Youth, Place and Theories of Belonging 9781138559622, 9780203712412

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What I like about this book is that it is innovative and challenging, bringing new thinking to Youth Studies. It is taking the work on ‘belonging’ and ‘place’ to another level and showing how these concepts can help us understand young people’s lives . . . a must read for people working in the Youth Studies field. Alan France, Professor of Sociology, University of Auckland, New Zealand This is a wonderful collection of chapters theorizing the relationships between young people, place and belonging. Not only does it include researchers from a range of places around the globe, but it also includes a significant range of theoretical perspectives on belonging. More than that as well as some worldrenowned youth studies scholars, it highlights the critical contributions of emerging and new researchers. A rich, illuminating and compelling read! Barbara Comber, Research Professor, University of South Australia, Australia In this timely and exceptional edited collection, an international set of social theorists offer up new forms and diverse ways of theorizing and connecting young people’s sense of place, space, identity and belonging, taking readers into some of the most forward-thinking provocations in sociology today. Pamela Burnard, Professor of Creativities, University of Cambridge, UK

Youth, Place and Theories of Belonging

Drawing on interdisciplinary perspectives, Youth, Place and Theories of Belonging showcases cutting-edge empirical research on young people’s lifeworlds. The scholars demonstrate that belonging is personal, infused with individual and collective histories as well as interwoven with conceptions of place. In studying how young people adapt to social change, the research highlights the plurality of belonging, as well as its temporal and fleeting nature. In the field of youth studies, we have seen a recent emphasis on studying the ways youth live out everyday multiculturalisms in an increasingly globalised world. How young people negotiate belonging in everyday life and how they come to understand their positions in fragmented societies remain emerging areas of scholarship. Composed of twelve chapters, the collection references key sites and institutions in young people’s lives such as schools, community/cultural centres, neighbourhoods and spaces of consumption. Drawing from diverse areas such as the rural, the urban as well as displacements and mobilities, this international collection enhances our understanding of the theories employed in the study of youth identity practices. Written in a direct and clear style, this collection of essays will be of interest to researchers working in geography, theories of affect, gender, mobility, performativities, and theories of space/place. Investigating how young people come to belong can open up new spaces and provide critical insights into young people’s identities. Sadia Habib is the author of Learning and Teaching British Values: Policies and Perspectives on British Identities (2017). She has nine years of teaching experience in UK schools and colleges. She holds a PhD from Goldsmiths, University of London, UK, where she conducted arts-based educational research with young Londoners to learn about their conceptions of local, national and transnational identities and belongings, as well as to observe the critical pedagogies involved in identity work in the classroom. She is co-founder of The Riz Test and co-editor of The Bookslamist. Michael R. M. Ward is a Lecturer in Social Sciences at Swansea University. His work centres on the performance of working-class masculinities within and beyond educational institutions. He is the author of the award-winning book From Labouring to Learning: Working-Class Masculinities, Education and De-Industrialization (2015) and co-convener of the British Sociological Association Education Study Group. Dr Ward has held visiting scholarships in Canada, the USA, Iceland and Germany.

Sociological Futures Series Editors: Eileen Green, John Horne, Caroline Oliver, Louise Ryan

Sociological Futures aims to be a flagship series for new and innovative theories, methods and approaches to sociological issues and debates and ‘the social’ in the 21st century. This series of monographs and edited collections was inspired by the vibrant wealth of British Sociological Association (BSA) symposia on a wide variety of sociological themes. Edited by a team of experienced sociological researchers, and supported by the BSA, it covers a wide range of topics related to sociology and sociological research and will feature contemporary work that is theoretically and methodologically innovative, has local or global reach, as well as work that engages or reengages with classic debates in sociology bringing new perspectives to important and relevant topics. The BSA is the professional association for sociologists and sociological research in the United Kingdom, with an extensive network of members, study groups and forums, and a dynamic programme of events. The Association engages with topics ranging from auto/biography to youth, climate change to violence against women, alcohol to sport, and Bourdieu to Weber. This book series represents the finest fruits of sociological enquiry, for a global audience, and offers a publication outlet for sociologists at all career and publishing stages, from wellestablished to emerging sociologists, BSA or non-BSA members, from all parts of the world. Climate Change and Intergenerational Justice Tracey Skillington Social Beings, Future Belongings Reimagining the Social Edited by Anna Tsalapatanis, Miranda Bruce, David Bissell, Helen Keane Youth, Place and Theories of Belonging Edited by Sadia Habib and Michael R. M. Ward For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/ Sociological-Futures/book-series/SOCFUT

Youth, Place and Theories of Belonging

Edited by Sadia Habib and Michael R. M. Ward

First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 selection and editorial matter, Sadia Habib and Michael R. M. Ward; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Sadia Habib and Michael R. M. Ward to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice : Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-55962-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-203-71241-2 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

List of illustrations Notes on the contributors Foreword 1 Introduction: investigating youth and belonging

ix x xvii 1

S A D I A H A B I B A ND MI CHAE L R. M. WARD

2 Expanding theoretical boundaries from youth transitions to belonging and new materiality

12

J O H A N N A W Y N , HE RNÁN CUE RVO AND JUL I A CO O K

3 Surveillance, belonging and community spaces for young people from refugee backgrounds in Australia

25

M E L A N I E B A A K, RE NAE S UMME RS , S HE PARD MA SO CH A , D E I R D R E T E D MANS ON, P E T E R GAL E , JOHANNE S PIETERS A N D AWI T K U AC

4 Queering Timmies: theorising LGBTQ youth claiming and making space in Surrey, BC, Canada

39

J E N N I F E R M A RCHBANK AND T I F FANY MUL L E R MY R D A H L

5 ‘Adults decided our fate’: children and young people navigating space, territory and conflicting identities in the ‘new’ Northern Ireland

51

FA I T H G O R D O N

6 Travel imaginaries of youth in New York City: history, ethnicity and the politics of mobility J O H N L O E WE NT HAL AND JOHN BROUGHTON

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Contents

7 Women, spatial scales and belonging: signalling inequality in Latin America

80

A N A M I R A N DA AND MI L E NA ARANCI BI A

8 Brotherhood and belonging: creating pedagogic spaces for positive discourses of Aboriginal youth

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N AY I A C O M I NOS , DAVI D CAL DWE L L AND KATIE G LO ED E

9 Belonging without believing? Making space for marginal masculinities at the Young Men’s Christian Association in the United Kingdom and The Gambia

109

R O S S W I G N AL L

10 Precarious class positions in Spam City: youth, place and class in the ‘missing middle’

122

K AT Y M C E WAN

11 Arenas of empowerment? Case study of a ‘multicultural’ high school in Oslo, Norway

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PA U L T H O M AS , MARE N S E E HAWE R AND S ANDRA FY LK ESN ES

12 Local and refugee youth in rural Australia: negotiating intercultural relationships and belonging in rural places

147

R O S E B U T L ER

13 Politics of class and belonging in Pakistan: student learning, communities of practice and social mobility

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M U N TA S I R S AT TAR

14 Conclusion: youth and belonging: agency, place and negotiation

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S A D I A H A B IB AND MI CHAE L R. M. WARD

Index

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Illustrations

Figures 8.1 8.2 8.3

Solidarity and language Activity 2: Group work Activity 10: Group work

102 102 104

Tables 8.1 8.2

On-field excerpt Activity 6: Group discussion

103 103

Contributors

Milena Arancibia received her degree in sociology from the University of Buenos Aires (UBA), Argentina, her master’s degree in urban studies from the National University of General Sarmiento (UNGS) and her diploma in Youth Studies and Policies from the Latin American School of Social Sciences (FLACSO). She is working as a researcher in the Youth Research Programme of FLACSO, Argentina, and doing her PhD studies in social sciences at the UBA with the financial support of the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET) (PhD scholarship 2013–18). Her research interests include youth, labour, cities, inequality and gender. Melanie Baak is a Research Fellow in the School of Education at the University of South Australia and the convenor of the Migration and Refugee Research Network (MARRNet). Her research and teaching interests broadly cover areas of equity and inclusion, particularly in schools, with a focus on refugee education and resettlement. She is currently a chief investigator on an ARC Linkage project, exploring how schools foster refugee student resilience. Her first book is Negotiating belongings: stories of forced migration of Dinka women from South Sudan (Sense, 2016). John Broughton is an Associate Professor of Psychology and Education, heading the Cultural Studies initiative in the Department of Arts and Humanities at Teachers College, Columbia University. He holds an MA from the University of Cambridge and a PhD in psychology from Harvard University. His areas of academic interest include media and popular culture as informal education, youth cultures and subcultures, film theory, gender and transgender, military technologies and trauma/PTSD. He is the editor of Critical theories of psychological development (Springer, 1987) and Cultural studies, education and youth: beyond schools (Lexington, 2001). Rose Butler is a postdoctoral researcher at the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation at Deakin University, Australia. Her research crosses the disciplines of sociology, youth studies and anthropology with a focus on children and youth, class and culture, multiculturalism and globalisation, schooling and social change and rural livelihoods. Her current postdoctoral

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project investigates the changing landscape of rural multicultures for youth. Rose is co-editor of the special issue ‘Asian Migration and Education Cultures in the Anglo-Sphere’ in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, and her forthcoming book is Class, culture and belonging in rural childhoods (Springer, 2018). David Caldwell is a Lecturer in English Language and Literacy in the School of Education, University of South Australia. David completed his Bachelor of Teaching, Bachelor of Arts (Hons) and Master of Arts in linguistics at Deakin University (Melbourne), and his PhD in linguistics at the University of Sydney. David is particularly interested in the application of systemic functional linguistics to contemporary language contexts. These have included post-match interviews with AFL footballers, medical consultations with hospital patients and Kanye West’s rap music. He is currently investigating a range of language contexts, including literacy practices in the APY Lands, English wordings on t-shirts in South-East Asia and the on-field language practices of sports people. Nayia Cominos, PhD MA, is a researcher, educator and consultant in communication, literacy, curriculum and linguistics. Her research areas include clinical communication in mental health, national ARC Linkage collaborative projects, medical discourse, Indigenous education, cultural and language diversity and academic literacies. Currently, she is Academic Developer with a language and literacy specialisation in the Health Sciences Division, University of South Australia. Her most recent publication is Asia literacy in a global world: an Australian perspective (Springer, 2018, in the ‘Education in the Asia-Pacific Region: Issues, Concerns and Prospects’ series). Julia Cook is a Research Fellow in the Youth Research Centre at the University of Melbourne where she works on the ARC-funded Life Patterns project. Her research is concerned with the ways in which young adults experience and manage uncertain futures, and she has recently begun to address issues of belonging, place and residential mobility. She co-convenes the Sociology of Youth thematic group of The Australian Sociological Association (TASA) and has a PhD from the University of Melbourne (2016). She recently published her first book: Imagined futures: hope, risk and uncertainty (Palgrave, 2018). Hernán Cuervo is an Associate Professor in the Melbourne Graduate School of Education and Deputy Director of the Youth Research Centre at the University of Melbourne. His research and teaching activities are informed by the project of addressing the complex issues of equity and social justice for young people, with a focus on rural spaces, spanning the disciplines of sociology of youth, political science and education. His most recent book is Understanding social justice in rural education (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). Sandra Fylkesnes has a MPhil in multicultural and international education from Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Sciences. She is currently completing a PhD in educational sciences for teacher education in the

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Department of Education and International Studies at OsloMet – Oslo Metropolitan University. Her research interests focus on the workings of whiteness in teacher education and her methodological expertise is in discourse analysis. Sandra has recently published two articles on this issue, one in Teaching and Teacher Education titled ‘Whiteness in teacher education research discourses: a review of the use and meaning making of the term cultural diversity’ and one in the Journal of Education Policy titled ‘Patterns of racialised discourses in Norwegian teacher education policy: whiteness as a pedagogy of amnesia in the national curriculum’. Peter Gale is an Associate Professor of Sociology in the School of Creative Industries in the Division of Education, Arts and Social Sciences (EASS) at the University of South Australia. Peter has been teaching and researching on a wide range of topics, including reconciliation, immigration, multiculturalism, asylum seeker policy, racism and the media. He has over sixty publications, including his books The politics of fear: lighting the Wik (Pearson Education, 2005) and God’s donkey: Sister Mary Theodore and the story of Mithra (Wakefield Press, 2014). Dr Gale is also involved in international development projects through Australind Children’s Fund and has been the President of Australind since 1998. Katie Gloede has worked in education for twelve years with both national and international experience in school settings. She has taught students from Reception to Year 12, acquiring a strong background in both SACE and SACSA curriculums. Katie currently works for UniSA Connect, which has a focus on inspiring science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) study and career awareness in secondary school students. She developed and coordinated a sport science workshop for teachers and secondary school students that has had over 200 participants in one year of operation. Katie also works extensively with SAASTA curriculum developers and students in areas such as sport science and numeracy, her passion being creating and researching assessment tasks that use sport to engage students in broader academic learning. Faith Gordon has over ten years’ experience researching in the area of children, young people and the media and is a Lecturer in Criminology at Monash University, Melbourne. Previously, Faith worked at Queen’s University Belfast and the University of Westminster, London. Faith is Director of the interdisciplinary Youth Justice Network; Research Associate of the Information Law & Policy Centre, Institute of Advanced Legal Studies; and a Trustee of Headliners UK. Faith’s first sole-authored monograph, entitled Children, young people and the press in a transitioning society: representations, reactions and criminalisation, was published in March 2018 as part of Palgrave Macmillan’s Socio-Legal series. This monograph built on Faith’s PhD and postdoctoral research on the media representations of children and young people in Northern Ireland and other post-conflict societies. Faith’s latest research focuses on

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children’s rights in the digital age, ‘naming and shaming’ on social media and the issue of pre-charge identification. Sadia Habib is the author of Learning and teaching British values: policies and perspectives on British identities (2017). She holds a PhD from Goldsmiths, University of London, UK. She conducted arts-based educational research with young Londoners to learn about their conceptions of local, national and transnational identities and belongings, as well as to observe the critical pedagogies involved in identity work in the classroom. She has nine years of experience working as a secondary school and sixth-form teacher in multicultural schools and colleges and is active in the community on issues of social justice, Islamophobia and anti-racism. She is co-founder of The Riz Test and co-editor of The Bookslamist. She was also co-editor of The Sociological Imagination blog. Awit Kuac holds a Bachelor of Social Science (Human Services) from the University of South Australia and works as a Community Support Worker at Anglicare South Australia. In previous roles, she has worked closely with multicultural communities, especially people from African backgrounds. John Loewenthal is a social anthropologist with an interest in education. His research explores what young adults want to do with their lives and how such ideas are produced, negotiated and revised over time. He is currently conducting an ethnographic study of the aspirations and transitions of university graduates in New York City. He is a doctoral candidate in the School of Education at Oxford Brookes University and Visiting Scholar at New York University 2017–18. He is also an Online Tutor in Social Anthropology at the Department for Continuing Education, University of Oxford. Jennifer Marchbank is a Professor in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies (GSWS) at Simon Fraser University (SFU) (unceded and unsurrendered Skwxwú7mesh Úxwumixw, Tsleil-Waututh (səl̓ ilwətaɁɬ) and xʷməθkʷəy̓ əm territory, Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada). She holds a PhD in political science from Strathclyde University, Glasgow and her current research interests include LGBTQ+ activism history, ‘mail order’ brides, refugee services and settlement and gendered violence and resistance. She is the co-editor of Basically queer: an intergenerational guide to LGBTQ2SIA+ lives (Peter Lang, 2017) and co-author of Introduction to gender: social science perspectives (2nd edn, Routledge, 2014). She has over 25 years’ experience of youth work and is also the co-founder and co-facilitator of Youth for a Change, a group of young LGBTQ educators, activists and advocates who are seeking to change the world. Shepard Masocha is the Programme Director for the Bachelor of Social Work Honours in the School of Psychology, Social Work and Social Policy at the University of South Australia, Australia. His research focuses on the critical study of social work with ethnic minorities, immigrants and asylum seekers and the intersecting discourses of race, racism, culture and social citizenship. His most recent publications include ‘Divergent practices in statutory

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and voluntary sector settings? Social work with asylum seekers’ in the British Journal of Social Work (2017) with Dr Kim Robinson and his book Asylum seekers, social work and racism (Palgrave, 2015). Katy McEwan recently completed her PhD at Teesside University and was an award-winning undergraduate student at Durham University. Her chapter in this edition is the first publication from her research. Katy’s research interests include class, place and social mobility and their impact on young people’s experiences and transitions. She is an experienced youth work practitioner with a background in managing, developing and delivering youth offending, engagement and employment programmes and support. Ana Miranda is a senior researcher at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET) and a professor at the University of Buenos Aires. She is the leader of the Grammar of Youth Longitudinal Research Programme in FLACSO, Argentina. She also runs a post-graduate programme on youth in Latin America. Her research and teaching are related to youth, education, inequality and labour. She has written seven books, the most recent being Entre la educación y el trabajo: la construcción cotidiana de las desigualdades juveniles en América Latina (CLACSO free access, 2018), which was written with the collaboration of the Latin American Network for Transition Education Work, which she co-coordinates. Tiffany Muller Myrdahl is a Senior Lecturer in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies and Urban Studies at Simon Fraser University (unceded Skwxwú7mesh Úxwumixw, Tsleil-Waututh (səl̓ ilwətaɁɬ) and xʷməθkʷəy̓ əm territory, Vancouver, Canada). She completed a PhD in geography with a certificate in feminist studies at the University of Minnesota in 2008. She was an assistant professor in women’s and gender studies at the University of Lethbridge from 2008 to 2012 and held the Ruth Wynn Woodward Junior Chair at Simon Fraser University from 2012 to 2015. Her teaching and research practice focus on collaborative and community-engaged initiatives related to equity and urban change. Johannes Pieters is a Lecturer in the Urban and Regional Planning Discipline at the University of South Australia. His current research and teaching interests include strategic planning, urban design and public open space planning in support of active living, the promotion of ageing and disability-friendly environments, links between social and urban theory and metropolitan regional transformation following manufacturing industry job losses. Muntasir Sattar earned a PhD in applied anthropology at Teachers College, Columbia University. A former youth worker in the United States, he taught at the university level in Pakistan and is currently working as an independent social researcher in the United Kingdom. Maren Seehawer has a Magister Artium in literature and psychology from the University of Freiburg and a MA in development studies from the Institute of

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Development Studies (IDS) in Brighton. Currently, she is doing a PhD in the Department of Education and International Studies at Oslo Metropolitan University. Her research interests include indigenous and third space epistemologies, participatory methodologies and education in the Global South. Renae Summers is a Lecturer in the School of Psychology, Social Work and Social Policy at the University of South Australia. Renae has worked with young people from refugee backgrounds as a researcher and social work practitioner. Her PhD research focussed on young refugees’ experiences of violence and non-violence in South Australia. Renae has worked in refugee resettlement, community health, palliative care and alternative care. Deirdre Tedmanson is an Associate Professor and Associate Head of School: Academic in the School of Psychology, Social Work and Social Policy at the University of South Australia. Prior to academia, Deirdre has worked in community development, research and policy management positions for Government and the community sector. Deirdre’s research interests and expertise include social work with Indigenous people, youth social work and research with marginalised people. She has been widely published including in International Social Work; Gender, Work and Organisation; Culture and Organisation and Journal of Youth Studies. Paul Thomas has a PhD in education from King’s College, London. He is currently Associate Professor in pedagogy at the University of South-Eastern Norway. His main responsibilities include teaching in three teacher training degree programmes (Bachelor and Master’s levels) for Norwegian and international students. In addition, his research has considered the manner in which multicultural categories, such as ethnicity/race, gender and religion, among others, have intersected with education. Currently, he is researching Tamil students’ educational success in Norway. His most recent publication has critically considered the World Bank’s developmental and educational discourse in Rwanda, published in Development Studies Research. Michael R. M. Ward is a Lecturer in Social Sciences at Swansea University. His work centres on the performance of working-class masculinities within and beyond educational institutions. He is the author of the award-winning book From labouring to learning: working-class masculinities, education and deindustrialisation (2015) and co-convener of the British Sociological Association Education Study Group. Mike has held visiting scholarships in Canada, the USA, Iceland and Germany. Ross Wignall holds a PhD in anthropology from the University of Sussex, UK. He is a Lecturer in Social/Cultural Anthropology at Oxford Brookes University and leads courses on livelihoods in West Africa, research methods and ritual. His doctoral research focussed on the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), exploring the intersection of morality, faith and the gendered body as modes of youth self-actualisation in the UK and The Gambia, West

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Africa. More recently he has specialised in youth employment and education transitions in Sub-Saharan Africa with a particular focus on disenfranchised young women in Sierra Leone. Johanna Wyn is Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the Youth Research Centre in the Melbourne Graduate School of Education at the University of Melbourne, Australia. She is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences Australia and of the British Academy of Social Sciences. She leads the Life Patterns longitudinal study of two cohorts of Australians. Her work focuses on the interface between young people’s learning and well-being in formal and informal educational settings, on young people’s transitions and on the knowledge and skills professionals who work with young people in these settings need in the twenty-first century. Recent books include Youth and generation: rethinking change and inequality in the lives of young people with Dan Woodman (Sage, 2014) and Handbook of childhood and youth studies with Helen Cahill (Springer, 2015).

Foreword

Putting belonging to work Belonging matters In an increasingly globalised world, an array of forces has intensified the anxious politics of belonging. Escalating flows of people, the technological mediation of social relations, separation of work and home, the growth in high density living, ecological crises which disconnect us from the environment and the spread of populist fears of the stranger: these are some of the ways in which we have less and less to do with those with whom we share social space. These forces are often keenly felt by young people, not just because they are interwoven with transitions in the life course but also because young people are intimately connected to both the challenges and opportunities of social, economic, technological and environmental change. However, ‘belonging’ is a word that is frequently used but rarely with conceptual clarity. As this book suggests, it is both theoretically and empirically underdeveloped, used more as a descriptor to gesture towards a raft of issues rather than an analytical framework to systematically engage with them. So what does it mean to ‘belong’? In youth studies literature, belonging is primarily understood in terms of representation and identity. As important as these are, and this book testifies to the significant discursive dimensions of belonging, there is an important shift to explore belonging as sets of practices. This emphasis points not just to the negotiated quality of belonging but to its situated nature, its function in specific kinds of social contexts. This points not just to the multiple nature of belonging but to the particularities of belonging in specific settings: informal or institutional, work or leisure-based, familial and community. Having a sense of belonging in a gym may be quite different to a sense of belonging at work, and these may be defined against each other. The emphasis on practice also points to the relational nature of belonging. Belonging is not simply an identity we express, for it always operates in complex circuits of recognition. We cannot simply belong to a space unless others acknowledge our position within it. Of course, this might mean that belonging

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can be as oppressive as it is enabling, something to be contested rather than simply inhabited and something which can be paradoxical and ambivalent – a point several chapters demonstrate well here. The situated and relational nature of belonging also underlines the scales of belonging: we can enjoy local attachments which are sometimes articulated, and sometimes disarticulated, with other registers of ethnicity, nation and transnationality, for example. But the key point here is that those categories to which we belong are not given nor primordial but are the result of processes of mobilisation of which practices of belonging are constitutive. In other words, belonging, like any practice, is a form of labour which produces and reproduces the worlds in which they function. Too often we are guilty of ‘category thinking’, relying on the demographic given-ness of categories of class or ethnicity or whatever, which belonging ‘expresses’, rather than seeing them as things to be constructed through our labour. This sense of the labour of belonging suggests that the focus on attachment could be extended further than it is. While we recognise belonging as an expressive emotional attachment (or detachment), a more Spinozan notion of affect would consider the ways in which our investment in a place is a process that increases or decreases the body’s capacity to act. The citizen always feels more empowered to inhabit civic space than the migrant, for example. This is especially significant in the study of young people’s formation of social capabilities to belong. In this instance, belonging is configured as an array of capacities that are acquired and learnt over time, as several chapters illustrate here. This suggests that coming to belong entails a pedagogical ensemble involving not only relations with others but relations with the spatial and non-human elements of one’s environment. This poses difficult methodological as well as conceptual questions for researchers: how do we study belonging as a process over time beyond simple statements of attachment? Does ethnography provide clearer insight because it draws attention to practices of belonging that are not always present in people’s accounts of their worlds? Lastly, the book reminds us of a very important lesson: conceptualising ‘belonging’ should not be separated from the investigation of its experiential forms and intensities. Holding the theoretical and the empirical together ensures the most productive way, as the editors describe it, of ‘putting belonging to work’ in examining the lives of young people. Greg Noble Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University June 2019

Chapter 1

Introduction: investigating youth and belonging Sadia Habib and Michael R. M. Ward

Introduction At its core, belonging is about connection, membership, attachment and a sense of security. However, in social theory, belonging can often be outlined as paradoxical, contradictory and vague. In composing this collection on youth, place and belonging, we acknowledge that belonging is often challenging to conceptualise when it is ‘vaguely defined and ill-theorized’ (Antonsich 2010, p. 644). Tied closely to the consequences of postcolonialism and globalisation, the study of belonging appears in explorations of geographic, cultural, national, linguistic and ‘racial’ borders (Habib 2017; Davis, Gorashi & Smets 2018). Furthermore, scholars working within the emerging field of belonging have used such theories in multiple areas, everything from citizenship to digital media, leisure, casual employment, migration, affect and familial household dynamics. Within contemporary scholarship, belonging appears as a theory, a conceptual lens, as well as an analytical framework, which, of course, contributes to its conceptual vagueness. What comes to the fore in Youth, Place and Theories of Belonging is not what Baumeister and Leary (1995, pp. 497, 500–501) call a ‘belongingness hypothesis’, which generates a sense of belonging aligned with specific criteria such as long-lasting, positive, stable and affective, albeit this varies from person to person. On the contrary, the scholars we have assembled in this book theorise belonging as a discursive and complex process – a personal dialectic in constant negotiation with one’s surroundings. So, while belonging may often be linked to a linear, developmental process of thinking (acquisition of language, formal legalities, the documentation of the nation-state), many in this collection passionately emphasise that belonging is far from linear and is much more personal, infused with individual and collective histories, tied closely to the social milieu youth experience daily across the globe. Furthermore, belonging occurs not only in reference to place but is highly relational and closely linked to collectives of people (Antonsich 2010). This introduction first discusses how belonging has been operationalised in youth studies as well as the relationship between belonging and theories of place. It then traces the outline of the book in which each chapter uses theories associated

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Sadia Habib and Michael R. M. Ward

with belonging to interrogate empirical data. Thus, each chapter contains a critical analysis of where these theories proved valuable to the authors, allowing for new explorations and mentioning where there are certain weaknesses.

