This chapter is a joint production bringing together a PhD supervisor and post-PhD early career researcher focused on exploring Herbert G. Blumer's (1969 [1954]) ‘sensitizing concepts’ developed within the symbolic interactionist approach. Our sensitizing concepts are intimacy, exchange, and friendship, which form the basis to understand and interpret data from a series of ethnographic studies on young people and subcultures. We look across our separate research studies and research sites and select examples from fieldwork as part of a joint research imaginary that brings together sociological analysis and the teaching of subcultures.

On this basis, we suggest that sensitizing concepts allow meaning to emerge containing the words and thoughts of research participants, which can then be open to the practice of interpretation. We begin this chapter by first outlining our research biographies to contextualize our backgrounds, highlighting our experience in the study of subcultures. Second, we explain our research positionality, related to the Chicago School of sociology and Blumer's theory of sensitizing concepts. Third, we specify our pedagogic approach to teaching subcultures through fieldwork and interpretation. In the final section, we introduce a series of ethnographic data vignettes focusing on intimacy, exchange, and friendship that sensitize students to the practice of interpretation.

Background and context: Barnett's and Blackman's research studies

Laura Barnett was an undergraduate taught by Shane Blackman who then became his PhD supervisee and subsequently, academic colleague teaching sociological approaches to research for final year undergraduates. We draw on our shared knowledge and commitment to research through this academic journey by doing ethnographic studies on young adults’ roles in subcultural groupings in the fields of education, alcohol, drugs, deviance, poverty, and youth cultural style. We investigate subcultures through fieldwork and teaching.

Laura : In this chapter I refer to data collected as part of my PhD scholarship at Canterbury Christ Church University. My thesis was titled: ‘Pleasure, Agency, Space and Place: An Ethnography of Youth Drinking Cultures in a Southwest London Community’ (Barnett, 2017). The study involved three years of fieldwork alongside young people, subcultural groups, and community members to explore youth alcohol consumption values and practices, and community responses to them.