Knowra Counterculture Counterculture A movement whose values and practices reject dominant social norms. Countercultures often build alternative ways of living, creating art, and organizing community.
Beat Generation : A postwar literary and social movement associated with experimental writing, spiritual exploration, and rejection of conventional respectability. Its writers shaped an early model of postwar dissent that later countercultures drew upon.
Subculture : A group within a larger society whose shared practices and meanings distinguish it from the mainstream. Counterculture is a form of subculture distinguished by opposition to dominant norms.
J. Milton Yinger : An American sociologist who introduced the term “contraculture” in a 1960 article on groups in conflict with their surrounding societies. His terminology helped establish a social-scientific framework for studying counterculture.
May 1968 events in France : A wave of student protests and worker strikes that disrupted France in May and June 1968. The events joined youth revolt and labor action in a challenge to established authority.
Mainstream culture : The widely shared values, practices, and cultural products regarded as conventional in a society. Countercultures define themselves in opposition to norms treated as mainstream.
Hippie movement : A youth movement of the 1960s associated with communal living, antiwar activism, psychedelic culture, and rejection of materialism. It became the best-known American counterculture of the 1960s.
Cultural hegemony : The process by which dominant groups secure consent by making their values seem like common sense. Countercultures contest the taken-for-granted assumptions that hegemony reproduces.
Theodore Roszak : An American historian and critic who analyzed 1960s youth dissent in his 1969 book The Making of a Counter Culture. Roszak popularized the term through his account of youth opposition to technocratic society.
Sexual revolution : A broad shift in sexual attitudes and practices, especially in Western societies during the 1960s and 1970s. Countercultural challenges to conventional morality contributed to changing public attitudes toward sexuality.
Social movement : A sustained collective effort to promote or resist social change through shared action. Counterculture overlaps with social movements but also centers everyday values, styles, and practices.
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