Operationalising theories of belonging and youth studies According to Butler and others in this volume, belonging takes on local forms and is closely informed by intersectional identity categories. As belonging is tied closely both to everyday experiences and common collective experiences, recent theorisations have highlighted the ways in which it remains racialised, classed, gendered and linked to place. Additionally, we the editors see belonging realised in reference to material goods and deeply inflected by both physical and online spaces. Belonging, deeply interwoven with constructions of status and meaning making, is subject to continual negotiations based on ‘conceptions of respect, authenticity and value’ (Stahl & Habib 2017, pp. 266–267). These conceptions heavily contribute to how young people construct their identities or, as Baak et al. (this volume) write, ‘Questions of belonging centre on the question of who is “a stranger”, and who does not belong’. Given its contradictory, complex and discursive nature, recent accounts from social theorists have also critiqued how stable the feeling of belonging actually is (Marcu 2014). In exploring migrants and refugees, Davis, Gorashi and Smets (2018) have used the theoretical provocation of ‘contested’ belonging, where belonging is explored as ‘space, practice and as biography’, where it is ‘imagined, enacted, constrained, negotiated and contested’ (p. 4). Furthermore, in recognising its temporality, Cuervo and Wyn (2014) assert that ‘belonging brings the idea of youth as a social process back into the centre of analyses’, thereby ‘enabling researchers to recognise the significance of relationships to people, place and to the times’ (p. 901), which are, of course, subject to change. Additionally, in Ward (2019) has highlighted processes of what he calls ‘(un)belonging’, where individuals do not feel secure in specific institutions but instead feel out of place and uncertain. Theories of modern social change, particularly those of Beck (1992) and Giddens (1991), have had a significant impact on studies of youth in sociology today. However, as Farrugia (2013) notes: ‘The image of a homogeneous modernity must be replaced by a spatialised sociology of youth biographies that is open to the geographies of inequality that structure youth transitions’ (p. 300). Focussing on how young people negotiate belonging has the potential to provide insights into the multi-faceted relationships which, in turn, shape young lives and the nature and quality of connections between youth and their worlds (Cuervo & Wyn 2014). As such, Butler and Muir (2017), amongst others, emphasise the role of agency in theorising belonging and its potential to ‘prioritise the efforts made by young people to remain connected to people, places and issues that matter to them

Introduction

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as they carve out a place in which they belong in the modern economy’ (p. 320). This process of connection can often be fragmented, discursive and precarious. As Stahl and Habib (2017) have previously argued, young people today experience many ‘diverse and contradictory discourses as they come to understand place and their own positionality; they both ascribe to narratives and construct counter-narratives’ (p. 276), which are, of course, never fully realised as the process is continual. Or, putting it more precisely, Marcu (2014) states that ‘the world is constantly changing, and thus our sense of home and belonging is constantly readapting and readjusting to the new realities’ (p. 327). The research presented in this collection emphasises this process of re-adaptation and readjustment as well as the plurality of belonging, showing how one can both feel a strong sense of belonging but also, simultaneously, feel lonely and alienated. Yuval-Davis (2006) writes there is a multiplicity of belongings where ‘people can “belong” in many different ways and to many different objects of attachments’ (p. 199). For example, Loewenthal and Broughton (this volume) ask how belonging may be possible in multiple places, beyond the location in which one grows up. This is akin to May’s (2017) notion of ‘belonging from afar’, which emphasises the importance of memory and nostalgia, a significant part of theorising belonging (see Miranda & Arancibia this volume; Wyn et al. this volume). In exploring theories of belonging, Cuzzocrea (2018, p. 1) argues that young people are entrenched in ‘motility’, the possibility of a type of movement that arises out of a specific relationship with one’s current context, which is comprised of three dimensions: access, competence and cognitive appropriation. This motility can, to varying extents, problematise the strong mobility orientation which can occur through continuous ‘lived’ relationship with place, a tension that Cuzzocrea calls ‘rooted mobility’. Such theorisations allow us to delve deeper into the transnational experience (Anthias 2006; Marcu 2014; Krupets et al. 2017) and explore to what extent mobility and immobility inform identity negotiations for youth today. Consistently, the scholars in the collection draw our attention to the possible temporalities of belonging (Marcu 2014), where questions remain as to its stability and durability. While belonging is institutionally validated (Sattar this volume) and socially realised (McEwan this volume), the scholars in this collection are increasingly focussed on its fleeting nature. Looking across the collection, the authors use theories of belonging to highlight how young people, regardless of social context, are striving for a certain sense of legitimacy as they understand how to belong and to what extent they can belong (Habib 2017; Fraser et al. 2017; Davis, Gorashi & Smets 2018; Habib 2019). In considering temporality and legitimacy, many chapters highlight the tension concerning young people’s sense of personal agency and desire to belong, despite at times a severe sense of marginalisation which can influence their aspirations. As Baak et al. (this volume) write, ‘belonging is both controlled and negotiated, where the borders and boundaries of belonging are not fixed, but discursively constructed, making belonging malleable’.

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Belonging and place As this chapter has outlined, belonging is a growing field of study. As an analytical tool, belonging has been theorised in a number of different ways in wider sociological, anthropological and geographical studies. Place has played an important part in much of this theorisation. In empirical and theoretical research on belonging, we see young people can and do construct status and meaningful identities for themselves – their conceptions of belonging – which are often heavily influenced by their relationships with ‘territories’ and places (Habib 2017). As Thrift (1997, p. 160) states, ‘the difference between location and place is that places have meanings for us which cannot be reduced to their location’ (p. 160). Similar to this thinking, for Massey (1994) places are ‘articulated moments in networks of social relations and understandings’ (p. 67). According to Cuervo and Wyn (2017), ‘everyday practices located in place layer onto each other to create performances of belonging that involve relationships with people and place’ (p. 225). Historically, belonging has been considered a spatial concept (Molgat 2002; Marcu 2014), a process of both identification and contestation to place-based attachments where young people may struggle to understand their sense of home (Christou 2011; Krupets et al. 2017). Prince (2014) draws our attention to how ‘place-based experiences, such as belonging, aversion and entrapment may be internalised and encoded into possible selves, thus producing [a] emplaced future self-concept’ (p. 697). As scholars theorise belonging in this collection, central to the analysis is how identity construction takes place in and through the making of places. For example, in critically considering the role belonging plays in experiences of immigration, Marcu (2014) writes: ‘Belonging is the mediated representational practice of the diasporic condition articulated through experiences of home and migration. Therefore, belonging is shaped by mobility and the extent to which the nostalgic and affective spaces of home shape migrant identification’ (p. 331). Due to shifts in globalised labour flows, as well as educational and leisure opportunities (See Ward 2015), young people may experience shifts in place, from locale to locale and country to country. During these movements, they experience overlapping and conflicting ways of being and belonging as they navigate new logics and hierarchies (Baak et al. this volume). The emotional connections that may form may be non-linear and multi-facited; furthermore, they may be influenced significantly by time or not (Krupets et al. 2017). Therefore, as Relph (1976, p. 141) argues, identity construction as a continual process is ‘directly experienced phenomena of the lived-world’ and ‘fusions of human and natural order [that] are the significant centres of our immediate experiences of the world’. The scholars in Youth, place and theories of belonging draw upon theories of place and space in tandem with theories of belonging to investigate how young people negotiate coming to belong. We now move on to refer to the chapters in more detail and highlight the authors’ contributions to the belonging literature.

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Outline of the book The collection is focussed on broadening our understanding of theories of belonging as opposed to devising a singular analytical framework, which has been proposed in previous scholarship (cf. Antonsich 2010; Yuval-Davis 2006). The international scholars in this edited collection seek to build on ‘theories of belonging’ while simultaneously operationalising their own interpretations as they explore youth in diverse and complex contexts. The collection begins with a chapter written by scholars who have consistently worked at the frontier of theorising youth and theories of belonging. Johanna Wyn, Hernán Cuervo and Julia Cook tell us belonging ‘is about relationships, it invites a consideration of both human and non-human elements that are particularly salient to young people’s lives across time’. Drawing on a longitudinal qualitative study of young Australians’ transitions to adulthood, the Life Patterns research programme, they emphasise the spatial dimensions, demonstrating the multi-faceted nature of belonging which, according to the authors, must be theorised as relationships between people, places and things influenced by time and through everyday routines, ‘layered over time’. Wyn, Lantz & Harris (2012) suggest that the focus on new materialist approaches has the potential to extend ‘the scope of analysis of belonging in relation to place because they emphasise the materiality of the world, both social and natural, in the production of the social’. While Wyn et al. focus on spatial and new materialist approaches to explore belonging, Chapter 3 by Melanie Baak, Renae Summers, Shepard Masocha, Deirdre Tedmanson, Peter Gale, Hans Pieters and Awit Kuac explores the notion of the ‘Other’ in studies of belonging as ‘un-done and re-done across multiple borders of body and place’. They consider the ‘geographic, cultural, national, linguistic and “racial” borders’ which structure notions of difference between ‘us’ and ‘them’. Their scholarship draws on data from a qualitative study of young people of refugee background from South Sudan living in Darley, Australia, and the ways in which their belonging is negotiated. Through interviews with community mentors, as well as those who police and govern the public spaces these young people inhabit, Baak et al. demonstrate the ways in which ‘surveillance can control the forms of behaviour and ways of being that are acceptable and belong within a given society, thereby also determining those behaviours and ways of being that do not belong’. The next chapter considers conceptions of resistance by LGBTQ+ youth in Canada. Jennifer Marchbank and Tiffany Muller Myrdahl draw on research on LGBTQ+ people’s leisure practices in Vancouver, British Columbia. Focussing critically on space, the authors demonstrate the ways in which LGBTQ+-friendly leisure sites are not guaranteed to be welcoming to all. Drawing primarily on Sara Ahmed’s (2006) work on queer phenomenology, the research Marchbank and Muller Myrdahl present demonstrates how youth come to belong through their physical presence and their queering of certain spaces, albeit temporarily. They use Ahmed (2006) to explore how young people intentionally fit into their

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worlds where comfortability is significant. As the LGBTQ+ young people focus on and engage in ‘hanging out’ practices directly related to their sense of place, they develop a sense of belonging within a public sphere where they often feel like outsiders. In Chapter 5, Gordon examines children and young people in Northern Ireland, UK. Gordon argues that rioting is an important means of expressing cultural identity interwoven with the legacy of the religious conflict between Protestants and Catholics. Her study highlights how, despite media portrayals which contribute to wider societal discourses, young people’s sense of belonging and their agency as rioters has a firm political foundation. Therefore, belonging, in this instance, is theorised as deeply fragmented in the ‘new’ transitioning society of Northern Ireland. Gordon’s writing emphasises the negative ideological constructions influencing children’s and young people’s sense of identity and belonging; she provides insights into ‘the realities of conflict and transition’ and the multiple ways in which young people are excluded in so-called ‘settled democracies’. Shifting the focus to the United States, in Chapter 6, Loewenthal and Broughton’s analysis theorises young people’s belonging as spatially and temporally dispersed according to their travel imaginaries. In presenting the findings from exploratory research with a group of young people who have grown up in New York City, Lowenthal and Broughton articulate four themes to conceptualise belonging: attachment to one’s history and ethnicity; cosmopolitan ideals of belonging to the world; the politics of mobility, which is evident through the young people’s hesitation or inability to travel; and the virtual mobilities of learning which parallel and shape the youth’s travel imaginaries. Their research not only provides insights into young people’s imaginaries of escape and mobility concerning their relationships with place and belonging but also highlights how there is ‘something spatially dispersed in their senses of belonging whereby the parameters of their attachments’ are not necessarily governed by young people’s immediate localities or previous experiences with geographical mobility. This is fascinating and compelling work which makes us think critically both about belonging as well as ‘(un)belonging’ where individuals may feel out of place (Ward 2019). While Loewenthal and Broughton consider the importance of future projections and what this means for understanding youth’s approaches to belonging, Miranda and Arancibia in Chapter 7 focus on the role of history and how it informs belonging in Argentina. Exploring ‘how historical roots and family history are anchored, reaffirming a sense of belonging and a situated identity’, Miranda and Arancibia draw on longitudinal research conducted in the Metropolitan Area of Buenos Aires to assess the contribution of place, gender and class interaction in shaping women’s identities. Exploring the role of class in women’s lives, their analysis draws on ‘elective belonging’ (Savage, Bagnall & Longhurst 2005), aligned with a middle-class sense of entitlement and morality, along with ‘hard place’ belonging which is more rigid, stable and durable. Both analytical approaches allow them to explore the widely diverse experiences of transition and senses of belonging experienced by these women.

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Continuing the theme of the diversity of how theories of belonging are operationalised, Nayia Cominos, David Caldwell and Katie Gloede’s chapter, entitled ‘Brotherhood and belonging: creating pedagogic spaces for positive discourses of Aboriginal youth’, uses belonging to supply a counternarrative to deficit discourses concerning Aboriginal youth as disengaged learners. The authors conceive of belonging largely in reference to pedagogy, language and learning. They consider ‘both the personal “place-belongingness”, as exemplified by feeling belonging on the sports field or in the classroom, and a “politics of belonging”, such as the exclusion of/“belonging” of Aboriginal voices in Australian classrooms’. In concentrating on belonging and its relationship to language in the domain of sport and masculinity, the chapter shows how Aboriginal young men demonstrate alternative ways of both being and belonging which avoid the oftenfacile Western–traditional classifications. Interrelated with Cominos et al.’s work on masculinity and belonging is that of Ross Wignall. Drawing upon extensive ethnographic research conducted in the UK and The Gambia at the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), in Chapter 9 Wignall offers a unique way to understand how transnational organisations are shaping local masculinities and how complex forms of belonging and belief are related to identity practices. Central to the scholarship is Wignall’s interconnected geographies of space, place and attachment, where he emphasises how these young men enact a sense of agency through space, challenging and subverting dominant forms of masculinity and developing forms of ‘situated agency’, which function within complex collections of space, place and belonging. Focussing again on how forms of belonging and certain beliefs are related to identity practices, but this time in the United Kingdom, Chapter 10 by Katy McEwan discusses social class, specifically the pathologisation and shame associated with social class. In exploring one locale, Ingleby, in the North East of England, McEwan shows how some young people experience multiple layers of precarity around class (dis)identity and belonging. The data shows how these labels are simultaneously contested and accepted, contributing to the complexity concerning belonging. McEwan’s research indicates that young people in Ingleby come to understand their class status in relation to belonging where, at various points, they contest and accept wider discourses of deservingness and acceptance. Interestingly, McEwan shows how this process contributes to the formation of aspirations in line with a conception of ‘deservingness’ which, in turn, contributes to their sense of acceptance and how her participants negotiate their sense of belonging to a specific place. Continuing with exploring the formation of belonging in relation to pathologisation and stigma, Paul Thomas, Maren Seehawer and Sandra Fylkesnes’s chapter focuses on a multicultural high school in Oslo, Norway. Employing theories of ethnic boundary making in reference to arguments that the Norwegian ideal of ‘sameness’ (Norwegian: likhetsidealet) may inadvertently contribute to a sense of alienation among non-ethnic Norwegian minorities (Gullestad 2002), they discuss how youth engage in ‘stigma’ management and the construction of multi-layered

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alternatives (what they call ‘third space identities’). The analysis highlights the relationship between belonging and class, particularly the manner in which students negotiate uncomfortable and problematic mainstream discourses of cultural standardisation and homogenisation. Highlighting the themes of diversity and stigma, in Chapter 12 Rose Butler explores the identity work of youth from refugee backgrounds living in Australia. She draws on fieldwork consisting of ongoing participant observations, semi-structured interviews with children and adults and visual media research methods with sixty-three children. Butler argues that we need to examine young people’s ‘own processes for negotiating rural diversity from the ground up within their situated intercultural histories and local forms of belonging’. Operationalising multiple theoretical frameworks, Butler focuses on the ways in which young people ‘produce belonging within their everyday multicultural lives, and how, as youth scholars stress, this is, in turn, reproduced and made anew within socially embedded circumstances’. To explore how young people come to belong, Butler works with theories associated with rurality and everyday multiculturalisms, providing valuable insights into how ‘vulnerabilities and inequities’ are formed and how such formations, in turn, lead to ‘new avenues for resistance, solidarities and pathways to belonging among youth’. In the concluding chapter, ‘Politics of class and belonging in Pakistan: student learning, communities of practice and social mobility’, Muntasir Sattar explores belonging by drawing upon an ethnographic study of middle-class men living in an all-male hostel in Lahore, Pakistan. As they participate in communities of practice, the ethnography shows how they familiarise themselves with and experience class-based linguistic and political norms to gain an advantage on national merit-based exams. In theorising belonging, Sattar shows how these men seek to muddy the lines of class in Pakistan through their efforts to become mobile and secure upper-middle-class status, desiring to ‘legitimately’ belong to a higher class despite significant barriers. In exploring how they belong, Sattar emphasises the importance of the acquisition and maintenance of social and cultural capital.

Conclusion Crowley (1998) has described belonging, and the politics of belonging, as ‘the dirty work of boundary maintenance’ (p. 30). We contend that this collection is positioned at an important time in studies of youth. Arguably, now more than ever the experience of young adulthood is increasingly fragmented and precarious. We feel that in studies of youth today, taking belonging and the theorising of belonging seriously is critical. The scholarship presented here demonstrates how young people’s identities are shaped across the globe by ‘high modernity and how their experiences inform a contradictory sense of belonging’ (Friese 2010, p. 67). After all, while belonging can be used to refer to emotions and everyday life, the politics of belonging concerns participation, entitlement and

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status (Yuval-Davis 2006, 2011). According to Yuval-Davis (2006) ‘[b]elonging tends to be naturalised and becomes articulated and politicised only when it is threatened in some way’ (p. 197). Challenging circumstances, therefore, can bring a sense of belonging into sharp relief. This edited collection draws on interdisciplinary perspectives of space and place to investigate young people’s identities. In understanding the relationship between identity and place, we see the power of using these theories of belonging in research focussed on the experiences of youth (Habib 2017; Davis, Gorashi & Smets 2018; Habib 2019). Furthermore, as these scholars put belonging to work, they hold in high esteem its multidisciplinary nature. To adequately explore how youth come to belong, scholars must often infuse their research with a wide spectrum of other theories and methods to investigate the various ways youth negotiate feelings of belonging. Drawing on recent international research, Youth, place and theories of belonging addresses the manner in which the practices, discourses and ethos of particular locales, spaces and institutions shape the dispositions and ‘ways of being’ for young people today. We direct the reader’s gaze to the importance of putting belonging to work and considering how young people experience this as ongoing negotiation, constantly structured and restructured in a reflexive process, imbued with conceptions of respectability, authenticity and value.

References Ahmed, S. 2006, Queer phenomenology: Orientations, objects, others, Duke University Press, Durham, NC. Anthias, F. 2006, ‘Belongings in a globalising and unequal world: Rethinking translocations’, in N. Yuval-Davis, K. Kabbanbiran & U. Vieten (eds.), The situated politics of belonging, Sage, London, pp. 17–31. Antonsich, M. 2010, ‘Searching for belonging: An analytical framework’, Geography Compass, vol. 4, no. 6, pp. 644–659. Baumeister, R.F. & Leary, M.R. 1995, ‘Need to belong: Desire for interpersonal attachments as a fundamental human motivation’, Psychological Bulletin, vol. 117, no. 3, pp. 497–529. Beck, U. 1992, Risk society: Towards a new modernity, Sage, London. Butler, R. & Muir, K. 2017, ‘Young people’s education biographies: Family relationships, social capital and belonging’, Journal of Youth Studies, vol. 20, no. 3, pp. 316–331. Christou, A. 2011, ‘Narrating lives in (e)motion: Embodiment, belongingness and displacement in diasporic spaces of home and return’, Emotion, Space and Society, vol. 4, no. 4, pp. 249–257. Crowley, J. 1998, ‘The politics of belonging: Some theoretical considerations’, in A. Geddes & A. Favell (eds.), The politics of belonging: Migrants and minorities in contemporary Europe, Ashgate, Avebury, pp. 15–39. Cuervo, H. & Wyn, J. 2017, ‘A longitudinal analysis of belonging: Temporal, performative and relational practices by young people in rural Australia’, Young, vol. 25, no. 3, pp. 219–234.

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Cuervo, H. & Wyn, J. 2014, ‘Reflections on the use of spatial and relational metaphors in youth studies’, Journal of Youth Studies, vol. 17, no. 7, pp. 901–915. Cuzzocrea, V. 2018, ‘“Rooted mobilities” in young people’s narratives of the future: A peripheral case’, Current Sociology (online). doi:10.1177/0011392118776357 Davis, K., Gorashi, H. & Smets, P. 2018, Contested belonging: Spaces, practices, biographies, Emerald Publishing, Bingley, UK. Farrugia, D. 2013, ‘Towards a spatialised youth sociology: The rural and the urban in times of change’, Journal of Youth Studies, vol. 17, no. 3, pp. 293–307. Fraser, A., Batchelor, S., Ngai Ling, L.L. & Whittaker, L. 2017, ‘City as lens: (Re)imagining youth in Glasgow and Hong Kong’, Young, vol. 25, no. 3, pp. 235–251. Friese, H. 2010, ‘Pre-judice and identity’, Patterns of Prejudice, vol. 35, no. 2, pp. 63–79. Giddens, A. 1991, Modernity and self-identity, Polity Press, Cambridge. Gullestad, M. 2002, ‘Invisible fences: Egalitarianism, nationalism and racism’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, vol. 8, no. 1, pp. 45–63. Habib, S. 2019, ‘Portraits of place: Critical pedagogy in the classroom’, in Habib, S. & Ward, M.R.M. (eds.), Identities, youth and belonging: International perspectives, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, UK. Habib, S. 2017, Learning and teaching British values: Policies and perspectives on British identities, Palgrave, Cham. Habib, S. & Ward, M.R.M. (eds.) 2019, Identities, youth and belonging: International perspectives, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, UK. Krupets, Y., Morris, J., Nartova, N., Omelchenko, E. & Sabirova, G. 2017, ‘Imagining young adults’ citizenship in Russia: From fatalism to affective ideas of belonging’, Journal of Youth Studies, vol. 20, no. 2, pp. 252–267. Marcu, S. 2014, ‘Geography of belonging: Nostalgic attachment, transnational home and global mobility among Romanian immigrants in Spain’, Journal of Cultural Geography, vol. 31, no. 3, pp. 326–345. Massey, D. 1994, Space, place and gender, Polity Press, Cambridge. May, V. 2017, ‘Belonging from afar: Nostalgia, time and memory’, Sociological Review, vol. 65, no. 2, pp. 401–415. Molgat, M. 2002, ‘Leaving home in Quebec: Theoretical and social implications of (im) mobility among youth’, Journal of Youth Studies, vol. 5, no. 2, pp. 135–152. Prince, D. 2014, ‘What about place? Considering the role of physical environment on youth imagining a future possible selves’, Journal of Youth Studies, vol. 17, no. 6. pp. 697–716. Relph, E. 1976, Place and Placeness, Pion, London. Savage, M., Bagnall, G. & Longhurst, B.J. 2005, Globalisation and belonging, Sage, London. Stahl, G. & Habib, S. 2017, ‘Moving beyond the confines of the local: Working-class students’ conceptualizations of belonging and respectability’, Young, vol. 25, no. 3, pp. 265–285. Thrift, N. 1997, ‘“Us” and “them”: Re-imagining places, re-imagining identities’, in H. Mackay (ed.), Consumption and everyday life, Sage, London, pp. 159–213. Ward, M.R.M. 2019, ‘(Un)Belonging in higher education: Negotiating working-class masculinities within and beyond the university campus’, in S. Habib & M.R.M. Ward (eds.), Identities, youth and belonging: International perspectives, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, UK.

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Ward, M.R.M. 2015, From labouring to learning, working-class masculinities, education and de-industrialization, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke. Wyn, J., Lantz, S. & Harris, A. 2012, ‘Beyond the transitions metaphor: Family, relations and young people in late modernity’, Journal of Sociology, vol. 48, no. 3, pp. 1–20. Yuval-Davis, N. 2011, The politics of belonging: Intersectional contestations, Sage, London. Yuval-Davis, N. 2006, ‘Belonging and the politics of belonging’, Patterns of Prejudice, vol. 40, no. 3, pp. 197–214.

Chapter 2

Expanding theoretical boundaries from youth transitions to belonging and new materiality Johanna Wyn, Hernán Cuervo and Julia Cook

Introduction The concept of belonging expands understanding of young people’s lives across time through an analysis of the dynamic processes that connect them to their worlds. When understood in this way, this concept resonates with the claim that youth is a social process, not simply a category or life stage (Wyn & White 1997; Cohen 1997; Mizen 2004). While transition points and markers such as leaving school, graduating from university or getting a full-time job may give us insights into young people’s trajectories, mapping transitions does not in itself generate understanding about how relationships with people, places and objects serve as resources that enable these transitions. Because belonging is about relationships, it invites a consideration of both human and non-human elements that are particularly salient to young people’s lives across time. Our discussion builds on previous theoretical work on belonging in rural places (see Cuervo & Wyn 2014, 2017) to analyse the lives of young people living in urban areas. We draw on the Life Patterns research programme, a two-decade mixed-methods longitudinal panel study of young Australians who completed secondary school in 1991 at the age of 17–18, using a sub-set of 16 interviews with participants living in urban areas. The interviewers invited them to look back over the two decades of their lives (the 1990s and 2000s) after leaving secondary school. These were years of significant social change in Australia, with the introduction of higher education fees and a debt scheme for students, a tightening of social security provisions, deregulation of the labour market and workplace reforms that formed the groundwork for the expansion of precarious work (Andres & Wyn 2010). These social changes, which formed the backdrop for the individual transitions that the young people were making, have been a focal point of a wealth of studies on youth transitions (te Riele 2004; Wyn & White 1997). Framing the experiences of these young people with the concept of belonging, and focussing specifically on their everyday, embodied experiences of belonging, enables researchers to acknowledge the sociological relationship between biography and history in young people’s lives. As we discuss below, this understanding of belonging has a multi-faceted focus, attending to the ways in which

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relationships to people, places and things are constructed over time and through non-spectacular routine practices. While there has been strong interest in belonging in urban environments at a general level, many researchers have noted the tendency within sociology to conflate youth with the city or urban life, positioning urban youth as the standard against which their rural counterparts are often viewed as ‘other’ or even as ‘backward’ (Ball, Maguire & Macrae 2000; Cloke 2006; Cuervo & Wyn 2014). The city is often depicted in popular culture and in youth studies as the location for ‘new youth’ trends and developments. Paradoxically, this approach treats all urban environments as much the same and tends to ignore how young people are connected to specific places such as neighbourhoods or suburbs, depicting their social relations as placeless. In response to this tendency, we seek to highlight the everyday practices that constitute belonging. In so doing, we demonstrate how an understanding of belonging that is attuned to the relationships between people, places and things can move past readings of transitions that equate social inclusion and life constructions solely with education and work.

Conceptualising belonging The term belonging is ubiquitous in sociological accounts, leading to the criticism that it is vaguely defined and ill-theorised (Antonsich 2010). Belonging has often been conflated with identity and citizenship, leaving its meaning somewhat obscured. In this chapter, we draw specifically on understandings of belonging related to mundane, everyday experiences of place. By outlining how belonging as ‘place relation’ has been theorised, we aim to gain an understanding of the limits and applications of this concept before applying it to specific examples. While accounts of belonging in sociology often focus on people’s subjective experiences, these accounts invariably recognise that belonging is about relationships between people and their environment. For example, Miller (2003) argues that belonging is ‘the quintessential mode of being human . . . in which all aspects of the self, as human, are perfectly integrated – a mode of being in which we are as we ought to be: fully ourselves’ (p. 218). This understanding draws links between belonging, place and ontology. For other authors, however, the focus remains on the social dimension of belonging. May (2013), for instance, argues that both strong and weak ties with family and friends enable individuals to feel ‘safe’ in their environment, underpinning a sense of belonging. Antonsich (2010) similarly expands on the subjective dimension of belonging to argue that it is also a discursive resource that constructs, claims, justifies or resists forms of socio-spatial inclusion and exclusion. The relational aspect of belonging is also highlighted by those who conceptualise belonging as a performative practice. For example, Bell (1999) views belonging not as an ontological given but as an achievement produced through the performance of everyday practices with people and place. The performative

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dimension of belonging is expanded by researchers drawing on the concept of intensities of affect. An example is the ethnographic study of the relationship between place and affect by Duff (2010), analysing how young people in Vancouver, Canada, engaged in practices of place making. Duff draws on Casey’s (2001) distinction between ‘thin’ and ‘thick’ places, which views the latter as a patchwork (an assemblage) of affect, habit and practice that provides opportunities for both an intensification of affective experience and personal enrichment over time. Duff found that young people transform ‘thin’ spaces into dynamic ‘thick’ spaces through their engagement with places over time. Similarly, Edensor (2012) studied the relationship between affect, emotions and place for attendees at Blackpool Illuminations, an annual event held at a popular holiday resort in Britain, viewing it as a ‘thick place’ due to individuals’ intense and repeated engagement with it. Although the study of ‘thick places’ is generally associated with attention to emotional rather than cognitive forms of place attachment, Edensor has argued that this approach is not necessarily blind to the wider socio-political contexts of the spaces to which it has been applied, citing the historically rooted nature of the event he studied. Belonging in urban spaces Belonging in cities is a strong theme in sociological research (e.g. Robertson 1995; Savage, Bagnall & Longhurst 2005; Habib 2017), focussing on citizenship; cosmopolitanism; identity; and the politics of inclusion, exclusion and boundary maintenance, as well as the relationship between the local and global. While considering the character of local forms of belonging in what appears to be an increasingly globalised world, several researchers have contended that cities offer forms of belonging as citizenship that transcend the nation-state (Vieten 2006; Bell & de-Shalit 2011). Purcell (2003) relates this development to radical reconstructions of the notion of citizenship, terming it ‘rescaling’. However, Purcell has claimed that, while rescaling is manifest in the upscaling evidenced by new forms of cosmopolitan citizenship, it is also evidenced by a downscaling which draws increasing focus to municipalities, neighbourhoods and suburbs. Studies using neighbourhoods and suburbs as a focal point for considering contemporary forms of belonging have often addressed processes of inclusion, exclusion and boundary making (Tyler 2003; Savage, Bagnall & Longhurst 2005; Stahl & Habib 2017; Fraser et al. 2017; Habib & Ward 2019). While such research has produced a wealth of insight, by treating urban spaces as exclusively social and political sites it has sidelined considerations related to place. More specifically, while these studies contribute important insights into the dynamics of identity, citizenship and the processes of exclusion and boundary creation, they do not provide similar insights into the relationships between individuals, groups and their environments. New materialist approaches have the potential to address this blindness in the literature and, in so doing, to considerably extend the scope of analysis of

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belonging in relation to place because they emphasise the materiality of the world, both social and natural, in the production of the social. The term ‘new materialism’ denotes a collection of perspectives that are united by their ‘turn to matter’ (Fox & Aldred 2017, p. 3). These approaches draw on the insights of theorists such as Braidotti (2013) and Haraway (1997) who challenge an anthrocentric view of the world, collapsing binary distinctions between nature – culture and human – and non-human. In shifting the focus from humans to both human and non-human elements (for instance, natural and built environments), new materialist approaches open an expanded understanding of belonging in relation to place that acknowledges the significance of physical environments alongside people’s thoughts, desires and feelings. The focus on ontology rather than the traditional sociological focus on epistemology expands the focus on what exists and what ‘matter’ does, rather than simply focussing on what can be known (Fox & Aldred 2017). This is illustrated by Duff’s study of belonging in Vancouver, mentioned above, which revealed that belonging was produced through the practices of young people, cumulating in a series of ‘events’ over time as they inhabited their spaces in the city. When the relational underpinning of belonging is understood to include all the material elements of the environment, it makes sense of Antonsich’s (2010) argument that belonging is a discursive resource. The ontology of new materialism is relational. It looks not at how things are constructed but at what they do. This means looking at associations, capacities and the capacities to affect or be affected, and it means that ‘belonging’ is an ‘affect’ that is derived from assemblages of human and non-human entities. In so doing, this approach breaks down the subject – object binary in which the former acts while the latter is acted upon, contending instead that both human and non-human entities (such as landscapes, weather patterns, everyday items) can be considered actors, in so much as they can affect their surroundings. By focussing not on what things are but instead on what they can do, new materialist approaches cut across irreconcilable epistemological debates and allow for fuller consideration of the role of non-human entities in social life. By depicting human and non-human assemblages (or in other words configurations) in non-hierarchical ways that do not automatically grant primacy to human actors, such approaches have the potential to shed new light on the ways in which the relationship between belonging and place can be conceptualised. To illustrate how this approach may expand our understanding of belonging, we turn to an analysis of young people in urban places.

Methodology This chapter draws on interviews with a sample of 16 people, aged 38–39 years old, conducted in 2012. They are members of cohort one of the Life Patterns longitudinal study, who left secondary school in 1991 and have been tracked since then to the present day. Cohort one was recruited in Victoria and in 1996 consisted of 2,000 participants who were representative of the wider youth population in

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terms of gender, socioeconomic and locational factors. Annual and biannual surveys with the entire sample and interviews with a subsample form the backdrop to the interviews on which we base this discussion. Focussing on residence, the 16 participants were chosen because at the age of 38–39 (in 2012), they were living in Melbourne (the capital city of Victoria) – near where they lived upon leaving secondary school. Interviews were recorded and professionally transcribed and then entered into NVivo for a priori coding (followed by posteriori developments of codes). The interviews provided a retrospective view of the participants’ aspirations, motivations, choices and actions over two decades. This retrospective data collection has enabled us to view the dynamic relationships that the participants have with people, places and objects over time. Indeed, participants’ narratives revealed the power of the idea and practice of belonging in affecting their choices and shaping their actions.

Findings and discussion To explore the relationship between youth and a sense of belonging, this chapter focuses on two themes that emerged in the analysis: (1) everyday performances of belonging and (2) social ties, affect and nostalgia. The interview excerpts that are quoted below were chosen to exemplify themes that were typical of the overall responses. Everyday performances of belonging As outlined above, the participants largely lived either in or near the area in which they attended secondary school. The main reasons that they reported for this were proximity to family, proximity to amenities (especially schools) and familiarity with the area. For example, Jennifer compared the feeling of being ‘lost’ in unfamiliar places to the ease and familiarity that she experienced in her local area: I know that when I’ve lived elsewhere and I’ve gone to the shops, to the shopping centre or whatever I don’t know where anything is, I feel a bit lost and finding your way around. You don’t know what’s in the area. Where here, because I’ve lived here for so long, if I need something I know exactly where to go to get it. My shopping trips are really efficient. I know where everything is. I know what is available in this area so I can access it and use it more fully than I would in an area that I don’t know. Although Jennifer’s experience of belonging as a sense of ease or familiarity reflects the claims of researchers (e.g. Savage, Bagnall & Longhurst 2005) who have conceptualised such experiences as a product of a fit between one’s habitus and the field in which one finds oneself, there is something more here that new materialist approaches allow us to explore. ‘Knowing’ her area is something

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that Jennifer has built up over time, through the accumulation of shopping as an ‘event’. Jennifer feels comfortable ‘knowing where everything is’ – that is, its place, layout, feel and smell. Jennifer’s familiarity with the space that she visits frequently (and ‘efficiently’) contrasts markedly with the abstract idea of the city presented by Amy, who imagined it as a place with ‘lots of people crammed together, noise, busy, crime’. Amy’s assessment evokes a physical space that is not just populated; it is ‘crammed’. It features noise (not just particular sounds), is busy and is (negatively) associated with crime. The physical and material reality of living in urban areas involves living with a high density of population. As Heather said: ‘I think urban means living in very close proximity to others and having to deal with higher population density’. Heather and Amy put the physical ‘proximity’ of others and the need to ‘deal with’ the high population density at the centre of what it means to have an urban or even a cosmopolitan identity, as has been suggested by theorists such as Smith (2001) and Urry (2002) who have conceptualised the global and local as inexorably bound in mutually constitutive processes. The mutually constitutive process of belonging is forged through everyday interactions with the environment, which includes people, but also includes buildings, services, streets, air and trees and the ways in which these connect. Respondents’ identification with their local areas, rather than their city more generally, reflects Purcell’s (2003) claim that the upscaling of political and economic life that is associated with cosmopolitan identities is accompanied by a downscaling that draws focus to suburbs, neighbourhoods and communities as units of political organisation, often coalescing around single issues. But belonging should be conceptualised as more than this. While Purcell intended downscaling to describe economic and political life, the participants in this study responded to the question of belonging by identifying the everyday experiences that embed them in their milieu: the practices of ‘dealing with’ proximity to others and the sense of ease and familiarity with physical surroundings, such as shopping centres. This finding also resonates with the work of Jørgensen, Fallov and Knudsen (2011), who seek to challenge the popular claim that social relations and geographical space have become increasingly separate in late modern societies. Specifically, the findings presented in this chapter reinforce the validity of their claims by considering a group of individuals for whom social relations and geographical space are tightly intertwined. Chris, for instance, compared his local area to suburbs in a different part of the city to help him to illustrate what he liked about his area: I grew up here and I’m always – I know it sounds pretty bad – but I don’t think about the east in terms of me living there, or I’ve always had something about living here in the west. I love the grassroots, well probably not now, but the people here are easy to get along with. They don’t interpret – they don’t have the hang-ups that others do around the other suburbs, so I don’t know.

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I just – they’re similar types of people basically and I seem to like it here because of that sort of reason. While Chris’s statement about ‘similar types of people’ undoubtedly refers to people with similar backgrounds and from a similar social milieu, it also highlights how familiarity builds up over time. This dimension was discussed by several of the respondents. For instance, Amy stated: It’s kind of a middle-class suburb. So it’s quite peaceful in that sense and there’s hardly any drama around. I mean you always have your break-ins and stuff like that, but it’s pretty low key from that perspective. That’s the main thing that I like about it, and it’s familiar to me. While, like Amy, many of the participants discussed the people who occupied their local areas at length, they also considered the local environment and infrastructure (in the form of shops, medical facilities and leisure spaces) which appeared to form part of the dynamic that created the feeling of being ‘at ease’ that is so important to belonging. Mary, for instance, described the active role of the physical environment, explaining that she missed an amenity of the suburb where she grew up: I really miss the greenery, I guess. I do live on a main road in Coburg [a suburb of Melbourne] so I think that colours my view a bit. There’s not many nice, big, tall trees in this area, and it just changes the whole feel of the suburb. She referred to living on a ‘main road’, conjuring an image of a constant stream of noisy and polluting traffic, which she contrasted with the ‘nice, big, tall trees’ which impacted directly on the ‘feel’ of the suburb where she grew up. Mary summed this up as ‘greenery’, offering a tantalising glimpse into the active role of the colour, shape and size of trees in creating a feeling of connection to a place. Several of the respondents emphasised the sense of connection or ease that was offered by the materiality of specific places. They offered an alternative view to the negative perceptions of their suburbs, saying they felt ‘comfortable’ in their environment. For instance, Kimberly said: I quite like it because it’s quiet and it’s a nice area and I feel comfortable here. I like the location in terms of where it is in relation to the city and other services. I like being in the western suburbs. A lot of people say horrible things about the western suburbs, but I actually find it quite a nice, relaxed place to live, and I appreciate that our traffic situation is better than in some of the other parts of Melbourne. She feels positive about how things are positioned in relation to each other (e.g. the city and services), and she highlighted the ‘relaxed’ nature of relationships and

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mentioned the traffic as a material reality that is ‘better’ than in other parts of the city, and so offers amenity. A further way in which participants gained a sense of familiarity through everyday activities with other people was by volunteering. Around half of the participants mentioned that they were involved in some form of volunteering, with all of them doing so in their local areas. Volunteering was an explicit strategy to extend relationships with one’s local community. For instance, while discussing his perception of belonging, Eric linked belonging with feeling that he contributed to the community: Just belonging to the different things that are within the community from the – involved in the school, the kinder, the cub scouts, the footy club, you know . . . that sort of thing. Yeah, it definitely contributes to community I guess. The institutions that Eric listed are both physical and social places for him. Being involved in these volunteering activities means that Eric engages with a wide range of spaces (school grounds, football fields and clubrooms) that create a sense of ease and familiarity with the community. Although for the participants volunteering was often tied to their children’s commitments, this was not always the case. For instance, Laura volunteered at her local tennis club and linked this with a sense of belonging in her local area: ‘My voluntary work, for example, that obviously would help me have a sense of belonging’. Volunteering is an example of the ways in which belonging is produced through repetitive, everyday ‘events’ that are layered over time, creating the sense of place through routine and familiarity. The routine or everyday nature of volunteering in their lives appeared to be a particular point of focus when some participants sought to describe how they belonged. Belonging was also associated with the amenity of ‘good schools’ for some participants. While this could be seen as a form of ‘boundary maintenance’ (and so identified as a political act) or as evidence that social class is reproduced through a middle-class habitus (Bourdieu 1996; McEwan this volume), it is also an example of the way in which ‘things other than humans can be agents, making things happen’ (Fox & Aldred 2017, p. 7). The proximity of ‘good’ schools was a central concern for participants with children. For instance, when asked why she chose the house in which she lived, Tracy replied: ‘The primary reason for this property is it’s zoned for a good school’. Similarly, while discussing how he felt about his local area, Eric stated: ‘We really love it here. It’s a great place, great school for the kids’. The respondents’ reflections on where they live, seen through a new materialist lens, highlight the way in which belonging is produced by connections between people and places that (1) include both the human and non-human elements, and (2) involve everyday iterations or events that situate people in place and time. In this sense, belonging is both ‘materially embedded and embodied’ (Braidotti 2013, p. 128). In the next section, we shift the focus to explore the way in which

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‘thoughts, desires and feelings’ (Fox & Aldred 2017, p. 6) contribute to the production of a sense of belonging. Social ties, affect and nostalgia We turn to the finding that these respondents lived in or close to the areas where they lived as children or young people. When asked to reflect on this, respondents referred to the familiarity of their childhood setting, the sense of nostalgia and the wish to have proximity to family and friends. For example, Laura said she had noted that people she knew were ‘going back to where they were born’ and reflected: But I think you just go back to what you’re familiar with, what you’re comfortable with. You know, you remember how it was for you as a child and you think, well, this is a good neighbourhood, and I think all the childhood memories that you’ve got probably bring you back to it. Nostalgia enables people to hold on to the ephemeral human and non-human elements that are associated with belonging. The links across time, from some perspectives, ‘profoundly [disturb] any chronological ordering of life and being’ because they ‘pull us back to a space that cannot be revisited’ (Probyn 1995, p. 446). However, viewed through a new materialist lens, the feelings associated with the past are experienced very much in the present. The past is not necessarily experienced as a separate place – it infuses the present and gives place meaning and familiarity. This is illustrated by Karen who grew up in Brisbane, moved to Melbourne with her parents when she was 16 and then moved independently to the Gold Coast at age 18. She said that she wanted ‘the lifestyle’ and in particular the ‘warmer weather’ that she had experienced in Brisbane because ‘I always thought if I could be warmer, I would be much happier’. The experience of nostalgia does not necessitate the loss of that which it is directed toward. It appears that it can instead be oriented towards a place as it was at a specific point in time and be experienced as a force that draws one back to this place. Amy, who lives two suburbs away from where she lived as a child, also experiences strong links with the past as one of the things that connects her to her place: I think it’s the experiences, so, well for me it’s more familiarity. But I think in terms of belonging, I guess it’s where your family is and stuff. I lost my grandfather two years ago and I lost my grandma this year, so for me it’s just having those memories as well. We had Sunday roast with them every Sunday. They lived two suburbs away. Amy’s statement indicates that interpersonal connections mediate one’s sense of belonging and attachment to place. Indeed, this claim is strengthened by the fact that the respondents reported proximity to family members (especially parents) as

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one of their primary considerations when determining where to live. This sentiment was reflected in Elizabeth’s response to the question ‘What do you think place means?’: I think having that security and having friendships, social networks, family, connections – just all connected and a part of your community. So whether it’s a school community, your family, your friends and feeling that – I suppose a feeling of that you belong as well, and that you’re actually, I suppose, supporting society, whether it’s through work or whether it’s doing voluntary work as well. That’s probably how I would see place, how you fit into your place. Elizabeth’s comment resonates with Antonsich’s (2010) understanding of belonging as ‘a symbolic space of familiarity, comfort, security and emotional attachment’ (p. 646). Taken together, the findings presented in this section indicate that, while attachment to place is related to employment (traditionally one of the domains of transition studies), it is equally associated with feelings of nostalgia as well as social connections and especially proximity to significant others, such as parents.

Concluding remarks Our focus on belonging to place using the relational lens of new materialist ideas makes visible the dynamic interrelationships between people and places. The ontological focus on what exists and what things do draws attention to belonging as an affect produced in everyday ways. Our discussion expands understanding of belonging in urban areas, shifting the focus from political action (such as boundary maintenance) to look more closely at the assemblages of people and things that produce the experience of familiarity, comfort, emplacement and safety. This shift also emplaces urban areas by making physical and material elements in these areas visible in the analysis of people’s lives. Our discussion occurs against a sociological tradition in which belonging in rural areas has been associated with nature and the environment, framed by the notion of backwardness and deficit compared to urban areas and cities (Cuervo & Wyn 2014). Despite the focus on the urban as a generic site of new and interesting social dynamics, much of this focus has ignored their material and physical elements, essentially rendering them ‘placeless’. This chapter joins the work of authors such as Duff (2010) in focussing on how young adults experience belonging through their relationships with the materiality of specific urban places. The reflections of the sixteen participants in our longitudinal study, analysed through a new materialist lens, show how belonging is forged through time and how the ‘things’ – both human and non-human – that produce that sense of belonging are a discursive resource (Antonsich 2010) that informs their transition processes from youth to adulthood. Remaining in or close to the areas where they

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lived as children was not just about ‘family support’ (indeed, this did not rate much mention). Their reflections instead emphasise the significance of ‘familiarity’ with both people and place – with both the social and the physical environment that is built through everyday interactions. Returning to the discussion at the beginning of this chapter, although we have focussed on everyday, micro-level experiences, this is not to the exclusion of the plethora of structural changes (to higher education, social security provisions, employment conditions and the political and economic landscape) which have shaped the lives of the generation that our participants belong to and have formed the focal point of many studies employing a transitions approach. Rather, we have used a different entry point to consider the impact of these conditions, centring embodied, affective experience instead of seeking to directly identify the impact of structural shifts. In so doing, we have nevertheless found our way back to the impact of these structural shifts: the type of belonging that we have identified in this chapter – specific, relational and bound up in nostalgic memories – appears indicative of a familiarity and comfort with one’s immediate surroundings that may constitute a response to, or buffer against, uncertain, skewed structural conditions. Specifically, by identifying with their immediate local area rather than with an abstract idea of ‘the city’, our participants appeared to immerse themselves in what was familiar to them. By allowing them to perform routines and practices of belonging, the materiality of these areas appeared to offer a buffer against the uncertainty inherent in change. The imperfect nature of this attempt to take cover in the face of pervasive (and not necessarily positive) change is, however, evident in the nostalgia that many of the participants felt for places that they had not actually left. In this chapter, we have engaged with the question of how, with the erosion of the conditions that enabled the previous generation to achieve their life goals, the young adults of the 1990s and 2000s formed and experienced belonging, which has occupied previous scholarship (Henderson et al. 2007; Andres & Wyn 2010; Furlong 2015). Our discussion suggests that a key to answering this question lies in making visible the interrelationships between people and places across time that become resources for building lives. Specifically, we find that, far from simply feeling comfortable in specific spaces, the small-scale and seemingly mundane forms of belonging that we have identified may form part of a means of responding to the pressure of broader processes of structural change. We conclude that the concept of belonging, when understood in this way, becomes a useful tool for gaining insight into the relationship between biography and history in young people’s lives.

References Andres, L. & Wyn, J. 2010, The making of a generation: The children of the 1970s in adulthood, University of Toronto Press, Toronto. Antonsich, M. 2010, ‘Searching for belonging: An analytical framework’, Geography Compass, vol. 4, no. 6, pp. 644–659. doi:10.1111/j.1749-8198.2009.00317.x

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Ball, S., Maguire, M. & Macrae, S. 2000, Choice, pathways and transitions post-16: New youth, new economies in the global city, Routledge/Falmer, London. Bell, D. & de-Shalit, A. 2011, The spirit of cities: Why the identity of a city matters in a global age, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ. Bell, V. 1999, Performativity & belonging, Sage, London. Bourdieu, P. 1996, The state nobility: Elite schools in the field of power, trans. L.C. Clough, Polity Press, Cambridge. Braidotti, R. 2013, The posthuman, Polity Press, Cambridge. Casey, E. 2001, ‘Between geography and philosophy: What does it mean to be in the placeworld?’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, vol. 91, no. 4, pp. 683–693. doi:10.1111/0004-5608.00266 Cloke, P. 2006, ‘Conceptualising rurality’, in P. Cloke, T. Marsden & P. Mooney (eds.), Handbook of rural studies, Sage, Thousand Oaks, CA, pp. 12–28. Cohen, P. 1997, Rethinking the youth question: Education, labour and cultural studies, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, UK. Cuervo, H. & Wyn, J. 2017, ‘A longitudinal analysis of belonging: Temporal, performative and relational practices by young people in rural Australia’, Young, vol. 25, no. 3, pp. 219–234. doi:10.1177/1103308816669463 Cuervo, H. & Wyn, J. 2014, ‘Reflections on the use of spatial and relational metaphors in youth studies’, Journal of Youth Studies, vol. 17, no. 7, pp. 901–915. doi:10.1080/1367 6261.2013.878796 Duff, C. 2010, ‘On the role of affect and practice in the production of place’, Environment and Planning D, vol. 28, no. 5, pp. 881–895. doi:10.1068/d16209 Edensor, T. 2012, ‘Illuminated atmospheres: Anticipating and reproducing the flow of affective experience in Blackpool’, Environment and Planning D, vol. 30, no. 6, pp. 1103–1122. doi:10.1068/d12211 Fox, N.J. & Aldred, P. 2017, Sociology and the new materialism, Sage, London. Fraser, A., Batchelor, S., Li, L.N.L. & Whittaker, L. 2017, ‘City as lens: (Re)imagining youth in Glasgow and Hong Kong’, Young, vol. 25, no. 3, pp. 235–251. doi:10.1177/ 1103308816669642 Furlong, A. 2015, ‘Unemployment, insecurity, and poor work: Young adults in the new economy’, in J. Wyn & H. Cahill (eds.), Handbook of children and youth studies, Springer, Singapore, pp. 531–542. Habib, S. 2017, Learning and teaching British values: Policies and perspectives on British identities, Palgrave, Cham. Habib, S. & Ward, M.R.M. (eds.) 2019, Identities, youth and belonging: International perspectives, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, UK. Haraway, D. 1997, Modest_witness@second_millennium: Femaleman_meets_oncomouse, Routledge, New York. Henderson, S., Holland, J., McGrellis, S., Sharpe, S. & Thomson, R. & Grigoriou, T. 2007, Inventing adulthoods: A biographical approach to youth transitions, London, Sage. Jørgensen, A., Fallov, M. & Knudsen, L. 2011, ‘Local community, mobility and belonging’, Danish Journal of Geoinformatics and Land Management, vol. 46, no. 1, pp. 22–35. doi:10.5278/ojs.tka.v119i46.590 May, V. 2013, Connecting self to society: Belonging in a changing world, Palgrave Macmillan, Hampshire, UK. Miller, L. 2003, ‘Belonging to country: A philosophical anthropology’, Journal of Australian Studies, vol. 27, no. 76, pp. 215–223. doi:10.1080/14443050309387839

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Mizen, P. 2004, The changing state of youth, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, UK. Probyn, E. 1995, ‘Suspended beginnings of childhood and nostalgia’, GLQ, vol. 2, no. 1, pp. 439–465. doi:10.1215/10642684-2-4-439 Purcell, M. 2003, ‘Citizenship and the right to the global city: Reimagining the capitalist world order’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, vol. 27, no. 3, pp. 564–590. doi:10.1111/1468-2427.00467 Robertson, R. 1995, ‘Glocalisation: Time-space and homogeneity-heterogeneity’, in M. Featherstone, S. Lash & R. Robertson (eds.), Global modernities, Sage, London, pp. 25–44. Savage, M., Bagnall, G. & Longhurst, B. 2005, Globalization and belonging, Sage, London. Smith, M.P. 2001, Transnational urbanism: Locating globalization, Blackwell, Oxford. Stahl, G. & Habib, S. 2017, ‘Moving beyond the confines of the local: Working-class students’ conceptualizations of belonging and respectability’, Young, vol. 25, no. 3, pp. 268–285. doi:10.1177/1103308816669451 te Riele, K. 2004, ‘Youth transition in Australia: Challenging assumptions of linearity and choice’, Journal of Youth Studies, vol. 7, no. 3, pp. 243–257. doi:10.1080/1367 626042000268908 Tyler, K. 2003, ‘The racialized and classed constitution of English village life’, Journal of Anthropology, vol. 68, no. 3, pp. 391–412. doi:10.1080/0014184032000134504 Urry, J. 2002, Global complexity, Polity Press, Cambridge. Vieten, U. 2006, ‘Out of the blue of Europe: Modernist cosmopolitan identity and the deterritorialisation of belonging’, Patterns of Prejudice, vol. 40, no. 3, pp. 259–279. doi:10.1080/00313220600769562 Wyn, J. & White, R. 1997, Rethinking youth, Allen & Unwin, St Leonards, NSW.

