Ned culture, rituals and resistance: The enduring spectre of class in contemporary youth studies

Marking 50 years since Resistance Through Rituals (RTR), this article argues for RTR’s renewal not as canon but as a conjunctural, neo-dialectical method for contemporary youth studies. Against post-subcultural framings that privilege lifestyle pluralism and individual choice, the article re-centres class as the structuring presence through which difference is produced and penalised under neoliberalism. First, it restates RTR’s core principle – to read cultural form conjuncturally across economy, state, and everyday life – and situates recent academic drift within the wider reorganisation of work, welfare, urban space, and penalisation. The article then uses original research on Ned Culture in Glasgow (circa 1995–2008) as a case study, drawing on archival materials, oral histories, and memoryscape to show how territorial rituals, aesthetic codes, grey economies, and non-market music circuits (PC-DJing), functioned as patterned practical responses to territorial stigmatisation, and spatial dispossession. Such forms operated as a type of social infrastructure, organising recognition, distributing risk, and mediating access, while simultaneously dignifying and disciplining – a contradiction that was constitutive rather than incidental. Building from this, the article proposes a simple criterion for assessing resistance in the current context: what a practice shifts (vulnerability, legibility, infrastructure), for whom, at what level and duration, and how authority responds. In conclusion, it is argued RTR remains analytically indispensable when utilised as a living method that maps determinations and reads youth cultural practice as labour on contradiction in a hyper-neoliberal conjuncture.