It is the sort of demonstration that is unlikely to have made it on to Blue Peter, even during the height of the IRA’s terror campaign. In the shadowy corner of an unfamiliar room, I am watching a video about how to make your own carpet bomb with the help of a couple of loo rolls, the odd football and a salesroom-full of shagpile remnants. In front of the TV, scattered on the floor, are 30 such bombs, made from a variety of household carpets, Persian rugs and prayer mats. Here’s one I vacuumed earlier? No, I haven’t stumbled across some peculiarly crafts-conscious terrorist cell. This is the degree show work of Yara El-Sherbini, a 26-year-old graduate of the Slade School of Art in London.

Grainy footage of El-Sherbini doing bedroom karaoke is playing on the other side of the gallery. Fully clad in a traditional Saudi abaya, she croons through a hookah pipe: “I’d like to buy the world a Coke.” Her microphone prop is not the usual hairbrush but a plastic gun. Her light touch blows me away. El-Sherbini’s work teams world politics and sharp questions. The themes are familiar, of course, but her gritty work makes me feel cathartically uncomfortable.

The Slade was the first stop on my UK tour to find the new faces of British art. Since the early 1990s art school degree shows have become plundering grounds for opportunistic investors and gallerists bent on discovering the hot young thing. The most notable of these collectors is Charles Saatchi; he is on the prowl again this year, for a show to be curated by his former wife, Kay, at an as yet undisclosed location. His visits have the effect of a reality TV show audition: every student catches his or her breath, hoping to be this year’s Chosen One. It was, after all, Saatchi who was largely responsible for the explosion of the YBA or Young British Artist — a term that has gained common currency in the increasingly mercantile world of new art.

In the late 1980s a group of diverse art-school graduates, mainly associated with Goldsmiths College in South London, burst on to the scene with their own distinctive brand of art. The most notorious of this group — Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas — prompted a re-evaluation of the artistic process. Marked by a complete openness towards the materials and processes with which art can be made, the YBA generation provided a neatly packaged, consumer-friendly product. It was, in the main, art that didn’t make us work too hard and that provided polemic dinner-party conversation.

With the YBAs we knew where we stood: we could all scold Emin for her drunken adolescent outbursts and deride Hirst for his transformation from enfant terrible to affluent country gent.

Yet for all that they appeared to exist as a group — coming from the same art schools, showing in the same exhibitions and drinking in the same pubs — the YBAs’ drive for individual celebrity overrode any communal endeavour. What I discovered on my tour was that the artists of the emerging generation often do work as a team, and moreover that they do not aim for the easily accessible or self-congratulatory, nor do they shy from asking hard questions; these are the children of bra-burning mothers and barricade-storming fathers. Here comes art that questions and critiques: “Issue is the new aesthetic,” is how Professor Roger Wilson, of Chelsea College of Art and Design sums it up.

The future trajectory of any new “movement” is impossible to identify as it is emerging, especially when students continue to subvert expectations by crossing the boundaries between disciplines — painters don’t paint and sculptors don’t sculpt. Even so, among these young artists I found a clear re-engagement with the political. It is not fanciful, perhaps, to attribute the increased politicisation of this generation’s work, such as that of El-Sherbini, to the aftermath of September 11.

John Carson, the course director of BA fine art at Central St Martins College of Art and Design, elaborated on this as we visited the college’s degree show: “I think something different is happening now than what was happening 20 years ago. I think a lot of the YBA stuff was initially in the nature of one-liners, jokey work, brash statements; the sensation was the intention. I think you are now getting work which will take on issues with depth.”

In the work of many of these young artists the medium is the message. Amanda Thomson, 40, from Glasgow School of Art, crafted hundreds of spheres from a left-wing newspaper. These are presented to us as cased cannonballs. Mass media have become her medium: we are bombarded by the news every day and yet it loses its potency in repetition.

Such political preoccupations are pursued not just through global concerns but also on a very local and specific level. In the work of Chris Dyson, 22, also a graduate of Glasgow, the backyard is political. From the demolition site of a council estate near where he grew up he salvaged a doll’s house, which now resonates with the soundtrack of the estate; Dyson canvassed former tenants and produced compilation CDs of their favourite music. The house booms tunes and stands now as a repository of memory, lost identity and displaced community, a spooky motif from any little girl’s worst nightmare.

Dyson is representative of young artists today who are working in the space between the poetic and the political. Tanya Eccleston, the head of sculpture and environmental art at Glasgow School of Art, explains this artistic intersection: “Many young artists today are drawing from their communities and seeking something very meaningful in terms of the people they engage with. The work of art implicates the viewer and is often interactive and collaborative.”

Collective endeavour has taken the place of the celebrity-seeking individual. For a group of artists at Chelsea School of Art — Ian Drysdale, Trevor Giles, Tom Neill, Darrel Stadlen and Wei-ho Ng — notions of community have become not only the content but the conduit. Their show has become a temporary community where they explore casual and informal environments to open up the possibility of individual and social interaction.

The successors to Gilbert and George, Sally-Ginger Brockbank and Ed Atkins, both 22, from St Martins, work as a “collaborative artist couple” exploring, as they put it, “an outmoded romanticism mediated through a contemporary context grounded in cynicism”. Out with Tracey and her drunken one-night stands, and in with Sally and Ed — teamwork and romantic love!