Chapter 3

Surveillance, belonging and community spaces for young people from refugee backgrounds in Australia Melanie Baak, Renae Summers, Shepard Masocha, Deirdre Tedmanson, Peter Gale, Johannes Pieters and Awit Kuac

Introduction I cannot tell you how many times – especially young men that are in this group would say, ‘I’m always discriminated against’ . . . ‘I can’t even walk with three friends down the road and the police come and ask us what we’re doing and follow us’ – so, it was just this constant thing of, not having . . . that strong sense of belonging. (Macy, youth service provider)

In the current era of increased global movements and what has commonly been referred to as a refugee ‘crisis’, borders have become the centre of both political debate and policy. In an era of increasing spatial connectedness, we argue that belonging is un-done and re-done across multiple borders of body and place. Geographic, cultural, national, linguistic and ‘racial’ borders continue to mark and maintain the differences between ‘us’ and ‘them’. Political and public discourses increasingly construct migrants, refugees and asylum seekers as ‘threatening unassimilable strangers, draining shrinking state resources’ (Yuval-Davis, Anthias & Kofman 2005, p. 516). Furthermore, the fear propagated by the media and political constructions of these so-called ‘threatening strangers’ results in a heightened surveillance of those who supposedly pose a threat. The boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them’ are marked and ‘policed’ in particular ways, determining who can belong, where and when. This chapter explores the ways in which belonging is negotiated in relation to people and place (Baak 2016; Fortier 2000; Probyn 1996; Yuval-Davis 2011; Habib 2017; Stahl & Habib 2017; Habib & Ward 2019; Wyn, Cuervo & Cook this volume), drawing on research data from three participant groups living and working in the same locale. The first participant group was young people, aged between 18 and 30 years old, from the South Sudanese community who are from refugee backgrounds. These young people frequently gathered and socialised in highly visible public spaces in a local suburban area, Darley,1 within a major

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city in Australia. They have been identified as ‘at risk’ by policing authorities and social services in this area. Furthermore, the young men were characterised by service providers as a disengaged group who were disconnected from their families and communities, likely to drink excessively and having contact with the criminal justice system. These young people were no longer eligible for refugee settlement services, placing them at a high level of disadvantage. The second participant group included older members of the South Sudanese community in Australia who were identified by other community members as community ‘leaders’. The third participant group included those employed to govern and ‘police’ the public spaces in which the young people were gathering. Drawing on theories of belonging from postcolonial and migration studies (Baak 2016; Fortier 2000; hooks 2009; Probyn 1996; Yuval-Davis 2006, 2011), as well as theories of surveillance and control drawing on the work of Foucault (1982), the chapter brings the viewpoints of the three participant groups together to analyse the relationship between space, belonging and surveillance. We consider how the young people’s sense of belonging to space is shaped by experiences of increased surveillance by law enforcement agencies and local government authorities. We argue that belonging, particularly for visibly different migrant groups, is controlled and negotiated both by the self and by Others in relation to particular spaces.

Conceptual framing: belonging and surveillance Across the world, the politics of fear and politics of belonging occupy the heart of political debates and the surveillance of borders (Yuval-Davis 2011). Questions of belonging centre on the question of who is ‘a stranger’ and who does not belong (Yuval-Davis 2011). Who does or does not belong ‘is also continuously being modified and contested, with growing ethnic, cultural and religious tensions within as well as between societies and states’ (Yuval-Davis 2011, p. 2). Belonging, then, is always negotiated in relation to particular places as well as to the people who are in those places (hooks 2009). Visible difference, particularly through skin colour or ‘racialisation’, has long been identified as a key marker that demarcates the boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them’. A number of researchers, particularly in the United States and United Kingdom, have explored ‘race’ and racialisation and their intersections with space (Byrne 2003; Haynes 2008; Knowles 2003; Neely & Samura 2011). These authors argue that race and space are co-constitutive. In white settler societies like Australia, it is also important to consider the historical and contemporary connections between racial and spatial processes, particularly the legal and social practices which ‘reproduce racial hierarchies’ through the governance of space (Razack 2002, p. 17). Constructions of ‘race’ and responses to cultural diversity have been the focus of government policy and legislation in Australia since Federation in 1901. Historically in Australia, the focus has been on both exclusion and managing diversity

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through governance. Surveillance is one way through which bodies are governed, and it can be understood broadly as ‘the focused, systematic and routine attention to personal details for purposes of influence, management, protection or direction’ (Lyon 2007, p. 14). According to Foucault (1979), the apparatus of surveillance ensures obedience as part of a ‘disciplinary society’ whereby institutions such as schools, hospitals, workplaces, army barracks and asylums become integral parts of processes of normalisation. Through constructing particular ‘normal’ ways of being within societies, surveillance can control the forms of behaviour and ways of being that are acceptable and belong within a given society, thereby also determining those behaviours and ways of being that do not belong. We draw on Foucault’s (1979, 1982, 1991) work on disciplinary, sovereign and governmental surveillance as a framework for analysing the surveillance and regulation of the young people who are the subject of this study. As a social group, children and young people have historically occupied the ‘wild zones’ imagined within the institutional spaces characteristic of modernity (Kelly 1999). In these ‘zones’, certain groups of young people have been viewed as being ‘ungovernable’ and lacking in ‘self-regulation’. Furthermore, negative representations of ‘deviancy’ and ‘delinquency’, particularly in Western nations, have also been fundamentally shaped by notions of ‘race’, class and gender and situated in relation to particular ideas about ‘normal’ youth (Kelly 2003; Woodman & Wyn 2014). Through considering the experiences of a particular group of young people who do not conform to ‘normal’ ways of being and behaving, we explore how processes of normalisation, such as surveillance, influence the young people’s sense of belonging.

Methodology and background to project This research was based on data collected through interviews conducted in 2017 with community members and young people from South Sudanese refugee backgrounds as well as service providers in Darley, a suburb in a major metropolitan city in Australia. Darley is relatively diverse; over the years, the proportion of young people in Darley who were born overseas has steadily grown from 29 per cent in 2001 to 45 per cent in 2016 (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2017). Interviews with community members and young people were conducted by a research assistant who was of the same cultural and linguistic background as the participants. These interviews were conducted in public spaces such as cafés or participants’ or relatives’ homes, depending on what suited the participants. Interviews with service providers were conducted by two members of the research team at the participants’ workplaces. Semi-structured interviews provided flexibility and enabled researchers to review the themes emerging from the data with participants. Through this methodology, we sought to foreground the perspectives of the young people who were the target of a number of interventions in the area. Four young men aged between 18 and 30 years old were interviewed. Purposive sampling was utilised to identify participants who were from a South Sudanese refugee

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background and lived or socialised in Darley. In addition, interviews with five adult community members of South Sudanese refugee-background provided a wider context and understanding of the issues for South Sudanese background youth in Australia. Community members were recruited through the researchers’ longstanding relationships with refugee communities. Additionally, semi-structured interviews were conducted with four individuals who worked for organisations which supported young people from refugee backgrounds in the Darley region. Pseudonyms are used to refer to all participants, and identifying place names are excluded. While the wider study involved multiple stakeholders and participants to explore how service providers have developed and implemented programmes for disengaged youth in the Darley region, for the purposes of this chapter we specifically focus on the young people’s experiences of surveillance and belonging.

Findings and discussion Connections to Darley: ‘these kids, it’s where they grew up’ Over the past 15 years, the demographics in Darley have shifted rapidly.2 Describing the diversity of the Darley region, Deng, one of the young men, said: It’s just messy because of the nature of different people. . . . The mix of different race and they are placed in that society, someone try to be the dominant one because – so, people who are – who feel like, okay, they belong in Darley, but there’s some people who feel like they want to take over Darley and they don’t want these people . . . these people feel like – I used to live in Darley. Deng described how the increasing diversity of the Darley region resulted in contestations over, in his view, who really belongs in and to Darley. His words illuminate how a sense of belonging is both controlled and negotiated, where the borders and boundaries of belonging are not fixed but discursively constructed, making belonging malleable. Deng noted that, while some people ‘try to be the dominant one’ and ‘want to take over’, for others simply having lived in Darley creates a sense of connection and belonging. Thus space, in Darley, is contested, fluid and historical, relational and interactional and infused with difference and inequality (Neely & Samura 2011). Community perceptions of and use of space exemplify the relational processes through which space is constructed but also the contestations over who belongs. There are current attempts to gentrify the Darley region through the private sale of much of the government housing and a range of strategies to improve public services and spaces. Deng described the gentrification process and its impact on the young people’s sense of connection to Darley: Darley is a messed up area in the first place . . . all the house that used to be Darley . . . few years ago, Darley used to be . . . houses all around – government house. At the moment, people are buying in. Government is

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selling to the private owners so that’s why the government has – is caring more than previous. You know why – because now they’re selling the land to private owners and they don’t want these kids to still hang around there but these kids, it’s where they grew up and that’s how I see it. Deng repeatedly emphasised that, while the young people may not still live in the Darley area, they have developed a sense of belonging and connection to the area, having grown up there. However, the visibly different South Sudanese background young people are readily constructed on the basis of their ‘race’ as Other, unwanted and thus not belonging in Darley. The young people’s sense of belonging to Darley, where they spent most of their childhood, outweighs the changes to place which have contributed to them being unwanted. These tensions indicate the complex ways through which belonging is controlled and negotiated both by the self and others in relation to particular spaces. As the diversity of the Darley area increased during the mid to late 2000s, a number of youth engagement programmes, including music, sport and educational support, were introduced to offer opportunities for social connection and skill building for young people outside school hours. Government initiatives were funded to facilitate youth engagement, connection and belonging. Garang, having been involved with a soccer programme, homework programme and music group, described how the number of programmes for young people has been reduced significantly in recent years: I remember back a few years ago, let’s say 8 years from now I used to play soccer, before that there were back in Darley . . . there’s a place where you can do homework . . . used to be a lot of . . . going on there. . . . But now, these days, kids ain’t got no options, they don’t have nowhere to go apart – they’re just going to . . . to get in trouble . . . like, a lot of kids used to come. . . . Youth community, community centre is in Darley . . . that’s why I still hang here. When funding ceased or the programmes were transferred to other areas, the young people retained the connection they had developed with Darley. They continue to gather in this space as, in Garang’s words, the young people ‘ain’t got no options’ or ‘nowhere to go’. The interviews with Deng and Garang indicate the complex contestations and shifts in belonging in a particular space over time and the ways in which this is shaped by government, private, public and individual interests.

What is public space for? ‘Just want to kick back in a public environment’ The questions of who decides what public space is for and how it should be used are important. Mitchell (2003), in his seminal text The right to the city, describes how New York’s public spaces were transformed in response to ‘the fear of inappropriate users: the homeless, drug dealers, loitering youth . . . [in order] to assure

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that public spaces remain ‘public’ rather than hijacked by undesirable users’ (p. 2). Hénaff and Strong (2001) suggest that: [p]ublic space . . . is the space created by and for humans that is always contestable, precisely because whereas there are criteria that control admission to its purview, the right to enact and enforce those criteria is always in question. (p. 4) All participants in our study described the complex ways in which the rights to ‘enact and enforce’ the criteria for admission into public spaces are negotiated. This included strategies such as the local government authority changing public spaces to alcohol-free ‘dry zones’, the installation of CCTV and the frequent police surveillance of the public areas in which the young people met. These strategies enact and enforce the criteria for public space usage, illustrating the embedded power differentials over who controls public space and its use. Young people are regular users of public spaces such as parks and community centres in their attempt to find somewhere to gather and socialise. However, young people frequently experience particular difficulties in gathering in and utilising public space (Lieberg 1995). For example, Garang uses public space in Darley ‘with friends of mine, just want to kick back in a public environment’. Another participant, Bol, described the desire to ‘hang out’; however, he also went on to describe the limits to the types of behaviour that are appropriate in public spaces: ‘in Darley Community area they are really above 20–25 that are really just hanging out and just want to socialise by drinking with their friends’. In Darley, like in other public spaces, young people are often constructed and perceived by the wider public as ‘flouting normative standards of behaviour’ (Manders 2010, p. 145). Mary, a service provider who was interviewed, described how the young people gather in a local park to drink alcohol: [A]t the John Smith Reserve. A lot of drinking . . . I didn’t worry about it because they were just using the public space and that’s fine . . . we’re quite happy for them to come here to use the space. . . . So then we were saying, ‘You’re welcome to come here; just don’t be naughty’. Mary described how she is happy for the young people to use the public space and even to drink there. However, she qualified this with ‘just don’t be naughty’, indicating the need for them to conform with ‘normative standards of behaviour’. A number of adult participants from the South Sudanese community also expressed fears that the youth were not complying with ‘normative standards of behaviour’. For example, one community member, Tong, suggested that: [T]hese young people they are now, they stay in park areas and in shopping centres and other places where sometimes they chill out and decide to go and buy some alcohol in the market and they sit there, they consume them, and

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these public places they are not for just consuming alcohol but sometimes you go, like there with your children and others, with your family, but when you find certain things happening, people are fighting and so and so. Visibly different young people, such as the youth participants of this project, are perceived as ‘black youth’ and strongly associated as perpetrators of problem behaviours. ‘Blackness’, youth and problem behaviours are conflated and become one and the same. In our dialogues with a service provider, Mary, the links that are made between blackness and youth were clear: [S]o they’re black. They’re African. . . . It’s probably the same as youth. You hear youth it’s like oh, it’s the youth, that’s scary, we’re under threat. The Africans, they are pretty big blokes. . . . So it is intimidating when they’re drunk and you see them and they get this body language changes, get the swagger and you see them coming towards you and it’s like ‘oh my’. In our conversations, it was clear that gatherings of young people from African backgrounds in public spaces in Darley were associated with inappropriate behaviour. Mary further discussed how this necessitated responses from local government and police. Kelly (2003) describes how: [I]n a number of jurisdictions, by-laws have been introduced that set limits on the number of young people who may gather in certain public spaces, and that allow police – both public and private – to move young people on if they cause others ‘anxiety’. (p. 175) The need to control and modify the behaviour of the young people in public spaces was demonstrated through an increased level of surveillance. In the following section, we focus on how surveillance was used in Darley in an effort to force the youth to comply with ‘normative standards of behaviour’. These efforts to control the young people’s behaviour had significant implications for the ways the young people used public spaces as well as their sense of belonging in Darley. Surveillance: ‘I can’t even walk with three friends down the road and the police come’ Increased surveillance in response to ‘deviant behaviour’ illustrates Foucault’s (1979) notion of the ‘normalising gaze’, where forms of governance attempt ‘to regulate conduct in relation to a set of norms defined by a dominant discourse’ (Nixon & Parr 2006, p. 81). Foucault (1979, p. 304) notes how in a neoliberal society ‘the judges of normality are present everywhere’ as every person in the society – the teacher, the doctor, the social worker – become part of modern surveillance apparatus, and the generation of knowledge is used to ‘normalise’ individual

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bodies, gestures, behaviours, aptitudes and attainments. The young people, community members and service providers described a variety of ways through which young people of South Sudanese heritage were surveilled in Darley. Service providers and young people described how police would regularly target and arrest African-heritage young people as a ‘politics of prevention’, where interventions are ‘based on risk assessment, rather than on the identification of specific criminal behaviour’ (Coleman & McCahill 2011, p. 69). One of the service providers, for example, described how after having a meeting with police ‘then they said while they are here they would go down and check out the park’. This illustrates how the police were continually monitoring public spaces which had been identified as locations in which the young people were gathering. Deng, one of the young people, described how on the morning of his research interview for this project he went ‘there [Darley area] today . . . we had an altercation with police this morning, yeah, because they wanted to just lock us up for no reason’. As mentioned at the beginning of the chapter, Macy, another service provider we interviewed, described how many young people tell her: ‘I can’t even walk with three friends down the road and the police come and ask us what we’re doing and follow us’. Macy further described to us the impact that the ongoing police surveillance has on the young people, suggesting that ‘it was just this constant thing of, not having . . . that strong sense of belonging’. Chan (2008, p. 224) argues that routine, intense and even intrusive surveillance technologies have become an accepted part of the landscape in Western democracies. Drawing on Foucault’s concept of the panopticon and the governing of space through surveillance and social control, Glover (2008) argues that individuals have an awareness of constant monitoring, patrolling and surveillance by the state, inducing an awareness of power relations with the state. In line with Coleman and McCahill (2011), we consider governing to be part of a process of boundary maintenance through which surveillance produces lines of demarcation between ‘normal’/‘law abiding’ and ‘abnormal’/‘criminal’ behaviour. By controlling and ‘normalising’ behaviour, surveillance determines and produces the forms of behaviour that are acceptable. A number of researchers have identified the ways in which surveillance operates to disproportionately target young men (Feeley & Simon 1994; Manders 2010) and particularly those from visibly different minority groups (Monahan 2017; Phillips & Bowling 2003). All of the young people discussed how their visible difference as ‘black’ Africans in a hegemonically white Australia impacted on how they were perceived, judged and treated by the police: [I]t has to do maybe with skin colour somehow or what not – make them think that we are so violent or is because we come from a war-torn background that they look down on us. . . . You can’t really compare the past – like our background and judge use like that. You’re not supposed to unless if we don’t know the law but if we are actually abiding by the law you can’t really – I mean can’t really portray us like that. (young person)

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I was just being picked out while there was a fight that broke out and then I had to serve time for that . . . You can’t just go on one part and then just in your mind just because you’re wearing a badge and you’re wearing – and then pick out that dude just because he’s black . . . And then you leave that white person to leave, scot-free. (young person) In Moore’s (2008) study of ‘street-life people’ (those who spend time hanging out in public areas) and their relationship to local communities, he argues that ‘streetlife people’ are perceived as a threat and are ‘represented as an essentialised other’. In Darley and wider Australia, ‘black’ bodies are read and surveilled in particular spaces as these are hegemonically white spaces (Mapedzahama & Kwansah-Aidoo 2017). Institutional police racism has been brought into focus through the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody (Johnston 1991) and in more recent years through the role of police in controlling immigration (Weber 2011) as well as in the police construction of youth from African backgrounds as ‘problem groups’ (Windle 2008). For example, research in Melbourne, Australia, with refugee-background youth aged 12 to 20 (85% born in Africa) reported that half of the male participants had been stopped and questioned by police within two years of arriving in Australia (Refugee Health Research Centre 2007). While there is no current Australian research which specifically explores stop and search procedures and experiences of black and visibly different minority people, the South Sudanese young people and community members in this study described similar experiences to those of black people in the United States and United Kingdom. A community member we spoke with described how groups of young African people are defined as ‘gangs’ and reported to the police, who subsequently stop the young people: [Y]ou could have young people who are friends . . . there could be 10 of them friends and they want to hang out together like African we all do the Sudanese way – we are all friends we just walk together . . . and for the police and the police ask them . . . pass by the neighbour then we can call the police – ‘have you seen a gang around here?’ So when they come they ask them . . . because it’s seen as African. These are powerful words which compel us to critically consider to what extent it is possible for ‘black youth’ in Australia to belong in public spaces if these spaces are conceived as public spaces for a particular (namely ‘white’) public. The following section explores how surveillance influences not only the use of space by the African-heritage young people but also how it affects their sense of belonging. Impact of surveillance on use of space and belonging: ‘you just move the problem on’ Manders (2010, p. 148) has argued that prohibiting the consumption of alcohol in public spaces has unintended consequences in that it forces already marginalised

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young people ‘indoors to spend time drinking, thus perpetuating their social exclusion’ (p. 148). A number of participants in this research similarly described how forms of surveillance in Darley, including CCTV installation and the prohibition of alcohol consumption in public parks, had the effect of moving young people to private houses or to other public spaces. Mary discusses how the installation of CCTV and an increased police presence reduced the gathering of young people: [W]e’ve got signs up and we told them we’re getting cameras. And they stopped coming before the cameras were actually activated. . . . And I think the police were indicating that they were active. . . . Well after that we pretty much didn’t see them at all and then . . . that they found houses to stay in . . . we got the cameras and we haven’t really had any trouble since. . . . I haven’t had any issues since the cameras went in. . . . Plus they know because we got the cameras and also the police kept coming constantly to them, arresting them and they’d have warrants out for their name so they’d come here and arrest them. And because we knew about it we’d report it and they’d come out. Through surveillance, the forms of ‘normal’ behaviour in public spaces in Darley are promoted and policed, thereby determining who can use the public space and for what purposes. The impact of making a number of the local parks dry zones was similar and effectively resulted in ‘moving the problem’ elsewhere. John Smith [a local park] became a dry zone . . . so the council actually did do it as a dry zone and they have now moved to another reserve . . . they don’t go to John Smith anymore . . . they started coming back to Alexander Reserve but not to John Smith because it’s a dry zone and they can be arrested . . . because there’s lots of parks around and they used to walk from one to the other, police move them on from one. (Mary) The police move the young people on from one park to another in an attempt to control their behaviour, but the young people continue to engage in undesirable behaviour in other locations. Manders’s (2010) concerns about the exclusionary consequences of prohibiting public consumption of alcohol are clearly illustrated by one of the young people, Bol: ‘that’s why they drink – so most of them go to that place to drink to socialise because they are also being isolated by the mainstream society which is the Australian society’. Bol highlighted the young people’s experiences of being excluded from the broader Australian society, identifying this as a key reason that young people gather in public places and drink together. Almost all of the community members, young people and service providers concurred with this view, identifying that some young people of South Sudanese heritage are struggling to find a sense of belonging with the Australian community. Deng elaborated on this, suggesting

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that a challenge for him and others is finding a space and a group in which they can feel comfortable being themselves: [F]or me and I believe others too, we just feel like, okay, there’s no ground that we can stand on actually to be who we are . . . everybody feel like a lone wolf until they meet a pack of wolf and then they know they’re right, so that’s how it goes . . . now it’s not about fun. It’s about oppression and not knowing nothing, and just being in a box . . . we are not just like them. We’re just a little bit different. We are people. Despite their experiences of marginalisation and exclusion from the wider community in Darley through practices of surveillance, our research shows that the young people continue to gather in public spaces. Perhaps as a result of the exclusion they have experienced, the young people have developed a sense of belonging based on shared experiences of ‘oppression’. Their sense of feeling that ‘there’s no ground that we can stand on’ (Deng), that there is nowhere that they can actually belong, is ironically what helps them to find the group in which they can belong. It is clear the young people we spoke with recognise their problematic and complex belonging in Darley and the ways in which this is contested and controlled, but their sense of belonging to and in Darley means that their desire to continue to gather in and utilise these spaces outweighs the negative impacts of surveillance. Antonsich (2010) has referred to ‘place-based belongingness’ as a feeling of being ‘at home’, a place of familiarity, attachment and security. As their first ‘home’ in Australia, Darley is a place with which the young people are familiar. It would appear that it does not matter how much surveillance is put in place to monitor and control their behaviour and how this impacts their everyday lives; they will continue to gather there. According to Garang: Going back to what we were saying again, if all these kids are saying they’re hanging around places and they’re saying all – do all these bad things – if they had a place where they could really – where they’re being accepted, it’ll be alright. As Garang identified, the only solution to the continuing challenges for the young people is to provide them with a place where ‘they’re being accepted’, and this means a space in which they do not feel they are under constant surveillance.

Conclusion In this chapter, we have described how young people from South Sudanese refugee backgrounds pursue ways to express their belonging in public spaces but also how these can easily be pathologised. We have explored the nexus between belonging in relation to place in a time of modernity and fears concerning ‘insider/

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outsider’ status from the perspective of young people from minority groups of refugee background and other community members, as well as those employed to govern or police these places. Foucault (1979) describes disciplinary forms of violence and control as a form of ‘biopolitics’ through regimes of governmentality. Power is inscribed through the local-level politics of surveillance which reinforces modes of subjectivity and both belonging and exclusion. Surveillance, as a power-infused ‘project of social ordering’ (Monahan 2017, p. 192), results in the production of ‘abject subjects’ where ‘[a]bjection signifies not only extreme need or destitution, but also a kind of social exclusion wherein the existence of the individual is called into question’ (p. 192). Through analysing the role of surveillance as both an enabler of stigmatisation as well as a symbol of the exclusionary power of the surrounding state, we have demonstrated the ways through which surveillance attempts to control who does and does not belong in particular public spaces. Yet, despite the intention to control the behaviours of certain ‘at-risk’ groups, and the apparent ability of surveillance to construct people as ‘abject subjects’, the young people have maintained agency in determining when and where they will gather. Through this, they demonstrated that, without an alternative space, Darley remains the space in which they feel ‘at home’, to which they feel connected and belong. In closing, we see this study as part of an ongoing project aiming to better understand the dynamics between the lived experience of marginalised young people, particularly those from African refugee backgrounds enjoying their civic right to gather in public places; the needs of broader community members and service providers; and the role of policing in civic contexts. Both space and belonging are contested, fluid and historical, relational and interactional and formed by but representative of power and inequality (Anthias 2006; Neely & Samura 2011; Yuval-Davis 2006; Butler this volume; Marchbank & Muller-Myrdahl this volume). Surveillance is just one example of the myriad of ways through which regimes of power continue to be exercised to determine who can belong in particular spaces. Yet the young people in this project described the complex ways through which they subvert these regimes of power to continue to negotiate their politicised belongings to spaces with which they are connected. The lived experiences and felt needs of young people are often rendered invisible or silenced in discussions about the communal use of public space; however, we have sought to centre the voices of young people in this chapter. As Deng explained, ‘it is about oppression . . . we’re just a little bit different [but] we are people’.

