Doing Youth in Diaries. Diaries of Adolescents as a Youth Cultural Phenomenon (1830-1930)

• Applicant: Dr. Sylvia Wehren
• Subject Area: General Education and History of Education
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 525538148

Diaries are considered important media of adolescence, which is why they are included in diverse research. Based on a corpus of historical diaries of adolescents from the years 1830 to 1930, the project aims to research the formation of the phenomenon of youth in the medium and thus to reconstruct the history of the modern youth diary for the first time. The project is based on the thesis that in the course of the 19th and at the beginning of the 20th century, the diary changed from a primarily pedagogically used medium, which adolescents often wrote under supervision and with educational intentions, to a space more appropriated by young people, which is characterised by practices of doing youth. The aim is to investigate when adolescents start to see themselves as youth and youthful in the diary and how they appropriate the medium in this regard. Since feelings are a central dimension of the practices of adolescent subjectification in the diary, one accent of the analyses is on the question of which orders of feeling are tied to the emergence of adolescent diary cultures. Diaries are understood in this study as historically changing, communicative and multimedia spaces with different functions that enable differentiated practices of subjectivation for children and youth, which are bound up in particular relations of power and dependency. A special feature of this study is an intersectionally oriented approach, which focuses on the connection between gender and class with regard to the formation of youth culture in diaries, taking religiosity into account. The corpus will be based on diaries from upper middle-class, educated middle-class and aristocratic contexts as well as on writings from lower middle-class, artisanal, (sub-)proletarian and peasant milieus. The question is how social backgrounds affect youth cultural appropriation of the medium in German-speaking areas and what gender-differentiated practices can be identified in the process. The project goes beyond previous studies, because the collection of historical youth diaries for the period between 1830 and 1930 have so far neither been comprehensively recorded nor systematically processed. Moreover, there is no study of the concept and phenomenon of youth for this early historical phase that is based on a larger gender- and socially heterogeneous collection of youthful self-testimonies. Thus, the project contributes to self-testimony research in youth history, just as it pursues the foundation of youth diary research oriented toward the history of education. Methodologically, the project refers to approaches of discourse and artefact analysis within the framework of praxeological considerations; these are supplemented by (collective) biographical perspectives.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants