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Sociological studies into alcohol use seem to find it difficult to deal with the substance itself. Alcohol tends to be reduced to a symbol of a social process and in this way the sociological research loses sight of effects beyond the social. This article suggests a new theoretical approach to the study of alcohol and teenagers' (romantic) relationships, inspired by actor-network theory (ANT). The central feature of ANT is to search for relationships, or rather networks, between all things relevant to the phenomenon. All material and semantic structures, things, persons, discourses, etc. that influence a given situation are described as actants and are entered into the analysis. The aim of this article is to propose a way of including materiality in sociological analyses of alcohol and to explore ways of using focus group interview material in ANT-inspired analysis. By analysing a girl's development from being a non-drinker at the age of 14, to a heavy drinker at 16, the article investigates how the actants brought out by young people in the focus groups themselves constitute different forms of agency. The analysis is based on a qualitative study consisting of 37 focus groups conducted with teenagers in Denmark over a three-year period.

This article argues for a need for spatial analyses in the study of youth cultures and youth subjectivities. With this aim, we propose a theoretical framework drawing on concepts from cultural class analysis and human geography. Empirically, the article is based on 10 focus groups with young people (n = 80) in four different parts of Denmark. The interviews included a photo elicitation exercise and the analysis in this article focuses on one particular picture of two young 'hipster' men. By using the figure of the hipster as an analytical case, the article illustrates how individual and spatial identities are co-constructed, not just alongside each other (relationally) but also hierarchically. Hence, 'place-making practices' are also 'people-making practices' and vice versa. Through this, the article engages with discussions in youth studies as well as in human geography about the importance of paying attention to structural inequalities.

This article explores youth drinking in Zurich, Switzerland, on both public squares away from nightlife areas, referred to as 'square street drinking' and on the street within the vicinity of nightclubs, defined as 'club street drinking'. Taking a relational space approach, the analysis adds a social perspective to the dominant economic-political perspective to drinking in urban nightlife zones. The results suggest that the normative landscapes of drinking are constructed differently: the same regulation by police and social workers works differently between the two areas both in terms of inclusion and exclusion as well as in terms of how the material and social dimensions interact. Production and regulation are dependent on how young people participate in these processes. This finding suggests that it would be fruitful to develop a regulation approach on drinking in the post-industrial city that is sensitive to young people as co-producers of space.

This article analyzes the meaning of alcohol in relation to young people's sexuality, with focus on acquaintance rape. Drinking is a way to stage oneself as mature; it is intentionally used by both male and female youth to make sexual pleasure possible. It is argued that in the context of sexuality among young people, there is a fine line between freedom and gender-specific restrictions. The research on acquaintance rape and alcohol drinking among the youth is traditionally dominated by the concept of risk. This article introduces the concept of chance, along with risk, to grasp the complexities of the grey zone situations of acquaintance rape among the youth. The risk of social stigma within the gender game increases with drinking alcohol simultaneously as the chances of expanding the limitations of gender roles also increase with drinking. These social stigmas, embedded in the gender roles, are central to understanding when a pleasurable situation turns into an acquaintance rape. The article is based on 95 police reports of rape and 37 focus groups on alcohol and sexuality of the Danish youth. The analysis takes it onset in a single case.

A growing share of illicit drug distribution takes place using cryptomarkets that use encryption and anonymization technologies. The risks of law enforcement intervention and violence are lower here than in off-line traditional drug markets, but with the technological innovations follow new opportunities for stealing and fraud. The sites themselves fall prey to theft and hacking attempts, administrators abscond with users' funds, and malicious sellers regularly cheat buyers. In this study, we explore the types of theft and fraud that occur on cryptomarkets using multiple data sources: formalized community resources (e.g., guides, tutorials), ethnographic observations of user forums, thematic identification of forum posts using unsupervised text classification, and an expert interview. We find system-based violent predatory resource exchange similar to robberies and process-based fraudulent resource exchange similar to rip-offs. We discuss these offenses conceptually as extensions of common drug-related crimes in the digital world. This contributes to the research on how cryptomarkets work and can improve crime-prevention efforts.

The article accounts for qualitative knowledge on European adolescents' (n=326) ad literacy, genre scepticism and persuasion knowledge as expressed in group discussions about televised beer commercials. Data was collected from six European countries: Denmark, Finland, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, and Poland. A general scepticism regarding the commercials' tactics of persuasion dominated the material as a whole. There were no significant cross-country, gender or age variations between the materials regarding the level of ad scepticism. The students had great beliefs in their own coping and resisting abilities and attempts of persuasion were generally judged as unlikely to succeed. The study suggests that critical ad-literacy is not culturally bound to the same extent as attitudes towards drinking. The researchers point out an opportunity to use the format of the FGs to stimulate the expression of persuasion knowledge among young people.