Notes 1 Darley is a created place name to avoid identifying participants and to protect their privacy. 2 In 2001, 0.5 per cent of Darley’s population (44 people) identified as having Sudanese ancestry, and this number increased in 2006 to 1.9 per cent (159 people). However, after this growth, the numbers decreased in 2011 to 1.2 per cent (112 people); by 2016, it was 0.6 per cent (59 people) (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2017).

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Chapter 4

Queering Timmies Theorising LGBTQ youth claiming and making space in Surrey, BC, Canada Jennifer Marchbank and Tiffany Muller Myrdahl

Introduction In this chapter, we theorise how lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) youth in Surrey, British Columbia, Canada, create safe spaces for themselves. Situated in this purportedly ‘redneck’ suburb, LGBTQ youth use various strategies to occupy and take up place: from being performers (thinking/speaking subjects) (Nelson 1999) to ‘hanging out’ (Panelli et al. 2002) to queering ‘boundary publics’ (Gray 2007), those ‘iterative, ephemeral experiences of belonging that happen at the outskirts and at the center(s) of the more traditionally recognised and validated public sphere’ (Gray 2007, p. 53). These and other tactics are read through scholarship on youth and liminality (see Sharkey & Shields 2008; Wood 2016), as the multiple liminalities of LGBTQ youth have a direct impact on how youth create, use and occupy space in Surrey. Baumeister and Leary (1995) developed the need-to-belong theory to explain the natural need of humans to belong with others; here we seek to theorise how LGBTQ youth create space in which to belong to each other when there is little else to belong to. We make two interrelated arguments. First, we contend that not only are young people absent, or even actively excluded, from planning decisions and shaping services and spaces; this marginalisation is compounded by the dual liminality of age and sexual orientation or gender identity. Yet, at the same time, youth are agents, claiming, making and holding space, however ephemeral (see Ward 2015). As the editors of this collection argue, ‘Young people can and do construct status and meaningful identities for themselves through conceptions of belonging, investment in peer cultures and via relationships with “territories” and places’ (Chapter 1, this volume). We can see these strategies in practice among LGBTQ youth in Surrey, BC. We turn now to consider the ethnographic background that shapes this chapter before moving on to consider how LGBTQ youth negotiate queer spaces within marginalised communities.

Methodology The empirical material we draw upon here was gathered from two LGBTQ youth groups that Marchbank has worked with over a period of a decade. Marchbank received ethics approval to work with both groups from Simon Fraser University.

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Data on the central event, Queering Timmies,1 was the result of ethnographic observations and the data from the Youth for a Change (YfAC) group, which is part of an ongoing participatory action project with young people (n = 18–20). In 2017, Marchbank conducted one-on-one interviews and group discussions with those who had been present at Timmies and on other ways of claiming and making queer youth space. Later, all YfAC members were provided with the chapter draft for comments which were then incorporated. Additional data is drawn from Marchbank’s autoethnographic experience as a member of the LGBTQ activist community in Surrey (see also Lozano-Neira & Marchbank 2016).

Claiming spaces As Sophia in The Golden Girls2 was famous for saying, ‘Picture it’: it is Wednesday night at 9 pm. A LGBTQ youth drop-in group has just ended, and fifteen or so LGBTQ youth, ages 14 to 20, decide to ‘queer Timmies’. Asked ‘Why Timmies?’, the youth respond that it is nearby, it is open and no one is required to buy anything. Off they go, every Wednesday night for several years. How do they ‘queer Timmies’? Simply by their presence. As Sara Ahmed (2006) contends, the youth shape the space: their physical presence, their youth, their queerness and their numbers change the place temporarily, for it is only ‘queer’ on Wednesday nights following youth group. In her work on queer phenomenology, Ahmed (2006) explores how we fit into our worlds, noting that how we are attracted to people and places is vital for understanding how we become comfortable in our world. Ahmed (2006) posits that to be ‘orientated is . . . to be turned toward certain objects, those that help us find our way. . . . They might be landmarks or other familiar signs that give us our anchoring posts’ (p. 1). She also notes that when we are oriented we feel a sense of comfort, of being ‘at home’ and that this ‘reminds us that spaces are not exterior to bodies; instead, spaces are like a second skin that unfolds in the folds of the body’ (Ahmed 2006, p. 9). Ahmed emphasises the intentionality of the subject, that is, the subject influences the shape of the space. At the same time, Ahmed recognises that the subject is simultaneously shaped by the space. We explore how that process of coming to feel at home, of being oriented to certain physical and imagined spaces, is achieved by LGBTQ youth. These youth experience disorientation, rather than orientation, in many aspects of their lives and often encounter ambiguity about where they belong. Existing within multiple liminalities, LGBTQ youth are often excluded from, or external to, mainstream youth culture; simultaneously, these youths cannot be truly members of adult culture, even if welcome. Moreover, how does one become oriented where there are few spaces to orient yourself towards? One answer is to create that space, to place a claim, to occupy, to hang out, to belong. We unpack these notions below.

Surrey, in the shadow of western Canada’s ‘gay central’ Among Canadian cities, three are understood in popular discourse to be ‘queer friendly’: Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver. The dominant imaginary about

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Canadian urban life, then, assumes that queer culture is part and parcel of ‘big city’ life, while challenges to the gender binary and heteronormative expectations that take place elsewhere are perceived to be out of place (Muller Myrdahl 2013). This imaginary is a legacy of the construction of white settler society where the foundational unit is the heterosexual nuclear family. The discourse around those on or outside the margins of dominant sexual and gender norms continues to permeate the notion of an urban–suburban divide in Canada: LGBTQ lives are positioned as ‘in place’ in gay villages of the urban core and understood to be out of place in suburban3 regions, which remain associated with conservatism and conformity to so-called ‘traditional values’. The persistent discourse that situates LGBTQ people as unwelcome in suburbia stands in contrast to other changes to the social and policy landscapes in Canada. For instance, although suburban residential patterns continue to be characterised by home ownership (which suggests less class diversity) (Moos & Mendez 2015), Canadian suburbs have become increasingly racially diverse in recent decades (Hiebert 2012). Likewise, from equal marriage policy at the federal level to sexual and gender diversity policies across a range of municipal (including suburban) school boards, there is a demonstration of greater acceptance of same-sex couples and families. Such changes have not gone uncontested (Nash & Browne 2015), and these changes have uneven consequences for those who are queer and racialised (Bishop et al. 2017), so the legacy of exclusion in which gays ‘for physical or moral reasons could not be accommodated by suburbia’ (Sowden 1994, p. 87) lingers on. What does this look like on the ground? Surrey, British Columbia, exemplifies both the discourse and its discontents. One of twenty-one municipalities of the Lower Mainland, Surrey is geographically the largest city in the province and second only to Vancouver in terms of population. Located south of Vancouver, its northern boundary is the Fraser River with the US border being the southern boundary. It is a city undergoing rapid change related both to its youthful population – 24 per cent of the population is 19 and under, and it is the only school district in the province with a growing number of students (Tan 2018) – and to its comparatively affordable housing in a region facing an intense housing crisis. Compared to neighbouring Vancouver, though, Surrey is framed as ‘redneck’ country. This reputation was firmly established by the banning of certain books from elementary schools due to the depiction of same-sex-parented families and gay characters in the 1990s. The six-year battle ended at the Supreme Court of Canada (Chamberlain v Surrey School Board) where the school district lost. Surrey has retained its image as a place that is not accepting of LGBTQ people: whereas Surrey only recently achieved, and lost, its first queer space for adults (a local bar next to a strip club), Vancouver has positioned itself as a vibrant city offering a range of LGBTQ-friendly public spaces for over two decades (Murray 2015/2016). Surrey as the ‘redneck neighbour’ is not the whole story, however. Ironically, the book ban of the mid-1990s prompted the beginnings of LGBTQ activism in Surrey (Rooney 2015). This activism began as a dance to raise funds to fight the

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book ban and developed into a Pride society, a branch of the Imperial Court System (an LGBTQ philanthropic organisation), and an adult-led youth drop-in centre (Rooney 2015). Indeed, for over eighteen years, there have existed some, though limited, LGBTQ youth spaces in Surrey, provided by volunteer organisations in the main. Thus, while spaces accessible to LGBTQ youth are more commonly associated with cities that have an existing array of LGBTQ-friendly services, Surrey exemplifies the need for greater nuance in the juxtaposition between the welcoming city and the regressive suburb (Muller Myrdahl 2013). The suburban context (in all its complexity), then, plays a key role in the lives of Surrey’s LGBTQ youth. So, too, does the reality of youth: being citizens-inthe-making with ‘limited formal mechanisms for voice and power’ (Cope 2008, p. 2847), youth are too often excluded from policy and planning circles, even when that policy making and planning relates to their own lives. Some academic research has sought to correct this tendency. As Bethan Evans (2008) writes: ‘Research on children and young people has . . . sought to address concerns that children and young people had previously been absent presences in social science research and public policy’ (p. 1659). Skelton and Gough (2013) note, however, that theorisations of cities and urban and social planning often fail to take youth seriously: despite the ubiquitous and often visible presence of youth in cities, they are ‘a generally ignored presence’ (p. 455).

Spaces of sexuality, spaces of youth Sexuality refers to the expression of sexual desires and behaviours (Johnston & Longhurst 2010) and is a fundamental component of subject formation and processes of self-identification. Like gender, sexuality is a socio-spatial phenomenon: more than just an identity or set of practices, sexuality becomes material through place-specific regulation and the production of – and resistance to – social norms. As Browne and Brown (2016) argue: [H]ow space and place are organised and used is directly related to sex and sexualities. Space/place are usually understood as heterosexual and meant to be used by . . . people who are unambiguously sexed (man or woman), [and] exhibit proper gendered behaviours (femininity and masculinity). (p. 1) The heteronormative construction of space and place, they note, assumes that dominant but often unspoken modes of heterosexuality are mapped onto physical bodies, which are assumed to perform dominant gender norms in uncomplicated ways and to entertain ‘sexual interests that are directed towards the clearly differentiated “opposite sex”’ (Browne & Brown 2016, p. 1). For the youth who ‘queered’ Timmies, regulation of their bodies and identities was a regular experience. They, like others (see TransFocus Consulting & Equity Labs 2016), reported encountering exclusion in school spaces, such as

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peer-policed gym changing rooms; in malls, when required by security to leave if not ‘shopping’; and in their homes, as parents and guardians restricted their movements and the selection of friends who were allowed to visit. In each instance, youth were expected to conform to dominant gender and sexual norms of the space; surveillance targeted ‘out-of-place’ gender identities, behaviour that deviated from consumerism and any aberrant sexuality and sexual activity. Notable research with youth draws out the power dynamics at play: O’Neill Gutierrez and Hopkins (2015), for example, write: ‘studying the lives of children and young people [we] have been acutely aware of the role, place and influence of gendered power relations within younger people’s lives’ (p. 384). Youth, of course, are also attentive to power relations and spatiality. This attention works in multiple and contradictory ways. On the one hand, David Driskell, Fox and Kudva’s (2008, p. 2837) work on youth space and urban change highlights the co-constitutive and mutually reinforcing ways in which being spatially marginalised – having few spaces to hang out, being regulated out of certain spaces – informs how youth feel marginal to and within the community. On the other hand, as Cindy Cruz (2014) shows from her work with queer street youth, ‘spaces away from scrutiny and examination of those in power, when queer street youth compare their experiences and analyse power, become locations of creativity and possibility’ (p. 209, original emphasis). These dynamics are akin to feminist responses to exclusion of women and the spatiality of resistance (Miranda & Arancibia this volume). Some scholarship focuses on the compound effect that being excluded from public space and public discourse has on social acceptance of women in the public sphere (Fraser 1990). Others take up the ways that feminists – particularly racialised women – have used exclusion as a generative opportunity to create spaces for community and resistance (hooks 1991). We argue that LGBTQ youth in Surrey have a unique relationship to power in spatiality, in part because they face multiple marginalisations as queer youth. There is no LGBTQ centre or youth-specific space for those who identify as LGBTQ or are exploring their sexual or gender identity. Likewise, the kinds of spaces that are typically available for LGBTQ people, like bars, are not only offlimits to youth, they simply do not exist in Surrey. As such, there are few places to become oriented towards. The role of LGBTQ adults is a notable part of how youth negotiate marginality and a lack of designated safe space. Panelli and colleagues (2002) describe the role of the media in Aotearoa New Zealand in constructing negative views of youth in public space. Citing Kristeva’s (1982) concept of abjection as being that which ‘disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules’ (p. 4), Panelli et al. (2002, citing Kristeva 1982) point out that youth exist as both child and adult (or attempt to) and, as such, disrupt the boundary between adult and child. This can put both LGBTQ youth and adults at risk. Because adult gay spaces often focus on alcohol and sex, adult gay community members may have concerns about the presence of youth in these spaces (Valentine & Skelton 2003). In addition, some LGBTQ adults fear that they may be read as predators if

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they interact with youth. To contend with the fact that LGBTQ youth disrupt several borders simultaneously, border guards occasionally need to be established. In Surrey, this has meant that youth attending adult events are marked in two ways: with bracelets, to indicate that they are not permitted alcohol, and through spatial segregation, where they are allocated to or allocate themselves to a specific area. As such, LGBTQ youth exist within yet without adult queer space. Indeed, adult LGBTQ organisations in Surrey have been very open to youth participation. This is distinct from the dance clubs and bars in Vancouver, which are only accessible to adults and from findings like those of Rae Rosenberg (2017), who showed that gay adults exclude youth, especially youth of colour and trans youth, from the Chicago gaybourhood through the use of security staff and playing music in public spaces to prevent loitering. In Surrey, LGBTQ adults help queer youth navigate multiple marginalisations in myriad ways. For instance, although limited space is available for any LGBTQ event in Surrey, many events have been held in venues with restaurant licences (rather than exclusively liquor licences) so youth can be legally admitted. Adult organisations also invite youth to participate: youth have taken great advantage of volunteering at events such as galas and pageants, events that are out of their price range, to be able to attend and experience the local adult gay culture. In addition, several youth volunteer to set up and work the Surrey Pride Festival each year and as such Surrey youth are possibly more integrated into the adult community than in other cities where adults and youth are in separate spaces. It is also important to acknowledge that this exchange between LGBTQ adults and youth is a two-way street: youth are active agents, negotiating their presence through providing service yet also learning about the adult organisations and adult issues. Youth take up opportunities and gain skills such as theatre management, public speaking and event planning. Likewise, youth seek out opportunities but do so on their own terms, including travelling in packs and fostering a sense of safety by volunteering in groups. Furthermore, these terms have enabled Surrey LGBTQ youth to develop mutually respectful relationships with a few of the adult community leaders and to use these ‘trusted’ adults to navigate the roles youth play in adult spaces. But what about youth spaces? In the following, we discuss how the youth create their own spaces and own sense of community.

Embodiment, friends and hanging out Living with multiple marginalities also means laying claim to spaces by repeated occupation. LGBTQ youth in Surrey accomplish this in at least two sites: Timmies and school stairwells. One youth,4 explaining why he and his friends always ate lunch on the same stairwell at high school, noted youth can mark their territory by regular occupation. It appears that other youth respect that territorial claim. However, a stairwell is hardly valuable territory when there is the central hall, the gyms and the outside space, all of which are more desirable to ‘hang out’ and be seen in. For this youth and friends, who are already labelled as members of the

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GSA (Gay Straight Alliance or Gender and Sexuality Association), their liminality restricts what territory they can claim. They are not only disempowered as youth in an adult world; as LGBTQ, they perhaps deliberately claim their identities and their spaces away from the mainstream high school population. Occupation and laying claim to space are embodied practices that can be understood both as ‘hanging out’ and to develop a sense of belonging. Ruth Panelli and colleagues (2002) define hanging out as involving: [Y]oung people negotiating ‘public’ space themselves, as well as becoming subjects of discourses that position their behaviour in these spaces. ‘Hanging out’ is about independence, meeting and being with friends and being in a place where they can see and be seen. (p. 22) LGBTQ youth use hanging out to establish ownership through repeated practice: regularly returning to the space and simply being present, to see and be seen, to be together and to relate to each other freely without surveillance of adults or their peers. This is akin to Vancouver youth in Cameron Duff’s (2010) ethnography who claim a similar school stairwell space. Duff (2010) notes that the youth who claimed this space ‘spoke of a sense of ownership they felt in this corner and their ongoing efforts to ensure that it was free for their exclusive use at lunchtime’ (p. 889). These practices of place making also enable youth to develop a sense of belonging. David Farrugia and Bronwyn Wood (2017) argue that producing a sense of lived space has ‘deep affective significance . . . that is manifest through the layering of everyday practices over time – which, in turn, also create place’ (p. 213). Creating place is not done simply through the presence of young bodies but also refers to the social relations amongst the youth, their interactions, their bonds of friendship and their shared exclusion from the adult spaces available in Vancouver. Returning to the example of occupying Timmies, Marchbank observed all these elements as the youth left the drop-in centre, emboldened by that experience and their own numbers, and headed to Timmies as out and proud queerlings. As Farrugia and Wood (2017) point out, these social relationships: [A]re both aspects of place, and actively constructed through the relational and embodied practices that make up particular places, which emerge as meaningful and affective sites for the production of social life. In this sense, the creation of culture and embodied sociality is also the creation of place. (p. 214) One particularly apt example of embodied practices was the night that the youth ‘queered Timmies’ in drag after the group had received a donation of several beautiful ballgowns! Several young gay men enthusiastically grabbed the gowns

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and rushed to change into them out of their jeans and t-shirts. Despite the coolness of the night, enrobed in their finery, these youths walked several long city blocks to Timmies. These youth, boys and young men in dresses, girls and young women supporting them, openly carried their own queer youth culture into a branch of Canada’s famous coffee shop chain.5 This exemplifies Edward Casey’s (1996) argument that place is an event, not a static thing. Further, the Timmies event put into practice Casey’s (1996) point that ‘[c]ulture is carried into places by bodies’ (p. 34), perhaps making a ‘thin’ place like a chain business more ‘thick’ (Casey 2001, cited in Duff 2010). Following Duff (2010), who observes that ‘thin’ places are those ‘that have been erased of any local specificity, any unique quality or feature that might enable individuals and groups to actively engage with place, to secure some purchase’ (p. 882), we might see the queering of Timmies as an activity that ‘thickens’ this place for queer youth as it enriches a sense of belonging by ‘forging a series of affective and experiential connections in place’ (Casey 2001, cited in Duff 2010, p. 882). The Timmies drag event was also akin to Mary L. Gray’s (2007) recounting of how LGBTQ youth utilise the only ‘public’ space in a small American town to create an opportunity for dress up, gender expression and queer activities. These youth go to Wal-Mart, also arguably a ‘thin’ place, and take advantage of trying on clothing, wigs and jewellery and create their own ‘drag race’ or fashion show. And, according to Gray (2007), they are tolerated. In both Wal-Mart and Tim Horton’s, LGBTQ youth create safe spaces for themselves (and perhaps others) through being performers, that is, thinking, speaking, acting subjects (Nelson 1999), simultaneously queering ‘boundary publics’ (Gray 2007). They transform ‘thin’ places into ‘thick’ places through the practices they perform in these sites, which alter ‘these thin featureless spaces into the kinds of thick places potentially supportive of young people’s personal enrichment’ (Duff 2010, p. 890). The creation of these ‘thick’ places may be ephemeral and may also be created through less than fully conscious behaviour in some instances. However, the existence of these places, even only for an evening or a lunchtime, allows LGBTQ youth to express their own social relations, create their own ‘thick’ place to belong through, for and because of their liminal identities.

Intentional spaces Whereas the already discussed activities were ‘accidental’ in some aspects – hallways that were chosen by happenstance and served a purpose of being away from peers, and Timmies was the continuation of the LGBTQ youth drop-in – other activities undertaken by LGBTQ youth in Surrey have been more deliberate. In one example of queer youth actively resisting being defined and instead acting as agents and creators of their own identities, some of the Timmies youth (and others) formed a LGBTQ youth activist and advocacy group a couple of years after the Timmies drag event, facilitated by Marchbank and her wife since March 2012. This group, which came to be called Youth for a Change, began its

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activism by flash leafleting a local mall, aiming to educate the public about queer youth: that LGBTQ youth are not miserable but instead are agentic young people who have multiple talents and skills. In a refusal of the ways that ‘[m]arginalised individuals are often denied the right to claim an identity distinct from an ascribed and enforced classification . . . conferred on the powerless by the powerful’ (Stahl & Habib 2017, p. 274), YfAC has conducted multiple workshops, staged performances, published their writings, won prizes and volunteered at adult events, amongst other acts (see www.youth4achange.com). These activist youth have claimed their place in public space not just through the occupation of specific physical locations but through education, participation in formal consultations with RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police) on policing of LGBTQ people, as advisors on the Homeless Count, through training youth workers and teachers and a myriad of other ways. And they have done so as young queer persons whose identities are shaped in part by the spaces they claim. In this sense, YfAC’s claims to public space have focussed not on ‘tangible buildings or specific streets . . . [but] strategies for space-making and constitutive processes for the queering of identity’ (Gray 2007, p. 53). Yet, YfAC also queered physical space! In 2015, from the anniversary of the Stonewall Riots to Labour Day (June to September), YfAC created and maintained a queer art bomb in a small wooded area next to a recreation centre. Earlier in the year, that area witnessed a brutal murder, prompting local citizens to reclaim the space for Friends of Newton (Newton is one of six communities in Surrey). YfAC wished to be involved in this kind of active citizenry and used rainbow streamers, flags and wool to ‘enclose’ a copse of trees which they then decorated with painted pine cones, poetry, collages, an ‘inclusion’ gate and a space dedicated to trans art, all of which was maintained on a weekly basis by the youth. A minor amount of vandalism and theft was experienced; however, when the ‘inclusion’ gate went missing, some youth used their own networks to track it down and ensure it was returned. This display of youth queerness, which marked this public space for nearly three months, was a claim of ownership, visibility and active citizenship. One outcome of the queer art bomb was connections between YfAC and other community groups, resulting in LGBTQ youth being invited to be involved in poetry groups, skill shares and a documentary, as well as a virtual march for peace, a relationship that is still active. In contrast to the earlier examples in which the adult LGBTQ community made space for queer youth, the queer art bomb was queer youth subverting public space with public art. Through this practice, YfAC developed recognition from local community leaders of the abilities and presence of LGBTQ youth in Surrey. When asked why queering this physical site was important, YfAC spoke of wanting other youth to see the possibilities of positivity in living a queer life. It was an act of resistance, an act of resisting the heteronormativity of the space. It was also an ‘affective rendering of place’ (Duff 2010, p. 892) that involved the expression of emotions through poetry and art, and it created place in pride for

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those who created it and a place for other LGBTQ community members (not just youth) to orient themselves towards and belong. As Duff (2010) contends, ‘[a]ffect is the means by which fragments of subjectivity, memory and purpose are deposited in place . . . leaving behind affective traces of lived intensity, awaiting reactivation in practice and interaction’ (p. 892). In this case, reflections of their lived experiences were deposited, and this made the site of the queer art bomb not just a place where the LGBTQ youth felt ownership; rather, this site also represented a physical manifestation of how queer youth had reached out into the community, to provide a space for others too to experience as positive, friendly and inclusive.

Conclusion LGBTQ youth in Surrey, BC, through their need to belong, have created and maintained spaces both actual and strategic, both for their own usage and to communicate to the wider community their presence and contribution to civic life in this city. So, whether in Timmies (in drag or not), in the school stairwell or purposely advocating and claiming space (physical, vocal or artistic), it appears that the experiences of liminal LGBTQ youth in Surrey problematise the discourse of youth needing to be ‘done for/to’ rather than ‘doing for themselves’. In addition, these experiences require us to rethink the juxtaposition between a LGBTQwelcoming metropolis and repressive and regressive suburbs.

Notes 1 Timmies is a shortened term for Tim Horton’s, an iconic Canadian coffee chain established by an ex-ice hockey hero. 2 The Golden Girls was a US sitcom broadcast over seven seasons from 1985. It involved four mature women living together. Sophia’s standard storytelling opening line was ‘Picture it’. 3 Unlike the suburb in the United Kingdom, which we understand as the dormitory outskirts of a municipality rather than a separate municipality, the Canadian suburb may be understood as similarly low density and residential in nature but may also function as a separate municipality. Because municipalities in Canada are creatures of the province and are largely subject to provincial jurisdiction, there is variation in suburban forms across Canada. In the Lower Mainland case discussed here, the municipalities are distinct in terms of governance. While it is not accurate to paint the municipalities adjacent to Vancouver as strictly bedroom communities, Vancouver functions as the dominant economic generator of the region. 4 One-on-one ethnographic conversation with Marchbank, 2017. 5 Marchbank observed the youth leaving the drop-in centre. The remainder of the information was reported to her the next week and many times later in the group.

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Murray, C. 2016 [2015], ‘Queering Vancouver: The work of the LGBTQ Civic Advisory Committee, 2009–14’, BC Studies, vol. 188, pp. 55–80, 164. Nash, C.J. & Browne, K. 2015, ‘Best for society? Transnational opposition to sexual and gender equalities in Canada and Great Britain’, Gender, Place & Culture, vol. 22, no. 4, pp. 561–577. Nelson, L. 1999, ‘Bodies (and spaces) do matter: The limits of performativity’, Gender, Place & Culture, vol. 6, no. 4, pp. 331–353. O’Neill Gutierrez, C. & Hopkins, P. 2015, ‘Introduction: Young people, gender and intersectionality’, Gender, Place & Culture, vol. 22, no. 3, pp. 383–389. Panelli, R., Nairn, K., Atwool, N. & McCormack, J. 2002, ‘“Hanging out”: Print media constructions of young people in “public space”’, Childrenz Issues: Journal of the Children’s Issues Centre, vol. 6, no. 1, pp. 22–30. Rooney, M. 2015, Interview for History of LGBTQ Activism in Surrey, BC Oral History Archive, Surrey, BC. Rosenberg, R. 2017, ‘The whiteness of gay urban belonging: Criminalizing LGBTQ youth of color in queer spaces of care’, Urban Geography, vol. 38, no. 1, pp. 137–148. doi:10. 1080/02723638.2016.1239498 Sharkey, A. & Shields, R. 2008, ‘Abject citizenship: Rethinking exclusion and inclusion: Participation, criminality and community at a small town youth centre’, Children’s Geographies, vol. 6, no. 3, pp. 239–256. doi:10.1080/14733280802183973 Skelton, T. & Gough, K.V. 2013, ‘Introduction: Young people’s im/mobile urban geographies’, Urban Studies, vol. 50, no. 3, pp. 455–466. Sowden, T. 1994, ‘Streets of discontent: Artists and suburbia in the 1950s’, in C. Healy, S. Ferber & C. McAuliffe (eds.), Beasts of suburbia: Reinterpreting cultures in Australian suburbs, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, pp. 76–93. Stahl, G. & Habib, S. 2017, ‘Moving beyond the confines of the local: Working-class students’ conceptualisations of belonging and respectability’, Young, vol. 25, no. 3, pp. 268–285. Tan, K. 2018, Surrey school district 36 parents advisory council funding model review submission, 27 February, . TransFocus Consulting & Equity Labs 2016, Trans* and gender variant and two-spirit inclusion at the city of Vancouver, TransFocus Consulting and Equity Labs, Vancouver, BC, viewed 15 October 2016, . Valentine, G. & Skelton, C. 2003, ‘Finding oneself, losing oneself: The lesbian and gay “scene” as a paradoxical space’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, vol. 27, no. 4, pp. 849–866. Ward, M.R.M. 2015, From labouring to learning: Working-class masculinities, education and de-industrialization, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke. Wood, B. 2016, ‘Excluded citizens? Participatory research with young people from a “failing” school community’, Children’s Geographies, vol. 14, no. 3, pp. 310–324.

