bedrooms.
INTERVIEWER
Because, I mean, in recent times, a sociologist like Angela Robbie criticised some of the subcultural studies of the '70s, because they didn't really look at girl's culture. I mean, you want, in a way that perhaps they were looking outside. They weren't paying enough attention, you'd want to say, to what was going on at home to the bedroom.
SHAWN
Yeah, absolutely. And Robin Garber's account is really seminal, in as much as it's getting us to think about why girls were not appearing in discourses about youth culture, about young people in public spaces. And one of their arguments was that that was because young women were primarily living out their cultural lives in the domestic sphere. Their bedrooms were about training up to be wives and mothers. They had domestic responsibilities. They didn't necessarily have the freedoms of their male counterparts. And of course, bedroom spaces were not easily accessible to the--
INTERVIEWER
Researchers.
SHAWN
--researchers, absolutely.

INTERVIEWER

SHAWN