Identities, Subjectivities and Language in Juvenile Alcohol Issues

This study looks at changing styles of alcohol consumption and the spread of underage drinking as a crucial nexus in discourse, dialectically involving economic, political and socio-cultural issues with ethical implications. Using an ad hoc corpus of print and web-distributed materials, and examining textual features within a framework of language as social action, the study explores how this discursive nexus is deployed in the dynamics of subject positioning on alcohol issues, highlighting different stances in the representations of the alcohol scenario with particular emphasis on the depiction and evaluation of ‘young alcohol’.