Chapter 5

‘Adults decided our fate’ 1 Children and young people navigating space, territory and conflicting identities in the ‘new’ Northern Ireland Faith Gordon

Introduction Conflicting identities is one of the ‘central dynamics of political and cultural conflict’ in Northern Ireland (Bean 2007, p. 158). McAlister, Scraton and Haydon (2010) have explored ‘how identity is linked to place’, observing that it ‘serves to create feelings of inclusion or exclusion’, with versions of ‘historical constructions of space . . . passed down . . . to children and young people’ (p. 70). Similarly, ‘rituals’ and ‘ceremonies’, as a ‘means of perceiving and displaying difference’ (Graham 2011, p. 88) reinforce the contestation of space and the expression of identities. For children and young people in Northern Ireland, rioting at interface areas is a means of expressing cultural identity, while also indicating resistance to the structural, socio-economic inequalities they experience (Gordon 2018). Although typically framed by media constructions and politicians as ‘recreational’, ‘fun’ and thus ‘not politically motivated’, contemporary research findings assert that for young people rioting has a firm political foundation and is a means of expressing identity and ‘defending space’ (Jarman & O’Halloran 2001; Leonard 2010a; Meadows 2010; Gordon 2018). Drawing on extensive qualitative interview data and content analysis of media coverage, this chapter focuses on the role of the media in creating and maintaining negative representations of children and young people. Using a contextual media analysis, I present a case study of what was framed in media and political discourse as youth ‘orchestration’ of, and involvement in, ‘sectarian rioting’, exploring how fear was mobilised to represent children and young people as ‘dragging’ communities ‘back through the horrors of the past’.2 In addition to analysing interviews with editors, journalists and politicians in Northern Ireland, I use theories of belonging to explore empirical data. In doing so, I include the voices of children, young people and their advocates, exploring how they perceive themselves and their peers, as well as the influence of negative representations on their sense of belonging in a society navigating transition from over thirty years of violent conflict. Children and young people describe the expectations placed upon them by adults regarding the future and stability of the ‘new’ Northern Ireland, which they feel they were not a part of forming. The chapter adds to the existing body of literature on ‘belonging’ by arguing that the realities of conflict and

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transition illuminate exclusionary and other issues experienced by young people, which are already present in ‘settled democracies’ (see Alvarez Berastegi 2017; Gordon 2018).

Historical context and the legacy of the conflict Northern Ireland is a society in transition following a period of over thirty years of violent conflict. The legacy of the Conflict remains a significant and largely unaddressed contemporary issue. Northern Ireland has the youngest population of any jurisdiction in the United Kingdom, and it is one of the poorest regions in the European Union (EU), with more than one-third of children and young people living in poverty (Save the Children & ARK 2008). Children, young people and their parents continue to suffer from ‘conflict-related trauma’, with a high proportion of working-class communities experiencing social exclusion and ‘extreme economic marginalisation’ (Scraton 2007, p. 150). As Scraton (2007) argues, ‘several generations have endured pervasive sectarianism, hard-line policing, military operations and paramilitary punishments’ (p. 148). For many children ‘the notions of post-conflict or transition are distant possibilities as sectarianism entrenches hatred for the “other”’ (Kilkelly et al. 2004, p. 245). Paramilitaries’ violence against children and young people has been endemic within communities.3 Children and young people have been ‘refugees, exiles for anti-social behaviour’4 or the ‘victims of punishment beatings’ (Hillyard, Rolston & Tomlinson 2005, p. 190). A community worker summarised the ‘emotional effects of the conflict’ as having a major influence on ‘children’s education, their mental health and their ability to participate in society’ (quoted in Scraton 2007, p. 149). The existing official discourse notes that ‘young people are often regarded with fear, suspicion and mistrust’ (Northern Ireland Office Statistics and Research Branch 2003, cited in Hamilton, Radford & Jarman 2003, p. 13), whereas research demonstrates that such feelings and suspicions from adults may arise from little more than having groups of young people hanging around on street corners (see Hamilton, Radford & Jarman 2003, p. 13). The paramilitary ceasefires in the early 1990s, followed by the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, brought what was widely considered a significant change with the formation of the locally elected Northern Ireland Assembly and the establishment of the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) in 2001. From 1998, however, it took a further nine years for the Northern Ireland Executive to be established (Gillespie 2009). Under the Northern Ireland Act 1998, decisionmaking powers in criminal justice and policing remained the responsibility of the UK Secretary of State for Northern Ireland until April 2010 when the Hillsborough Agreement devolved powers to the Northern Ireland Assembly. In political and media discourse, this was represented as ‘the final piece in the devolution puzzle’ (see BBC News 2010b, 2010c), with Northern Ireland’s First Minister asserting: ‘Throughout history there are times of challenge and defining moments . . . This is such a moment’ (quoted by BBC News 2010a).

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Societies in transition from periods of conflict face significant challenges in navigating the transition from violence to ‘peace’ (Aughey 2005). In Northern Ireland, these challenges include ongoing dissident republican activity. As McEvoy (2008, p. 67) notes, republican dissidents oppose Sinn Féin’s endorsement of the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement and the abandonment of the ‘armed struggle’. Contemporary academic analyses note that nationalist politicians are ‘presented with similar challenges to their authority by growing support for the dissidents from sections of alienated nationalist youth’ (Bean 2011, p. 166). This projects youth as a threat to the stability of the peace process in Northern Ireland.

Contestation of space and conflicting identities in a transitioning society In light of ‘its divisions’, ‘particular circumstances’ and the ‘politicisation of space’, the existence of contested spaces and the influence of conflicting identities remain ‘a lasting feature’ of the legacy of the Conflict (McAlister, Scraton & Haydon 2010, p. 69). In Northern Ireland, the ‘sectarianization of space’ (Jarman 1998, p. 84, cited in Harnett 2010, p. 74) is evident in ‘residential segregation’ and ‘territorial control’ (see Shirlow 2008), which is ‘most acute in working-class’ communities (Harland 2010, pp. 2–3). Through the presence of physical ‘peace walls’ or ‘interface barriers’, space is ‘labelled and politicised . . . by flags, murals and symbols’, symbolising ‘specific cultural identity, territory and “ownership”’ (McAlister, Scraton & Haydon 2010, p. 69). This can impact on ‘the functions of space’ and can ‘control’ or ‘influence’ the ‘activities of individuals and social systems’ (Graham 2011, p. 88). How children and young people ‘negotiate’ space (Haydon & Scraton 2008, p. 63), and also their sense of identity and belonging in their community, is heavily influenced by the legacy of the Conflict. Parades remain ‘an idiom of contestation’ (Ross 2007, p. 88). As Brocklehurst (2006) argues, ‘Orangemen’s marches visually illustrate the . . . traditional symbolism of historical conquest’ (p. 97) and, furthermore, the physical ‘routes . . . may be perceived as statements of territorial claims’ (Farren & Mulvihill 2000, p. 31, cited in Ross 2007, p. 88). Due to the contested nature of parades, rioting typically occurs in interface areas, where Catholics and Protestants live side by side but are physically segregated (see Jarman 2002). McAlister, Scraton and Haydon (2010) observe that for young people ‘rioting and sectarian clashes . . . assert cultural identity while symbolising resistance towards perceived inequalities’ (p. 76). Similarly, Grattan (2008) asserts that ‘for many young people . . . conflict and violence . . . [is] in “defence” of community, identity . . . [and] culture’ (p. 255). Although typically framed by adults as ‘recreational’ (Jarman & O’Halloran 2001), research findings assert that for young people rioting is ‘considered . . . to have a firm political basis’ (McAlister, Scraton & Haydon 2009, p. 98) and is a means of expressing identity and ‘defending space’ (McAlister, Scraton & Haydon 2010, p. 76; see also Leonard 2010b; Meadows 2010). The section which follows provides the first analysis of print media coverage of contemporary rioting

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in Northern Ireland. The analysis explores the portrayals of children and young people as the instigators of violence in their communities and as the cause of a number of social ills. Blame is coupled with a lack of context in media reports and further intensified by the denial that young people’s actions have a political foundation in this transitioning society.

Reading the ‘riots’ in 2010: media reporting Intense local, national and international media coverage in July and August 2010 portrayed rioting in Belfast, Derry/Londonderry and Lurgan, as ‘the worst rioting in years’ (see Financial Times, 12 July 2010; The New York Times, 13 July 2010).5 Context, such as the legacy of the Conflict and ‘underlying causes’, were omitted from or marginalised in the reporting. Contextually, the devolution of criminal justice decision-making powers in April 2010, following a period of 38 years of direct rule, the appointment of a local Minister for Justice, as well as the commencement of the Youth Justice Review, provided a unique setting for this empirical research. Methodology The larger study from which the case study of the riots is derived involved qualitative and quantitative content analysis of media coverage. Content analysis is a ‘useful and important tool . . . providing objective and rigorous methods for investigating social meanings’ (Scott 2006, p. 41). The data collection involved the collection of newspaper content from eight newspapers over six months. Six hundred twenty-seven newspapers were collected for analysis, from 1 March 2010 to 31 August 2010 (inclusive). In total, 2,456 media items referred directly to children, young people and their advocates in Northern Ireland. The case study of the riots included the additional collection of international online newspapers and news items accessed in hard copy from several United Kingdom and Republic of Ireland newspapers in July and August 2010. Five central themes emerged from the media content of the riots. Themes are defined as ‘recurring typical theses that run through’ news items (Altheide 1996, p. 31, cited in Green 2008, p. 200). The following analysis provides an overview of the central themes that emerged. Framing youth involvement The outcome of the news-making process is typically a ‘selected’ and ‘constructed representation constitutive of “reality”’ (Barker 2000, p. 260). This is evident in the language employed and in ‘other signs like photographs’ and images, which ‘frame’ news items in a particular way (Bignell 1997, p. 81). Journalists’ selection of language depicted the rioting in July 2010 as orchestrated, planned and premeditated: ‘Ardoyne chaos planned’ and ‘Fears over invasion of . . . thugs . . .

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[with] deadly intentions’ (Sunday Life, 11 July 2010, pp. 2, 6). Journalists, along with several commentators writing ‘guest’ articles, typically blamed young people for orchestrating the riots: ‘the good news is . . . adult involvement was minuscule . . . The bad news is that youthful participation was extensive and widespread’ (The Sunday Times, Comment, 18 July 2010). Comparisons to the past When comparing the 2010 rioting to the Conflict (1968–98), local journalists blamed youth for ‘dragging’ Northern Ireland ‘back through the horrors of the past’ (The Irish News, 15 July 2010, p. 11). International and national journalists described the rioting as ‘one of the worst outbreaks . . . in the last decade’ (The Hindu, 13 July 2010); ‘a throwback to the violence that erupted regularly . . . before . . . 1998’ (The New York Times, 13 July 2010) and ‘levels of mayhem not seen since the Good Friday peace agreement’ (The Sunday Telegraph, 18 July 2010, p. 17). These descriptions exaggerated the levels of violence and presented clear comparisons between the Conflict and contemporary riots. Further comparisons presented the riots as ‘a worrying sign for the future’ (The Irish News, 17 July 2010, p. 32), with one commentary written by the then Secretary of State describing it as ‘shocking . . . to see children younger than 10 rioting in the same streets that saw death and destruction in August 1969’ (Belfast Telegraph, 19 July 2010, p. 29). The strong comparisons to the past heightened concern and evoked ‘panic’ surrounding the current generation of children and young people. ‘Lost generation’ The current generation of children and young people were framed as ‘Our lost generation’ (Belfast Telegraph, 14 July 2010, pp. 4–5). References to the past and future also reinforced this generalisation: We . . . talk about the next generation being different, freeing themselves from the bigotry of the by-gone age. Yet there can be nothing more chilling than the laughter of the young men who threw petrol bombs last night. . . . Without the education to question, to self-examine, this part of the next generation is long lost. (Belfast Telegraph, 13 July 2010, pp. 4–5) Another journalist stated: ‘Ulster’s troubled youth – why children run riot’; ‘these “hard men” are in fact children. . . . “Why do . . . some as young as eight, who should be playing with toys . . . feel the need to riot?”’ (News Letter, 19 July 2010, pp. 10–11). In clearly positioning young people as outside of the community, journalists labelled young people as ‘hoodies’ (News Letter, 13 July 2010, pp. 4–5) and ‘anti-community’: ‘Community disowns teen rioters’ (South Belfast News, 17 July 2010, p. 1).

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‘Recreational’ rioting The media further demonised youth by presenting children’s and young people’s motivations as ‘fun’ rather than political: ‘A deadly game for youth out for “fun”’ (Belfast Telegraph, 13 July 2010, p. 3). Headlines portrayed youth as seeking entertainment, with no regard for the consequences: ‘Thugs aged eight pummel police in “recreational” riot . . . that leave 82 hurt’ (Daily Mail, 14 July 2010). Jarman and O’Halloran (2001) define ‘recreational rioting’ as ‘violent interchanges . . . a social activity, undertaken through boredom and bravado rather than having a more political basis’ (p. 3). This label was employed throughout the media coverage: ‘local youths want to attack the police . . . because they consider it fun. . . . “Recreational rioting . . . like a Disney theme park for rioting”’ (San Diego Union-Tribune, 14 July 2010). The application of labels such as ‘recreational rioting’ in the media marginalises or excludes ‘young people’s own view of what they are doing’ and it also ‘imposes an adult (and middle-class) judgement’ (Meadows 2010, p. 251). In choosing to portray young people’s ‘motivations’ as ‘fun’ and not ‘political’, the media do not acknowledge the alienation of children and young people from political processes. Perceived impact on transition Journalists emphasised the ‘timing’: ‘the rash of street fighting comes at a critical time for Northern Ireland’s peace process’, with the devolution in April of ‘policing and justice powers . . . symbolising the final “jigsaw piece” of the peace process’ (Global Post, 21 July 2010). The riots were framed as ‘a step back’ for Northern Ireland’s transition: ‘Sectarian riots shake Northern Ireland’ (Financial Times, 12 July 2010). Quotations from the First Minister reiterated that ‘nobody . . . who has “more than two brain cells to rub together wants to go back to the bad old days of the past”’ and ‘we need to treat as pariahs those who would seek to take us there’ (Belfast Telegraph, 6 July 2010, p. 12). Similar descriptions in major newspapers included: ‘a new generation of “out of control” children and youths at the frontline’ (Belfast Telegraph, 14 July 2010, pp. 4–5). Such representations arguably contribute to the ‘panic’ surrounding youth and the future political stability of Northern Ireland. During the data collection period, devolution of policing and justice symbolised ‘transition’. The emphasis on leaving the past behind and moving on diverted attention away from dealing with the past. As the media content analysis above demonstrates, journalists routinely objectified young people as ‘the problem’ and presented punitive responses as ‘the solution’, with children and young people positioned as convenient scapegoats. The blame that is placed on them invariably diverts attention away from structural and institutional issues that are inevitable in a society accommodating a gradual transition from conflict.

‘Authoritative’ voices: media responses and political reactions Hall (1986) asserts that ‘the hierarchy of access’ to the media and the perpetuation of negative representations of certain social groups are intertwined. The following

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qualitative analysis explores findings from sixteen interviews with ‘authoritative voices’ such as newspaper editors, journalists, broadcast journalists, politicians and an inspector from the Police Service of Northern Ireland.6 These are people whose voices are readily heard and who are in a position to ‘shape’ and ‘frame’ debate and discussion. Each played an active, prominent role in reporting on, responding to or policing the ‘riots’. Role of the media and audience relationship The interviewees clearly identified the transition from conflict as a significant contextual influence on the role of the media in reporting on the ‘new’ Northern Ireland. As one journalist suggested: ‘this is contemporary Northern Ireland, the role of the media is situated in a particular time and space . . . and . . . is really quite complicated’. Specifically focussing on the current ongoing transition, one politician stated that ‘the media has played a major role in bringing the province forward out of the violence’. Each editor and journalist demonstrated how the media’s relationship with its readership ‘is very close . . . in Northern Ireland [as] people . . . trust the press’ (editor). ‘Adults and young people aren’t in touch’: relegating young people to the margins The politicians who were interviewed felt that children and young people ‘standing on a street corner’ were not as much of a focus for the media during the Conflict, whereas they have become a focus during this transitional period. One politician stated that, while they did not think society ‘has declared war’ on children and young people, ‘in my own party room . . . young people are labelled badly . . . I think that’s where adults and young people aren’t in touch’. Only a small number of those working in the media acknowledged that ‘demonisation’ and ‘negativity’ featured in the daily newspapers and community newspapers in Northern Ireland: We have to put our hands up and say sometimes we can demonise young people because . . . young people in this community . . . congregating . . . that is anti-community, sometimes that is . . . criminality . . . we have to report on that. (Editor) This is consistent with existing literature, which outlines that news coverage often frames youth as ‘unruly, anti-social delinquents’ (Schissel 2006) or presents children and young people as a ‘threat’ to the ‘inner’ community (Curran 2002). One politician was critical of the use of the legacy of the Conflict as an ‘excuse’: I think it is an all too easy political excuse to say that the reason we have a juvenile justice problem is because we have had a conflict in our past . . . it services some political leaders to perpetuate that myth . . . trying to pass off some excuse that because you were born in community X and community

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X . . . [was] particularly affected by the Troubles, that people who were born after the ceasefires and there was no life memory . . . of the Troubles are somehow caught up in them. I just don’t accept that. This response clearly is in contrast to the evidence-based research literature which demonstrates that the legacy of the Conflict and intergenerational trauma continues to impact upon the lives of children and young people in Northern Ireland (McAlister, Scraton & Haydon 2009). There are multiple layers to the impact and, as one politician asserted, media discourse plays a role in vilifying young people and not acknowledging the context in which they live their lives. This can have long-lasting consequences, particularly in relation to policy making: What you end up with . . . is a sensationalised press, who are fed it all too easy . . . [and] vilify young people as a cohort . . . turn them into the problem and then that ends up in government policy, [such as] . . . ‘The Cohesion, Sharing and Integration Strategy’. Throughout the media coverage, prominence was given to calls for the transferral of UK policies, such as parenting orders and longer sentences. These recommendations were proposed without consideration of the wider context of the legacy of the Conflict.

‘Alternative voices’: children, young people and their advocates As Muncie and Fitzgerald (1981) poignantly note, ‘in times of rapid social change . . . the ensuing public disquiet is resolved by the media identifying certain social groups as scapegoats or folk devils’ and thus as ‘visible symbols of what is wrong with society’ (p. 422). This content analysis of newspaper coverage demonstrates how the media’s use of selective language and imagery frames children and young people as ‘perpetrators’ of violent rioting. This reflects the findings of national and international research, which asserts that ‘the media reserves its most vociferous reporting for the apparent “crime waves” and “social problems” generated by certain sections of . . . youth’ (Bessant & Hil 1997, p. 2). The following analysis will explore ‘alternative’ views, drawing upon interviews with thirty-three children and young people and twelve advocates, including youth workers, research and policy officers and the Children’s Commissioner for Northern Ireland.7 Adults were contacted directly and interviewed in person in their place of work and gatekeepers provided access to children and young people, via established youth groups. Sense of belonging in the ‘new’ Northern Ireland Cuervo and Wyn (2014) assert that ‘belonging brings the idea of youth as a social process back into the centre of analysis’, thereby ‘enabling researchers to recognise the significance of relationships to people, place and to the times’ (p. 901).

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It has long been documented in international and national research that children, young people and their advocates are largely absent in the mainstream media and in the political sphere (Crane 1997; Bentley et al. 1999; Brown 2005; Hunt, Moloney & Evans 2010). The media’s unwillingness to provide ‘alternative’ voices with the same access as ‘moral entrepreneurs’ ultimately impacts on newspaper content and also, coupled with the existence of dismissive attitudes towards children and young people in political discourse, impacts upon young people’s sense of belonging. Several youth workers interviewed asserted that while ‘there is always going to be a bit of trouble . . . the media just feeds bad feeling among young people’ and instead ‘we need to look at what is behind it’. Similarly, young people felt that the media chose to ignore the context of rioting and disputes in relation to Orange Order parades. As a young person stated, ‘where do they think the hate is coming from? . . . They are not looking at the source of the problem . . . sectarianism in this country . . . is such a taboo’ (Focus Group 2, aged 17–21). The influence of sectarianism has been reinforced by contemporary critical research, which indicates that, for many children and young people, ‘sectarianism entrenches hatred for the “other” physically as well as psychologically and culturally’ (Kilkelly et al. 2004, p. 245). However, the existing research does not explore the media’s role in ignoring and perpetuating this ongoing dynamic in a contemporary transitioning society such as Northern Ireland. Most of those interviewed discussed the ongoing transition from conflict to peace, and the dominant view was that, ‘because we are in a transition period . . . young people will be demonised for political reasons’ (youth sector worker). The viewpoint of those advocates related closely to Young’s (1971, cited in Goode & Ben-Yehuda 2009, p. 90) observation that there exists ‘an institutionalized “need” for moral panics’. Another interviewee asserted that: Because the Troubles aren’t there per se to take over all the coverage . . . their focus is now on young people and labelling them as the lost generation and a new generation of hate, that is just asking for the Troubles all over again. . . . If the media would stop doing it . . . it would make a huge difference. (Youth worker) Advocates I spoke with routinely described young people as a target or a scapegoat for ‘political’ purposes, and one representative comment put forward reasons why children and young people were demonised in July 2010: Things like another generation of hate or recreational rioting . . . are really in a sense designed to stir up . . . hostility towards the young people . . . There is . . . a political dimension . . . because we are in this transition phase. . . . There is a political context and unfortunately young people are in the middle of all that. . . . It is necessary to actually demonise the young people or criminalise them. (Youth sector advocate)

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In transitioning societies, there exists a significant dynamic evident when those in power avoid or are reluctant to ask ‘awkward’ political questions and address structural inequalities but need to be seen as possessing ‘strong’ leadership skills. The finding that children and young people were ‘demonised for political reasons’ (youth advocate) reflects Schirato and Yell’s (2000, pp. 77–78) discussion of how ‘narratives’ and ‘explanations’ in the media attempt to divert attention away from the ‘conditions’ and ‘political’ and ‘economic realities’ that ‘define’ and ‘determine’ the lives of the most marginalised. ‘Adults decided our fate’: experiences of being ‘the post-conflict generation’ In discussing the print media’s portrayal of the riots, a large number of the focus group participants discussed how the Conflict still impacts their lives. One representative comment was: Northern Ireland was a war zone and . . . still is in bits and pieces . . . it has always been for people . . . to fight and drink. . . . The media are portraying our generation as fighting for the sake of fighting . . . previous generations are looking down at us and saying, ‘At least we were fighting for a cause’. (Focus Group 4, aged 16–20) Young people asserted that their actions were denied any political context and meaning, and they put forward reasons why they were routinely ‘blamed’ for ‘dragging Northern Ireland back to the past’ (Focus Group 4, aged 16–20). This view that young people are following the example set by adults has been acknowledged in previous research. For example, concerns were expressed following the ceasefires in the 1990s about ‘anti-social behaviour among young people [who have] grown used to civil unrest’ (McGrellis 2004, p. 3). Such, Walker and Walker (2005) observe that, ‘in exerting . . . power, adults often prioritise the future of the child and society over the child’s present wellbeing: a stance of so-called “futurity”’ (p. 302; see also Prout 2000). As one group of young people described it: We are expected to be the perfect generation because we haven’t had it as bad as our parents. . . . They expected after the peace process that everyone would get along and they set such high expectations and hopes for the next generation and they decided our fate . . . it is like, ‘Oh what have we done this for, they are throwing away all our work’ . . . but we are following the example we have been set. (Focus Group 2, aged 17–21) Their reflections relate closely to the ‘process of control’ (Such, Walker & Walker 2005, p. 302) that is ongoing in a transitioning society, whereby adult responses

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and reactions seek to deter ‘unwanted outcomes’ like riots, but the difficulty lies in dealing with the legacy of the Conflict. Many of the children and young people who participated in the focus groups considered the media ‘must think older people wouldn’t riot but they do’, describing how ‘there was a good few adults there . . . all the older people wanted us to help’ (Focus Group 6, aged 14–16). Children and young people’s advocates also argued that the media and politicians, rather than focussing on the exploitation of this social group by adults, in particular dissident republicans, chose to promote reactionary responses: Young people . . . seen rioting at interfaces . . . [the] reaction to that is to clamp down harder. . . . They will quote these examples . . . as a reason for being harder on young people . . . for longer sentences . . . to introduce more legislation . . . so there is a lot of politics that goes on as a result of how young people are portrayed. (Youth sector worker)

Conclusion This chapter has demonstrated how the existence of conflicting claims over territory and identities continues to impact the lives of children and young people in Northern Ireland. The issue of parades and the annual expressions of disagreement ‘provide a microcosm of the overarching’ impact of the contestation of space and conflicting identities in Northern Ireland and is ‘an example of the impact of history on the present’ (Little 2008, p. 68). Significantly, the voices of children, young people and their advocates are hidden, marginalised and excluded from discussions of continuing contemporary conflicts and tensions in communities, as well as the broader issue of navigating transition from years of violent conflict. The hidden nature of children’s and young people’s voices is particularly evident in media reporting, and the content analysis reinforces the contemporary applicability of Hall’s (1986) theorisation of ‘the hierarchy of access’ to the media. The empirical findings also demonstrate how negative ideological constructions influence children’s and young people’s sense of identity and sense of belonging. Specifically in a society emerging from conflict, children and young people are routinely ‘presented as emblematic of a moment in society’s socio-cultural history’ (Scraton 2007, p. 1) and are ‘treated as a key indicator of the state of the nation’ (Griffin 2009, p. 229). According to Griffin (2009, p. 229), young people’s position is heightened at times of societal change and transition, whereby on one hand youth are ‘assumed to hold the key to the nation’s future’; on the other, they are feared for their capacity to challenge both ‘adult social identity’ and ‘a stable social order’ (Fionda 2005, p. 27). As the empirical data analysed in this chapter demonstrates, the realities of conflict and transition illuminate exclusionary and other issues experienced by young people, which are already present in ‘settled democracies’ (Alvarez Berastegi 2017; Gordon 2018). These issues include being

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excluded from political decision-making processes, being labelled ‘anti-social’ and being blamed for a number of social ills and relegated to the margins of society. This chapter has discussed children and young people’s own views on their sense of belonging during the period of transition. By prioritising their voices, this empirical study addressed the marginalisation of this social group and contributed to an understanding of the impact of inequality of access, participation and inclusion. The children and young people spoke of adults’ expectations following ‘the peace process’ and how they were blamed for a range of social ills, such as riots and interface violence, without consideration of the legacy of the Conflict or, as one young person described it, ‘the example we have been set’ by adults (Focus Group 2, aged 17–21). In light of the legacy of the Conflict, Brocklehurst (2006) asserts that ‘the continuation of violence by children is also to some extent placing a focus on children as agents of change within their communities’ (p. 110). This was evident in journalists’ repeated references to ‘the lost generation’ and the representation of children and young people as ‘out of control’. Describing children and young people in this way feeds into what the literature describes as ‘the process of control’, whereby adult responses and reactions seek to deter ‘unwanted outcomes’ like riots (Such, Walker, & Walker 2005, p. 302). Barry (2005) concludes that young people ‘are the perceived threat to an already precarious status quo . . . [and] are . . . often scapegoated as a result’ (p. 2). As a consequence, children and young people have a limited and fragmented sense of belonging in the ‘new’ transitioning society of Northern Ireland (Gordon 2018).

