The Passions of Youth

《青春的激情》是在AHRC支持的专著《成为男孩》的研究基础上进行的，它旨在展示“普通”工人阶级青年男性在青少年时期的创造潜力，以替代对工人阶级青年男性的流行假设，这种假设往往忽视普通和日常，专注于特殊、耸人听闻和消极的东西。该方案侧重于“参与者”，即那些积极遵循特定休闲兴趣的人，旨在加强和验证他们的选择，并将他们的热情传达给公众。《青春的激情》歌颂的是工人阶级的年轻人在参加特定的休闲活动时经常发展出来的技能和经历，在这个例子中是足球、高速公路和音乐。该项目通过曼彻斯特和索尔福德的三个团体：曼彻斯特联队、Belle Vue Aces（高速公路）和索尔福德青年中心交付，并使用各种创造性的方法和这些共同的休闲激情的媒介，使十几岁的工人阶级年轻人和20世纪40年代至70年代的青少年年龄较大的工人阶级男性探索不断变化的青年经历。年轻的工人阶级男性将有权塑造自己的休闲经历，以及对年龄和工人阶级男子气概的另类诠释。《青春的激情》不仅仅是关于活动本身，在这里，足球、音乐和赛车；它为参与者提供了反思的机会，让他们对这些活动所使用的广泛技能有更多的自我意识，从社会互动和协作到自给自足和应变能力。由年轻人自己选择的一系列创造性活动将帮助他们获得新的技能和信心，将他们的休闲追求融入更广泛的历史和社区背景。这些活动将建立知识和信心，给个人一种权力和所有权的感觉，帮助他们传达他们特定的休闲热情的个人意义，并与他们直接环境之外的其他人分享、学习和反思。参与的年轻人将发展一系列个人和可转移的技能，在创作项目的创意和社会方面变得经验丰富，创建新的档案和收藏，阐明自己的想法，并展示如何利用历史“做一些积极的事情”。2014年和2015年曼彻斯特历史节的参与将为该项目的创造性成果提供大量观众。将鼓励当地社区为这些年轻人的专业知识感到自豪，提高公众对他们潜力的认识，并挑战对他们行为的普遍刻板印象。“青春激情”活动是基于曼彻斯特城市大学、社区组织和大曼彻斯特地区创意专业人士之间的合作伙伴关系和可持续的创意参与，这将使年轻人能够向彼此和公众展示和展示他们独特的休闲热情。该提案的潜在目的是传达人文科学研究的潜力，以激发对工人阶级年轻人生活方面的新鲜和创新方法，这些方面通常被公众和更广泛的政治辩论所忽视和看不到。

The Passions of Youth, which follows on from research conducted for an AHRC supported monograph, Being Boys, intends to showcase the creative potential of 'ordinary' working-class young men in their teens as an alternative to popular assumptions made about working-class young men, which tend to ignore the ordinary and everyday and focus on the exceptional, sensational and negative. This proposal focuses on the 'joiners', those who have actively followed particular leisure interests, with the aim of strengthening and validating their choices and communicating their enthusiasm for them to a public audience. The Passions of Youth celebrates the skills and experiences that working-class young men often develop when they participate in particular leisure activities, in this case football, speedway and music. The project is delivered through three groups in Manchester and Salford: FC United of Manchester, Belle Vue Aces (Speedway) and Salford Youth Hub, and uses a variety of creative approaches and the medium of these shared leisure passions to enable working-class young men in their teens and older working-class men who were teenagers between the 1940s and 1970s to explore changing experiences of youth. The young working-class men will be empowered to shape their own narratives of their leisure experiences and alternative interpretations of age and working-class masculinity. The Passions of Youth is more than about the activity itself, in this case, football, music and speedway racing; it offers participants opportunities to reflect on and become more self-aware of the wide range of skills these activities utilise, from social interaction and collaboration to self-sufficiency and resilience. A range of creative activities, chosen by the young men themselves, will help them to acquire new skills and the confidence to put their leisure pursuit into a broader historical and community context. The activities will build up knowledge and confidence by giving individuals a sense of empowerment and ownership to help them convey the personal meanings of their particular leisure enthusiasm and share, learn and reflect on it with others outside their immediate environment. The young men who participate will develop a range personal and transferable skills, becoming experienced in authoring the creative and social aspects of their projects, creating new archives and collections, articulating their own ideas and showing how history can be used to 'do something positive'. The involvement of Manchester Histories and the Manchester Histories Festivals in 2014 and 2015 will provide large audiences for the project's creative outcomes. Local communities will be encouraged to take pride in the expertise of these young men, public awareness of their potential will be raised and popular stereotypes of their behaviour will be challenged. The Passions of Youth is based on collaborative partnerships and sustainable, creative engagements between Manchester Metropolitan University, community organisations and those working in the creative professions across Greater Manchester, which will enable the young men to present and showcase their particular leisure enthusiasms to each other and to the public. The proposal's underlying aim is to communicate the potential of humanities research to stimulate fresh and innovative approaches to aspects of working-class young men's lives which are usually overlooked and unseen by the public and in broader political debates.