Making time for the tribes

This chapter argues for better attending to the way young people make time for cultural practices with others, something often taken for granted in both subcultural and post-subcultural framings of youth culture. Drawing on multiple rounds of data collection (2008 and 2017) from a mixed-methods study of youth in Australia, I show how the individualising social structure that shapes contemporary lives means that investments and demands in one sphere, such as employment, often do not articulate easily with those in other spheres, such as leisure. The timetables and rhythms of the participant's lives are constantly varying in ways that are difficult to control and 'non-standard' hours of employment are common. Contemporary life demands efforts, often drawing on digital technology, to synchronise schedules to engage in leisure and collectively create and consume culture offline. A paradox of contemporary life for these participants is that periods of collective creativity and 'tribal' abandon require active synchronisation, and even routinisation for it to take place, yet it is exactly this 'effort' that goes into finding time for co-present 'tribal' abandon that can amplify a 'special occasion effect' that heightens the pull towards liminal experience when the 'gang is all together again'.