Notes 1 This chapter is dedicated to the memory of Lyra McKee, a journalist from Northern Ireland who wrote passionately about young people being let down in the years following paramilitary ceasefires, the Good Friday agreement and the power-sharing government in Belfast. On 18 April 2019, Lyra was fatally shot during rioting in Derry/Londonderry. Lyra’s passing is a huge loss to the community and she will always be remembered for the impact she made. 2 These phrases are colloquial terms in Northern Ireland; during the media coverage of the riots, they were a key part of the emerging discourse and featured heavily in the media reporting (for example, The Irish News, 15 July 2010, p. 11). 3 Approximately 95 per cent of social housing in Northern Ireland is segregated by religious affiliation – namely loyalist/unionist/Protestant and nationalist/republican/ Catholic (McAlister, Scraton & Haydon 2009, p. 25). Division or ‘segregation’, in both ‘public housing’ and in ‘schooling’, ‘remain defining features of social, political and cultural experiences and opportunities in Northern Ireland’ (McAlister, Scraton & Haydon 2009, p. 25). 4 The definition of ‘anti-social behaviour’ is vague and open to interpretation. It has resulted in ASBOs being given for a range of minor offences, including what have been classed as ‘silly ASBOs’ (see BBC News 2006). 5 McKeown’s (2001) database, which records and analyses the ‘patterns of politically motivated violence during the years 1969–2001’, demonstrates the extent of violence and fatalities during this period. McKeown’s (2001) findings are clearly not in line with the contemporary media’s claims that the riots in 2010 were the ‘worst’ in years.

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6 Interviews took place in 2010 and 2011 in Northern Ireland. Interviews were conducted in person, recorded using a Dictaphone and fully transcribed. 7 Interviews and focus groups took place in 2010 and 2011 in Northern Ireland. Interviews and focus groups were conducted in person, recorded using a Dictaphone and fully transcribed.

References Alvarez Berastegi, A. 2017, ‘Transitional justice in settled democracies: Northern Ireland and the Basque Country in comparative perspective’, Critical Studies on Terrorism, vol. 10, no. 3, pp. 542–561. Aughey, A. 2005, The politics of Northern Ireland: Beyond the Belfast Agreement, Routledge, London. Barker, C. 2000, Cultural studies: Theory and practice, Sage, London. Barry, M. 2005, ‘Introduction’, in M. Barry (ed.), Youth policy and social inclusion: Critical debates with young people, Routledge, Oxfordshire. BBC News 2010a, ‘PM hails “historic” Northern Ireland justice vote’, BBC News, 9 March, . BBC News 2010b, ‘Timeline: Devolution of policing and justice’, BBC News, 5 February, viewed 10 February 2010, . BBC News 2010c, ‘What will happen when policing and justice is devolved?’, BBC News, 12 April, viewed 27 April 2010, . BBC News 2006, ‘Should Asbos ban hoodie wearing?’, BBC News, 12 April, viewed 3 March 2010, . Bean, K. 2011, ‘Civil society, the state and conflict transformation in the nationalist country: A violence from the past?’, in M. Power (ed.), Building peace in Northern Ireland, Liverpool University Press, Liverpool, pp. 154–171. Bean, K. 2007, The new politics of Sinn Féin, Liverpool University Press, Liverpool. Bentley, T., Oakley, K., Gibson, S. & Kilgour, K. 1999, What young people really think about government, politics and social exclusion, Demos, London. Bessant, J. & Hil, R. 1997, ‘Introduction’, in J. Bessant & R. Hil (eds.), Youth crime and the media: Media representations of and reactions to young people in relation to law and order, Australian Clearinghouse for Youth Studies, Hobart, Australia. Bignell, J. 1997, Media semiotics: An introduction, Manchester University Press, Manchester. Brocklehurst, H. 2006, Who’s afraid of children? Children, conflict and international relations, Ashgate, Hampshire. Brown, S. 2005, Understanding youth and crime: Listening to youth?, 2nd edn, Oxford University Press, Berkshire. Crane, P. 1997, ‘Whose views? Whose interests? The absence of young people’s voices in mainstream media reports on crime’, in J. Bessant & R. Hil (eds.), Youth crime and the media: Media representations of and reactions to young people in relation to law and order, Australian Clearinghouse for Youth Studies, Hobart, Australia, pp. 93–104. Cuervo, H. & Wyn, J. 2014, ‘Reflections on the use of spatial and relational metaphors in youth studies’, Journal of Youth Studies, vol. 17, pp. 901–915. Curran, J. 2002, Media and power, Routledge, London. Fionda, J. 2005, Devils and Angels: Youth policy and crime, Hart Publishing, Oxford. Gillespie, G. 2009, The A to Z of the Northern Ireland conflict, Scarecrow Press, Metuchen, NJ.

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Goode, E. & Ben-Yehuda, N. 2009, Moral panics: The social construction of deviance, 2nd edn, Wiley-Blackwell, West Sussex. Gordon, F. 2018, Children, young people and the press in a transitioning society: Representations, reactions and criminalisation, Palgrave Macmillan, London. Graham, B. 2011, ‘Sharing space? Geography and politics in post-conflict Northern Ireland’, in P. Meusburger, M. Heffernan & E. Wunder (eds.), Cultural memories: The geographical point of view, Springer, London, pp. 87–100. Grattan, A. 2008, ‘The alienation and radicalisation of youth: A “new moral panic”?’, International Journal of Diversity in Organisations, Communities and Nations, vol. 8, no. 3, pp. 255–263. Green, D.A. 2008, ‘Suitable vehicles: Framing blame and justice when children kill a child’, Crime Media Culture, vol. 4, no. 2, August, pp. 197–220. Griffin, C. 2009, ‘Representations of the young’, in J. Roche, S. Tucker, R. Thomson & R. Flynn (eds.), Youth in society, 2nd edn, Sage Publications Limited, London, pp. 10–18. Hall, S. 1986, ‘Media power and class power’, in J. Curran, J. Ecclestone, G. Oakley & A. Richardson (eds.), Bending reality: The state of the media, Pluto Press, London, pp. 5–14. Hamilton, J., Radford, K. & Jarman, N. 2003, Policing, accountability and young people, Institute for Conflict Research, Belfast. Harland, K. 2010, ‘Violent youth culture in Northern Ireland: Young men, violence and the challenges of peacebuilding’, Youth and Society, vol. 20, no. 1, pp. 1–19. Harnett, A. 2010, ‘Aestheticized geographies of conflict: The politicization of culture and the culture of politics in Belfast’s mural tradition’, in H. Silverman (ed.), Contested cultural heritage: Religion, nationalism, erasure, and exclusion in a global world, Springer, London, pp. 69–108. Haydon, D. & Scraton, P. 2008, ‘Conflict, regulation and marginalisation in the north of Ireland: The experiences of children and young people’, Current Issues in Criminal Justice, vol. 20, no. 1, pp. 59–78. Hillyard, P., Rolston, B. & Tomlinson, M. 2005, Poverty and conflict in Ireland: An international perspective, Issue 36 of Research Report Series, Combat Poverty Agency, Belfast. Hunt, G., Moloney, M. & Evans, K. 2010, Youth, drugs, and nightlife, Routledge, Oxon. Jarman, N. 2002, Managing disorder: Responding to interface violence in North Belfast, OFMDFM, Belfast. Jarman, N. & O’Halloran, C. 2001, ‘Recreational rioting: Young people, interface areas and violence’, Child Care in Practice, vol. 7, no. 1, pp. 2–16. Kilkelly, U., Kilpatrick, R., Lundy, L., Moore, L., Scraton, P., Davey, C., Dwyer, C. & McAlister, S. 2004, Children’s rights in Northern Ireland, Northern Ireland Commissioner for Children and Young People, Belfast. Leonard, M. 2010a, ‘Parochial geographies: Growing up in divided Belfast’, Childhood, vol. 17, no. 3, pp. 329–342. Leonard, M. 2010b, ‘What’s recreational about recreational rioting’, Children and Society, vol. 24, no. 1, pp. 38–50. Little, A. 2008, Democratic piety: Complexity, conflict and violence, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh. McAlister, S., Scraton, P. & Haydon, D. 2010, ‘“Insiders” and “outsiders”: Young people, place and identity in Northern Ireland’, Shared Space, vol. 9, pp. 69–83.

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McAlister, S., Scraton, P. & Haydon, D. 2009, Childhood in transition: Experiencing marginalisation and conflict in Northern Ireland, Queen’s University Belfast, Save the Children and Prince’s Trust Northern Ireland, Belfast. McEvoy, J. 2008, The politics of Northern Ireland, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh. McGrellis, S. 2004, Pushing the boundaries in Northern Ireland: Young people, violence and sectarianism, Families and Social Capital ESRC Research Group Working Paper Number 8, London South Bank University, London. McKeown, M. 2001, ‘“Remembering”: Victims, survivors and commemoration’, CAIN: Conflict Archive on the Internet, viewed 21 August 2011, . Meadows, S. 2010, The child as social person, Routledge, East Sussex. Muncie, J. & Fitzgerald, M. 1981, ‘Humanising the deviant: Affinity and affiliation theories’, in M. Fitzgerald, G. McLennan & J. Pawson (eds.), Crime and society: Readings in history and theory, Routledge and Kegan Paul/Open University Press, London, pp. 403–429. Prout, A. 2000, ‘Control and self-realisation in late modern childhoods’, Children and Society, vol. 14, no. 4, pp. 304–315. Ross, M.H. 2007, Cultural contestation in ethnic conflict, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Save the Children & ARK 2008, Persistent child poverty in Northern Ireland, Save the Children and ARK, Belfast. Schirato, T. & Yell, S. 2000, Communication and culture: An introduction, Sage Publications Limited, London. Schissel, B. 2006, Still blaming children: Youth conduct and the politics of child hating, Fernwood Publishing, Nova Scotia, Canada. Scott, J. 2006, ‘Content analysis’, in E. McLaughlin & J. Muncie (eds.), The Sage dictionary of criminology, 2nd edn, Sage Publications Limited, London, pp. 40–41. Scraton, P. 2007, Power, conflict and criminalisation, Routledge, London. Shirlow, P. 2008, ‘Belfast: A segregation city’, in C. Coulter & M. Murray (eds.), Northern Ireland after the troubles: A society in transition, Manchester University Press, Manchester, pp. 73–87. Such, E., Walker, O. & Walker, R. 2005, ‘Anti-war children: Representation of youth protests against the second Iraq War in the British national press’, Childhood, vol. 12, no. 3, pp. 301–326. Young, J. 1971, The drugtakers: The social meaning of drug use, McGibbon and Kee, London.

Chapter 6

Travel imaginaries of youth in New York City History, ethnicity and the politics of mobility John Loewenthal and John Broughton

Introduction The spatial and demographic complexion of the United States reflects the country’s dramatic past. Questions of land, heritage, identity and inequality are therefore central to the cultural politics of everyday life. New York City is an international symbol renowned for its urban architecture, launching into the sky, and for the multiple ongoing waves of migration that make it one of the most ethnically diverse places on earth. While it is a place of abundance and opportunity, New York features high levels of inequality which deny many of its residents access or belonging to the city’s central spaces and iconic landmarks (Millington 2011; Loewenthal 2015). Through certain qualitative methods, however, people’s broader attachments can be magnified beyond their immediate landscape. This chapter explores the imaginations of a group of young people from migrant backgrounds who have grown up in New York. Discussing the theme of travel around a large world map illuminates their epistemological relationship with different geographies and histories, as well as demonstrating the future mobilities and lifestyles they conceive as desirable or plausible. We begin the chapter with a vignette before elaborating on the notion of travel imaginaries. Our analysis proceeds to theorise the young people’s belonging as spatially and temporally dispersed, focussing on four themes: attachment to one’s history and ethnicity; cosmopolitan ideals of belonging to the world; the politics of mobility, evident through the young people’s hesitation to travel; and the virtual mobilities of learning which parallel and shape the youth’s travel imaginaries.

Around the map On a typically hot June day in 2015, two 17-year-old girls raised in the New York boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens are seated around a world map. We are at the All Stars Project on 42nd Street in Manhattan, an organisation set up in the 1980s to heal the city’s ‘stark contrasts between the cosmopolitan corporate world and the circumscribed and underdeveloped experiences of many young people from the surrounding boroughs’ (Gordon, Bowman & Mejia 2003, p. 5). The two girls,

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named Liya and Joy,1 both black, are attending a focus group run by the first author, advertised as part of a series of ‘group conversations about travel, the future and the world’. One of them reflects: I don’t wanna say I don’t wanna end up like my mother, but it’s sad to see she didn’t get a chance to travel like she wanted to. She didn’t get a chance to do what she wanted. She gave up so many things. JOY: So now . . . LIYA : So now it’s up to me to do those things that she didn’t get the chance to do and to try and at least make her proud of some of my experiences. LIYA :

Here, travel is recognised as a privilege to be articulated personally as an extension of and honour to those who came before. Liya envisions her own social mobility through a geographical lens, aiming for her mother to live vicariously through her experiences. A similar implication of one’s parents emerges when Joy is asked where she would begin her travels: I have a list, so pull out your notepad. Definitely the Democratic Republic of Congo [stretching her hand emphatically over the country]. That’s my foundation. That’s where my roots go to. My family’s from there, so I would definitely start there. Liya echoes the sentiment, after explaining that one side of her family is from the American South: ‘And I’m like from Panama and Trinidad, that’s the other side of me and so I really, really, really wanna go to Trinidad’. After ten lively minutes recounting places they might like to visit, in comes Marcus, a sixteen-year-ld Jamaican-American male. He soaks up the map and then says: I look at this map and I just, like, want to travel here [spreading his hand from the bottom of Africa, up through the top of Europe]. LIYA : Why is that our common places? We all wanna go, like, in this region and beyond [swishing her hand down from the top of Europe to the bottom of Africa]. MARCUS : Because this is where, like, the world started. I wanna know how the world started. And then from there I wanna know where the world is at. And then from there I wanna learn what’s the best the world has to offer, in general and how does that translate back here. LIYA : I also wanna visit, like, the small places that, like, nobody remembers. JOY: Me, too! MARCUS : Madagascar!2 LIYA : I said that already! Whoop. Been there, done that. I’m talking about places like [gazing across the map] . . . the Philippines! [She slams her hand down on the country]. Everybody knows it’s there, but they’ve not really talked about it. MARCUS :

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In these opening quotations, we see multiple emotions, diverse destinations and differing rationales. Below we further examine this range of elicitations about hypothetical travel, exploring how such perceptions of place and conceptions of mobility reveal insights about youth belonging.

Youth travel imaginaries The notion of the ‘tourist gaze’ (Urry 1990) has been a key development in analysing how places, and even people, are commodified for tourist consumption. A related notion, the ‘imaginary’, has since been developed regarding tourism and travel (Salazar & Graburn 2014). Here we borrow Healy’s (2003) definition of the imaginary as the ‘ensemble of images and fantasies, thoughts and expectations, feelings and values that we mentally attach to the idea [of something]’ (p. 56). It is through the prism of such travel imaginaries, apparent in our discussions with youth based in New York City over a large world map, that we analyse youth imaginings of and attachments to the world. This contrasts with most research on perceptions of travel which has been conducted in situ during actual trips. Our exploratory investigation responds to this gap in the literature by examining the travel imaginaries of those who, for whatever reasons, remain at home. In eliciting such imaginings, it is important to connect fantasy dimensions to the social and material contexts in which they are produced (Strauss 2006). Such work has been conducted of late by Ward (2014), who correlates the stigma of coming from the South Wales Valleys (UK) with local working-class young men’s fantasies of hedonistic tourism and permanent escape. A similar dynamic is apparent in the work of Maoz (2007), who explains the popularity of backpacker travel among young Israelis through the trauma of compulsory military service and frequent terror attacks that produce and contextualise this travel imaginary. Such imaginaries of escape and mobility thus provide valuable insights into young people’s relationships with place and belonging. Are there factors about ‘home’ that drive young people away? Or might belonging be possible in multiple places, beyond the heteronomous and arbitrary location in which one grew up? In the United States, a large study conducted by Bellah et al. (2007) portrays a disappearance of communal belonging in public life. Such analyses of social alienation might help to contextualise why travel has been explained as a quest for authentic experience in ‘other’ places (MacCannell 1973). For young people, accustomed to regulated times and pre-determined spaces, travel presents a capacity to ‘disembed’ and start afresh through freedom and adventure. Some may seek to ‘wander’, un-bound to place (Voigt 1976), while others envisage patchworks of new attachments, curating an individualised biography (Desforges 2000). Such imaginaries of travel may be rendered as very personal aspirations, while being shaped, even if unknowingly, by broader aspects of one’s socialisation (cf. Bourdieu 1984). Global inequalities have accorded people in the Western world a disproportionate and unreciprocated degree of mobility (Cresswell 2006; Spracklen 2013). Yet constructions of Western tourism may be critiqued for extrapolating an assumed

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whiteness across diverse populations. Tourism research with non-white Americans has discovered two important rationales for travel, both regarding ethnicity. The first, among African Americans, concerns the popular imaginary of ‘roots tourism’ to West Africa (Thimothy & Teye 2004). The other travel motivation, also diasporic, entails young people from recent migrant backgrounds wanting to visit their familial homeland (Huang, Haller & Ramshaw 2013; Huang, Ramshaw & Norman 2016). While both dynamics are important in the theorisation of youth belonging, the paradigms of such research may feed into an ethnic reductionism. In his ethnography of Southall in the United Kingdom, Gerd Bauman (1996) warns against an over-determinism by ethnic categories, as though ‘whatever any “Asian” informant [says is] a consequence of their “Asianness”, their “ethnic identity”, or “the culture of their community”’ (p. 1). With regards to travel imaginaries, we are therefore cautious not to totalise ethnicity and explain all motivations as an intrinsic consequence of people’s social categories – even while remaining sensitive to the various implications of identity. In a city as heterogeneous as New York, the institutions and spaces through which one conducts research will strongly affect the demographics and nature of the data, as well as the contingency of which individuals one gets to know.

Research context and methodology Dominguez and Habib (2017) have asked why so few non-US scholars have conducted ethnographies in the United States. The first author, from the United Kingdom, capitalised on his geographic location while studying for a degree in anthropology and education in New York. Seeking to conduct an exploratory study on the theme of youth aspiration for a master’s thesis (Loewenthal 2015) and in preparation for doctoral research, he approached the All Stars Project, an organisation providing opportunities for out-of-school youth development.3 He conducted a continuous month of fieldwork as a volunteer and researcher there in the summer of 2015, in the context of a longer involvement throughout that year. On an early visit, and the first opportunity to speak with youth participants, he approached a group of adolescents who were chatting about upcoming summer internships. As he attempted to translate the research proposal’s jargon into ordinary language, their surprise at hearing a British accent sparked conversations about geography: ‘Where you from?’; ‘What’s it like over there?’; ‘You know my friend, he’s been to Denmark’; ‘I need to earn the money first, then I’m gonna go all over’. Following a series of excited conversations about cultural identities and travelling the world, the research enquiry was infused with a geographical focus. At a subsequent event, the author verbally advertised a series of ‘group conversations about travel, the future and the world’ to roughly one hundred All Stars youth. Two focus groups ensued. The data that emerged from these form the core evidence in this chapter.4 The first focus group (1 hour 35 minutes) involved three youth participants: Liya (half African American, half Panamanian Trinidadian), Joy (Congolese

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parents), and Marcus (Jamaican parents). Liya and Joy returned to a second focus group (2 hours 45 minutes) later that week which involved four further participants: three other girls (one with Nigerian parents, two with Jamaican parents) and a boy (of Chinese parents). For the purposes of demographic coherence, the research focuses on the voices and experiences of those of African and Caribbean descent. During fieldwork, having a British accent relayed an appearance of cultural naiveté that justified asking participants to describe their city and their social worlds to someone who clearly would not know. Furthermore, the differences in identity of being a white male graduate student spending time with black, mainly female adolescents from financially poor backgrounds were neutralised by the overriding difference of being British. Stahl (2016) similarly discusses the advantages he fostered from an ‘outsider’ status as an American conducting research on class in British schools. We would agree with his reflection that having boundaries of national identity in researcher–participant relationships can evade or supersede the politics of subtler intra-national differences. The focus group setting was centred around a large world map. This prompt elicited free-flowing, participant-led conversation about an array of spontaneously generated topics. Even though maps can be easily accessed alone in digital form, there was a clear novelty and excitement as the map was laid out on the table, with eyes and hands scrambling over different sections of the world. Whereas some scholars have emphasised the propensity of maps to dullen life’s animation and three-dimensionality (de Certeau 1984), the opposite was true in this case, as the map served as an endless source of stimulation. Banks (2001) discusses how, when compared with face-to-face interviewing, a ‘third party object’ as a neutral point of focus can remove participants’ sense of interrogation, enabling them to express aspects of their interior worlds without feeling scrutinised. A crucial contribution of the map to the research outcomes was in raising themes such as heritage and history that had not been considered in the research design. In the following sections, we discuss the four most salient themes in our analyses of the young people’s conversations about travel.

Belonging to history and to an ethnicity Among the opening quotations above was Joy’s proclamation that she would begin her itinerary in her parents’ native Congo. In the same sentence, she continued: ‘Who am I kidding? I would go all over Africa! I want to spend a year in Africa – that would be awesome’. Meanwhile, Marcus proclaimed that at top of his list were: ‘Japan, Italy or anywhere in Africa’. For Liya, Africa and Europe were the main regions that she oriented towards. An interest in the African continent as an aspect of these young people’s heritage appeared throughout the conversations. Authors have previously documented the travel imaginaries of African Americans seeking a ‘return’ to Africa (Thimothy & Teye 2004) and while only Liya has such parentage, certain African diasporic experiences and cultural formations of New World displacement have been shown to transcend national boundaries (Gilroy

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1993). The legacies of the trans-Atlantic slave trade were a key point raised in both focus groups, with the geographical map highlighting uncertainties about the past: Half of my history is just lost today. I don’t know what happened to the Tainos [indigenous people from the Caribbean]. Like, they just disappeared from Jamaica. I don’t know what happened to West Ghana and what happened to their first king. Like, what happened to him? Where did he go? Was he a slave? Are his ancestors still living? (Marcus) For Marcus, this series of historical events is simultaneously monumental and vague, echoing Boym’s (2001, p. 251) notion of ‘diasporic intimacy’ – when someone is captivated by their heritage precisely because of its distance and opacity. This paradox of ‘not knowing’ about significant pasts may contribute to broader community motivations for ‘knowing your history’. For example, at one stage Marcus pleaded: ‘We need awareness – awareness is the biggest thing in this world’. As we later discuss, our analysis depicts learning as a key vehicle through which belonging is rendered knowable. The young people’s appetite to learn about diasporic geographies and the histories that have shaped the modern world even provoked a critical tone towards the school syllabus: JOY: The Cold War – they spent a lot of time on the Cold War. LIYA : That’s it! You will never hear about what happened in Australia,

and how Australia came to be. You’ll never hear anything about Africa other than ‘black people were selling black people to come to America’. That’s the only thing you hear about it. . . . History is just that. His story. The story that they are feeding to us is government funded, which means we will never truly know our history unless we go out and we ask questions and we dig for it ourselves.

The young people deem the ‘government-funded’ school curriculum to have a politicised agenda. Yet they frame this limitation in their schooling and their society as a further rationale to ‘conscientize’ themselves (Freire 1977) by ‘asking questions’ and ‘digging for themselves’. This discussion frames travel as serving a radically educational purpose, situating the as-yet-unexplored world as the locus of a kind of learning that cannot be found in school, as Liya continued to reinforce: America stole from Africa. . . . We stole from them. We did something that we cannot undo. This is why it’s important to know your history, whether it’s based off of the government or it’s based off of travel, which I really prefer – travelling and getting to know your history.

