24 Hour Party People? An Ethnographic Study of Hedonism in Stoke-on-Trent’s Night-Time-Economies.

This thesis is an examination of the place of hedonism in the contemporary night-time- economy in Stoke on Trent. Based on ethnography, and extensive in depth interviewing and participant observation in a range of social settings in and around the city, it considers the changes and continuities that frame experiences of sybaritic harms in Stoke, particularly in its nocturnal drinking venues.
The thesis commences with a consideration of the historical socio, economic, political and cultural place of Stoke-on-Trent, a unique and yet hitherto little considered area in the United Kingdom that is now understood as post-industrial. It moves from this to consider framing debates on violence, consumerism, individualism and inebriation and the surrounding framing criminological debate around these concepts, before moving to consider specifically how the NTE has been understood as a context for social harm. It moves then to revisit this literature and use it, developing emergent criminological ideas associated with Ultra-realism to consider contemporary harms in the NTE of Stoke, a hitherto largely unstudied context that has transformed from a hub of nightlife to a decaying nocturnal economy.
It makes a significant knowledge contribution in the form of empirical material gathered through extensive ethnographic engagement and uses much of the thick data from this to show how the NTE and hedonistic drives in Stoke can be understood within the wider macro-context of neoliberalism. It then ties this data to theories and ideas emerging from Ultra-realism, seeking to broaden and reconsider how we understand the dynamics and complexities of social harms in the NTE.