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An interesting phrasing here is the term ‘we’ – while criticising America, she still situates herself as a part of it. Belonging continues to be a highly complex topic for black people in America. For some black Americans, a multi-ethnic form of patriotism such as that encouraged by President Obama might offer a sense of national belonging. However, this population has long been subject to state-sanctioned exploitation, poverty and violence and a denial of equal opportunity or elements of citizenship. As a result, there is an ongoing history of identifying ambiguously or antagonistically with the nation-state. W. E. B. Du Bois (2012) famously depicted this as a ‘double consciousness’, simultaneously negotiating life as Americans and as black people, aware that the two are often at odds. At All Stars talks and workshops, where the majority of youth participants are black, the question of negotiating one’s identity in a racially unequal society was a dominant theme. As we have seen above, the group members imagine stepping outside of their society and travelling to alternative locations – particularly in Africa – to learn about history. They compare an imaginary of travel as educational (albeit idealised) to a critique of the ‘government-funded’ school curriculum. A degree of belonging to the United States is evident, although in tandem with a dominant affiliation to their ethnic histories and identities. Further to an interest in their own heritage, however, the travel imaginaries of these youth reveal a fascination with cultural difference.

Cosmopolitanism and belonging to the world Stimulated by the map, the participants enthusiastically discussed numerous foreign topics and destinations: I think you need four shots [immunisations] to go to China. I was watching a documentary last night, cos I like to do that, cos I’m like the coolest person ever. And the Yangtze River, there’s a civilisation who hunts the giant honeybees. . . . When you look at these civilisations and how they do things, like using otters to help them fish and stuff, you’re just like, ‘I wanna go there, so I can learn how to fish with the otters!’ It’s just mad cool. (Liya) Such remarks indicate Liya’s interest in the wider world through her media consumption and her desire to push beyond the familiar to try new things. Similarly, Marcus’s interest in visiting Japan or Italy is a product of his explorations on YouTube, where he has taught himself to cook Japanese and Italian food. More generally, the focus groups entailed quick-fire lists of destinations to visit: MARCUS : I wanna go to Ecuador! LIYA : Nicaragua! JOY: I wanna go to Brazzzilll!

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While an ostensible rationale or conviction to carry such trips through was often missing, this travel imaginary focuses on novelty and adventure – such as is evident among affluent globally mobile youth (Desforges 2000). It is interesting to recognise similarities in youth fantasies across demographic differences. Indeed, a central critique from whiteness studies regards the neutralisation and de-racialisation of white pursuits, while the activities of non-white people are framed through the inescapable shadow of their ethnicity (Bauman 1996). Such findings indicate that anthropological interests in otherness are not confined to white travellers and social scientists. Nevertheless, alongside a possible pan-youth imaginary of travel, irrespective of ethnicity, the group’s interest in cultural difference could also reflect a response to ongoing racial inequalities in America, following which they seek a deeper acceptance within the diversity of the world. Cosmopolitan ideas of belonging first and foremost to the human race were discussed explicitly in the second focus group: You see the things that happen in school about one against another – we’re divided by who we are: we’re divided by our sex, we’re divided by our race, we’re divided by height. LIYA : Our hair. CIA : And I’m just like, if I cut you open and I cut you open it’s gonna be the exact same thing, honestly. Unless you some alien! CIA :

Such calls to the universal substance of human bodies, superseding external features, recurred: JOY: CIA :

We bleed the same blood! [shaking her head in disagreement] ‘A positive’. Nah I’m kidding! [laughs]

While blood is generally used as a metaphor for the distinctive nature of family relatedness, the opposite is in fact true: a fixed set of blood types transcends ethnicity, nationality and even family. These youths situate their belonging within this common humanity – in partial response, it seems, to ongoing historical divisions and inequalities. Yet while they may dream of globetrotting and envisage themselves as part of a wider world, they have rarely had the chance to leave New York, let alone travel abroad.

The politics of mobility One 17-year-old who joined up for the second focus group asked, ‘Do you have to be eighteen to travel?’, summarising how travel was chiefly conceptualised as an abstract idea – and perhaps a quixotic fantasy (cf. Ward 2014). Many of the barriers to mobility that the young people identified were financial. Jenkins’ (2013) work touches on this contradiction in belonging: ‘As an African American

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community we hold fast to our roots, which are planted in the African soil that many of us can’t even afford to touch’ (p. 6). It is salient to consider that African diasporas in the Americas and the Caribbean have experienced this separation for centuries of successive generations. While air travel in recent decades has engendered a historically unprecedented scope for mobility, global tourism remains starkly imbalanced towards the economic power of white Westerners and a growing Asian elite (Spracklen 2013, p. 174). In our study, concomitant with the structural inequalities of wealth, cultural immobilities emerged, especially as they pertain to ethnicity and gender. For example, in the second focus group, participants projected their identities into unknown lands, imagining how they might be perceived: It’s also fear. I wanna travel but my biggest fear is that I’m gonna go somewhere and then someone’s just gonna kill me cos I’m black or kill me cos I’m a woman. JOY: Yeah, my fear is having to deal with racism. DENISE : Being attacked. DENISE :

The hesitation apparent in these comments serves as a barrier to physically enacting and experiencing the kinds of global belonging envisaged. Such concerns are discussed elsewhere in Stone’s (2002) account of being a black female world traveller. Differing senses of entitlement to mobility may be socialised through the significations of popular culture, as Brummett (2014) argues: In the whole ‘Indiana Jones’ series of films (e.g., Raiders of the Lost Ark) and similar texts (e.g., the whole Anaconda series of films), there is an assumption that white explorers can go anywhere in the world and find friendly and agreeable ‘natives’ who will be at their beck and call, willing even to lay down their lives for them. (p. 210) The sense of confidence and spatial omnipotence that Brummett suggests is instilled into white audiences could not be seen in our study. Liya illustrates this perceived lack of casual access: You have to learn the culture first before you go anywhere. Because if you don’t, and you go there, and you do something wrong, you might end up buried and you don’t even know it. Or you might end up disrespecting someone by putting your hand out to them. Everyone has their own set of traditions and things. These remarks, entailing a hesitant cultural sensitivity and preparatory selfeducation, are a far cry from discourses of loud white Americans actively engaging

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in risky behaviours, neglecting and disrespecting the local culture while in Cancun on spring break. Similarly, in pre-marital British ‘stag do’s’ (bachelor parties) to Poland, Thurnell-Read (2011, p. 977) shows how, far from any attempts to ‘learn the culture first’, as Liya suggests, male visitors use the foreign space as a site for the un-disciplining of behaviour – including public nudity, urination and vomiting – with men let ‘off the leash and out of control’, like wild animals. The contrasts with the data in our study are striking, and we suggest the need for a closer look at the role of identity in the politics of mobility. Rather than concluding on a theme of immobility, however, which would not reflect the vitality of our research encounters, we finally look at the amount of learning occurring in these young people’s lives. We suggest that these modes of education are cut from the same cloth as the youth’s travel imaginaries and the associated discourses of belonging that have been discussed.

Learning as virtual mobility Throughout our data, learning can be seen as an aspect of what Urry (2007) terms ‘virtual and imaginative mobility’ (p. 40). Take the following instance of Marcus reflecting on an early internet search: Who would have thought that Africa would have so much gold at like 12? You didn’t know this, you didn’t know about ivory and alabaster. You don’t know! But when you find out, it’s life changing. Through learning, Marcus is transported to other places and to the past. Like travel, this virtual mobility is framed as deeply educational and even ‘life changing’. Reading was also frequently referenced. For instance, Liya commented: ‘Start reading, cos reading is your best friend, reading will entertain you’. A key text that was raised on a few occasions was Lorraine Hansberry’s (2002) A raisin in the sun, a play about a black family’s efforts to integrate successfully in a white suburb of Chicago. Joy commented on how reading (and re-reading) the book has helped her resolve her own belonging in the United States – ‘That’s what I do. I read it. And I can relate to the story’ – before offering to lend Liya her copy. We refer to these learning activities as ‘virtual’ as they are (re)constructing distant phenomena through their evocations. Current research demonstrates the profundity of virtual experiences, whereby simulations are often experienced by the mind as though one were physically there (Bailenson 2018). Such findings give credence to the power of the imagination, over necessarily the location of the physical body, in the theorisation of youth belonging. For instance, while Joy has not yet travelled to Africa, oral histories within her home have shaped her imaginary of the continent: I’m so grateful to my parents and my grandmother for just lecturing me, even though I didn’t wanna hear nothin’ they had to say. I learned so much about

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African history because of them. They would sit me down and give me three to four-hour lectures, I kid you not. Just talking about the histories of Congo, and everything else that happened throughout all of Africa. Liya presents an equivalent narrative of talking to her grandparents from Panama: They can sit there for hours and just talk about it and describe what goes on in Panama, and how does it look, and how their parents met when they were working on the Panama Canal – one of them was a nurse and one was a construction worker. It’s, like, so connecting. Like, it hits my heart and it makes me wanna go so bad. An important term here is ‘connecting’, as though the words from her grandparents attach her to both her family and the place they are from. We argue that the young people’s travel imaginaries are paralleled and partially produced by their learning activities – from exploring heritage (Joy’s family ‘lectures’) to negotiating ethnicity (reading A raisin in the sun) to an interest in other places through documentaries and the internet. It is through modes of education such Marcus’s internet search that aspects of African history were rendered knowable, leading to a heightened sense of belonging. This would indicate that belonging has epistemological and not merely ontological dimensions. The emphasis on extracurricular learning in our study taps into an extensive history of education being instrumentalised by black people in the United States. The historian V. P. Franklin (1993) shows how the discourse of self-determination in supplementary education was first pioneered by African Americans. Such autodidactic approaches are evidenced in Fisher’s (2006) ethnography of two black bookstores in Northern California that serve as ‘alternative knowledge spaces’ for black students and families to participate in both physical and imagined communities. With regard to belonging, the All Stars Project was shown through fieldwork to serve as a learning environment in which the young people could at once foster who they are and where they come from (historically, ethnically and economically) while aspiring to social and geographic mobility and assimilation with white-majority middle-class society. This last element of the data indicates multiple aspects of learning which can be interpreted as a kind of virtual mobility. We suggest that these virtual mobilities partially generate the young people’s travel imaginaries and the related negotiation of belonging. Importantly, considering the themes of immobility previously raised, the young people’s imaginations transport them beyond their immediate circumstances. There is thus something spatially dispersed in their senses of belonging whereby the parameters of their attachments are not governed by their immediate localities or previous mobility. A constellational view of belonging can be expanded if we incorporate temporality as well – as in May’s (2017) notion of ‘belonging from afar’ which emphasises the significance of memory and nostalgia. Further to the reflective discourse of heritage already discussed, through their learning and aspirations the young people in our study also forged a sense of belonging to the future.

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Conclusion: belonging beyond the immediate Through the concept of travel imaginaries, the values inscribed into perceptions of travel, this exploratory research in New York City has provided insights into young people’s attachments to the world. The methodological richness of utilising a world map as a stimulus is apparent from the range of participant-led conversation topics which were unforeseen in the research design. A key finding is the importance of heritage in underpinning the youth participants’ sense of who they are. Participation in an African diasporic ethnicity, to be crystallised through travel to Africa, was shown to exist in tandem with a critical view of the school curriculum, deemed to present and promote a politicised distortion of world history and geography. Simultaneously, the group express interest in gallivanting around the world visiting culturally foreign places. On the one hand, this travel imaginary of novelty and adventure makes a potential contribution to the tourism studies literature in not reducing the fantasies of minority youth to aspects of their ethnicity. Yet equally, such an interest in cultural difference could be interpreted as an aspiration to global citizenship and the acceptance of one’s own difference within the variety of the world. The significance and inescapability of identity does recur in the students’ hesitation to travel for fear of racial or sexual violence. Such discourse is markedly different from the nonchalant mobility of other youth. We conclude by considering the role of education in transporting young people to different times, places and imagined communities, arguing that virtual mobility may be just as important as the physical kind. Throughout our analysis, the geometries of belonging in these young people’s lives have stretched far beyond New York or the present moment – spatially, through the imagination of physically distant places, and temporally, through the historical past, the conditional tense, or an aspirational tone of ideal futures. Hence, we remark on the degree to which belonging is dispersed beyond the sphere of spatial or temporal immediacy.

Notes 1 These are pseudonyms chosen by the participants. 2 The response to ‘Why Madagascar?’ was a unanimous ‘the film!’ 3 The mission statement of the All Stars Project is ‘to transform the lives of youth and poor communities using the developmental power of performance, in partnership with caring adults’ (All Stars Project 2017). 4 For details on other components of the research see Loewenthal (2015).

References All Stars Project 2017, Who we are, viewed 12 November 2017, . Bailenson, J. 2018, Experience on demand: What virtual reality is, how it works, and what it can do, W. W. Norton & Company, New York. Banks, M. 2001, Visual methods in social research, Sage, London. Bauman, G. 1996, Contesting culture: Discourses of identity in multi-ethnic London, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

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Bellah, R.N., Madsen, R., Sullivan, W.M., Swidler, A. & Tipton, S.N. 2007 [1985], Habits of the heart: Individualism and commitment in American life, University of California Press, Berkeley, CA. Bourdieu, P. 1984, Distinction: A social critique of the judgment of taste, Routledge/Keagan Paul, London. Boym, S. 2001, The future of nostalgia, Basic Books, New York. Brummett, B. 2014, Rhetoric in popular culture, 4th edn, Sage, Thousand Oaks, CA. Cresswell, T. 2006, On the move: Mobility in the modern western world, Routledge, New York. de Certeau, M. 1984, The practice of everyday life, University of California Press, Berkeley, CA. Desforges, L. 2000, ‘Traveling the world: Identity and travel biography’, Annals of Tourism Research, vol. 27, no. 4, pp. 926–945. Dominguez, V. & Habib, J. 2017, America observed: On an international anthropology of the US, Berghahn, New York. Du Bois, W.E.B. 2012 [1903], The souls of black folk, Emereo, New York. Fisher, M. 2006, ‘Earning “dual degrees”: Black bookstores as alternative knowledge spaces’, Anthropology & Education Quarterly, vol. 37, no. 1, pp. 83–99. Franklin, V.P. 1993, Black self-determination: A cultural history of African-American resistance, 2nd edn, Lawrence Hill Books, New York. Freire, P. 1977, Cultural action for freedom, Nicholls, London. Gilroy, P. 1993, The black Atlantic: Modernity and double consciousness, Verso, London. Gordon, E.W., Bowman, C.B. & Mejia, B.X. 2003, Changing the script for youth development: An evaluation of the all stars talent show network and the Joseph A Forgione development school for youth, Institute for Urban and Minority Education, Teachers College, Columbia University, New York. Hansberry, L. 2002 [1959], A raisin in the sun: A drama in three acts, Random House, New York. Healy, C. 2003, ‘The city’, in F. Martin (ed.), Interpreting everyday culture, Bloomsbury, London, pp. 54–66. Huang, W.-J., Haller, W.J. & Ramshaw, G.P. 2013, ‘Diaspora tourism and homeland attachment: An exploratory analysis’, Tourism Analysis, vol. 18, no. 3, pp. 285–296. Huang, W.-J., Ramshaw, G.P. & Norman, W.C. 2016, ‘Homecoming or tourism? Diaspora tourism experience of second-generation immigrants’, Tourism Geographies, vol. 18, no. 1, pp. 59–79. Jenkins, T.S. 2013, My culture, my color, my self: Heritage, resilience, and community in the lives of young adults, Temple University Press, Philadelphia, PA. Loewenthal, J. 2015, ‘Home and away: Cultural imaginaries of the city and the world among New York City youth’, Master’s thesis, Teachers College, Columbia University, New York. MacCannell, D. 1973, ‘Staged authenticity: Arrangements of social space in tourist settings’, American Journal of Sociology, vol. 79, no. 3, pp. 589–603. Maoz, D. 2007, ‘Backpackers’ motivations: The role of culture and nationality’, Annals of Tourism Research, vol. 34, no. 1, pp. 122–140. May, V. 2017, ‘Belonging from afar: Nostalgia, time and memory’, Sociological Review, vol. 65, no. 2, pp. 401–415. Millington, G. 2011, “Race”, culture and the right to the city: Centres, peripheries, margins, Palgrave Macmillan, Houndmills.

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Salazar, N.B. & Graburn, N.H.H. 2014, Tourism imaginaries: Anthropological approaches, Berghahn Books, New York. Spracklen, K. 2013, Whiteness and leisure, Palgrave Macmillan, Houndmills. Stahl, G. 2016, ‘Relationship-building in research: Gendered identity construction in researcher-participant interaction’, in M.R.M. Ward (ed.), Gender identity and research relationships, Emerald Group Publishing, Bingley, pp. 145–165. Stone, M. 2002, Black woman walking: A different experience of world travel, Bea Gay Publications, Bournemouth. Strauss, C. 2006, ‘The imaginary’, Anthropological Theory, vol. 6, no. 3, pp. 322–344. Thimothy, D.J. & Teye, V.B. 2004, ‘American children of the African diaspora: Journeys to the motherland’, in T. Coles & D.J. Thimothy (eds.), Tourism, diasporas and space, Routledge, London, pp. 111–123. Thurnell-Read, T. 2011, ‘Off the leash and out of control: Masculinities and embodiment in Eastern European stag tourism’, Sociology, vol. 45, no. 6, pp. 977–991. Urry, J. 2007, Mobilities, Polity Press, Cambridge. Urry, J. 1990, The tourist gaze: Leisure and travel in contemporary societies, Sage, London. Voigt, J.W. 1976, ‘Wandering: Youth and travel behavior’, Annals of Tourism Research, vol. 4, no. 1, pp. 25–41. Ward, M.R.M. 2014, ‘“You get a reputation if you’re from the valleys”: The stigmatisation of place in young working-class men’s lives’, in T. Thurnell-Read & M. Casey (eds.), Men, masculinities, travel and tourism, Palgrave Macmillan, London, pp. 89–104.

Chapter 7

Women, spatial scales and belonging Signalling inequality in Latin America Ana Miranda and Milena Arancibia

Introduction In Latin America, there is a strong research tradition focussed on studying youth cultures, with a stream of large-scale studies exploring local specificities in the construction of identity (e.g. Cerbino 2012; Reguillo Cruz 2000; Valenzuela Arce 2015). Likewise, studies have been conducted on the intersection of youth identities and space, which have addressed the process of segregation and territorial fragmentation and their impact on quotidian life (e.g. Bayón 2015; Saraví 2015). However, many studies have centred on youth identities and masculinity, but little research has been done from a feminist perspective. Research into identity construction and its relationship with time, space and caregiving activities among young women is of fundamental importance.1 Although the trajectories of young women are strongly influenced by the opportunities available in spaces and family groups where their biographies are lived, studies have still focussed on their transition to adulthood through access to employment. From a theoretical standpoint, the centrality of employment in the processes of transition to adult life evades the debate on the magnitude of the task of caring for children and older people among young women. From the social standpoint, the scant recognition of domestic work, in some cases, stigmatises those who develop transitions where employment is informal, unstable or non-existent. A series of studies has considered the dimensions of gender, identity and place. Among them, the concept of belonging facilitates the incorporation of generational identity, roots and affectivity as central notions for the analysis of youth transition. This concept is particularly useful when addressing the trajectories of young women in Argentina, especially the trajectories of women who live in places where productive employment is not central to their identities (Miranda & Arancibia 2017). In formulating our approach to belonging, we have drawn on Cuervo and Wyn (2014), who explain that the ‘interactions with family, friends, neighbourhood and other members of the community have the capacity to generate a sense of belonging’ (p. 907) and affect the processes of change and reproduction of the structure of opportunities and access to welfare. In the same direction, our conceptual proposal of a ‘grammar of youth’ examines both the spaces that contextualise and determine youth experiences in different fields and the forms of

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action (agency) of young people that affect these structures and determinations. As in Bourdieu’s (2008) habitus, youth’s grammars constitute structured action principles that allow for multiple biographies, according to socially structured patterns and values. Therefore, the idea of a grammar of youth indicates that a system of rules that organises the life course has been formulated. This grammar, through which young people interact and negotiate, has territorial anchoring, meaning that it evolves in a socially and culturally situated manner (Bendit & Miranda 2017). In researching how young women transition beyond school, our focus of analysis is the transitions from education to employment or to reproductive work, where we consider the different social origins as well as the different trajectories leading to adult life. Based on longitudinal research conducted in wealthy and underprivileged areas of the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Area, this chapter evaluates and discusses the contribution of place, gender and class interaction in shaping women’s identities. In presenting the research findings from the Grammar of Youth Programme at the Latin American School of Social Sciences (FLACSO Argentina), we address how women who were born in the early 1980s and who reached the age of majority at the end of the twentieth century experienced transitions. The stories correspond with fieldwork carried out between 2013 and 2017 when these women were entering the fourth decade of their life course, in which we asked the following questions: how does the influence of space manifest in the identity construction of young women of different social class? What is the connection between social space and belonging among young women? How do different spatial scales and senses of belonging influence their work and family trajectories? To address these questions, the chapter is organised into four sections. The first section presents the specificities of the Latin American context, specifically the economic growth and the continuity of territorial segregation. The second section introduces the methodological strategy of the research. The third section, following Hopkins (2015), addresses the importance of spatial scales in defining trajectories to adult life and also examines the relationship between work and belonging in the trajectories of young women from different social sectors. Finally, in the conclusion, we compare the different senses of belonging of women who live in the same city but in very unequal conditions with the purpose of contributing to the debate on the construction of feminine identities and the persistence of inequality.

Young women’s transitions in Latin America The applicability of the conceptual models of the so-called Global North in Latin America has been widely questioned (Prebisch 1949). In the early 2000s, the questioning of the neoliberal model by numerous Latin American governments provided the context for in-depth criticism of the usefulness of theories produced in the North for the analysis of the region. The combination of heterodox

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macroeconomic policies and social inclusion policies generated improvement in the living conditions of the population and also among the youth. However, even in a context of growth and social inclusion, social structural problems remained. In Latin America, inequality is manifested in access to basic goods such as education and health, a wide income gap, the habitat in informal districts and in marked residential segregation. Segregation influences young people’s project of building their lives, and this influences women particularly. In Latin America, and despite the redistributive trends of recent decades, the neoliberal city model has tended to deepen inequalities, stimulating residential segregation (Rodríguez et al. 2007). The financialisation of urban income has prompted regressive redistribution of land and urban opportunities associated with it, resulting in the promotion of highly differentiated generational experiences among different social groups and from an early age. The fragmentation of space has strong consequences in the quotidian life of young people. Some studies have held that a process of fragmentation of cultural identities has spread (Tiramonti & Ziegler 2008) as part of the abovementioned process and based on social closure strategies of higher income sectors. The diffusion of this division implies the expansion of borders, conformity to mutually exclusive spaces and the rupture of ties between different social segments (Saraví 2015). These processes, which have spread to all the countries of the region, are present with different intensities in different Latin American cities and countries. Argentina, a country with an intermediate average income, is part of a group of nations that make up the southern region of the continent. As part of the ‘southern cone model’ (along with Brazil, Chile and Uruguay) and after two decades of accentuated unemployment, a change in economic strategy once again made labour the main defining factor in social relations. Heterodox macroeconomic policies and social inclusion policies generated an extensive social protection programme but with little impact on the labour market positioning of women, who continue to be in charge of caregiving tasks that are now covered by public income programmes associated with maternity.2 The persistence of a strong sexual division of labour calls into question models of youth transition centred on employment and housing autonomy, which appear ineffective for the analysis of female transition as caregiving work, and extended social reproduction are not taken into account. Many young women who have grown up in low-income households experience continuous participation in caregiving tasks, first in their family of origin and then caregiving activities in their own home, often without having access to employment independent of family reproductive strategies (Rodríguez Enríquez & Marzonetto 2015). In Argentina, the process of space fragmentation is less intense than in other nations in the Latin American continent; however, we argue that space fragmentation has strong implications in the quotidian life of young women. The subjectivity of young women is formed in the context of space fragmentation, and it is expressed through the decisions they make during their transition to adulthood. Issues related to education and work are rooted in vital decisions about marriage, motherhood and participation in family caregiving activities. Labour trajectories, which are a product of transitional journeys, support different levels of autonomy

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and privatisation of personal life (Warr 2015). As part of this process, young women experience a variety of feelings related to belonging. In the following section, we introduce the longitudinal research strategy utilised in this study.

Longitudinal studies programme Grammar of Youth is a research programme that began in 1998 to develop longitudinal studies through surveys and in-depth interviews. The methodology employed was cohort analysis, applied to young people from different generations. The information compiled has allowed us to analyse the transformation in youth transitions in Argentina since the beginning of the twenty-first century. So far, the programme has gathered information from two generations that reached the age of majority (18 years old) in very different economic and social situations. The first longitudinal cohort (called G99) consists of young people who were born between 1981 and 1982 and reached the age of 18 in a period marked by the application of adjustment programmes, unemployment and economic recession (1999). The second cohort (G11) groups young people who were born between 1993 and 1994 and reached the age of 18 in a context characterised by greater job opportunities and social protection (2011). The information presented in this chapter was elaborated with the G99 cohort through in-depth retrospective interviews carried out when the participants were between 32 and 34 years old. The selection of interviewees corresponds to a segmented sample according to the level of education attained, gender and characteristics of the habitat, which included underprivileged neighbourhoods (both informal modalities and different types of social housing). The sample contains fifty-two interviews with urban youths (twenty-seven men and twenty-five women) from different social groups in the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Area: twenty-two youths living in underprivileged neighbourhoods, twelve working-class youths, ten middle-income-sector youths, and eight middle-upper-sector youths. The stories revealed to us as researchers throughout the fieldwork have allowed us to theorise the complete transition of young people between education and the world of work (either as employment or as caregiving activity) at the beginning of the adult life of a generation who integrated into the labour market in years of economic crises but who then, in part, experienced upward trajectories within the social structure (Bendit & Miranda 2016). The analysis presented in this chapter focuses on the transition to adult life of young women from underprivileged neighbourhoods and from the upper-middle class. We ponder the importance of their family trajectories as they make vital decisions. We focus on the spatial dimension of trajectories, the sense of belonging and their importance in the construction of biographical routes.

Women, spatial scales and belonging During recent years, many sociologists who focus on youth have worked on conceptual theories which allow for the incorporation of the notions of identity, gender, place and belonging (e.g. Cuervo & Wyn 2014; Savage 2010; Warr 2015;

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Wyn, Cuervo & Cook 2019; Sattar 2019). The analysis of the identities and sense of belonging of women has allowed us to understand the decisions made in the process of construction of their life projects and the possibilities they have. Contributing to the knowledge of the Global South (Connell 2007), rather than just focussing on the normative and North-centric character of youth transitions, we have analysed educational and labour trajectories of young women in Argentina (Miranda & Arancibia 2017). In this research, we also incorporated notions of time and space, which allowed for reflection on identity in the framework of heterogeneous, non-linear life courses (Worth 2015) while incorporating a broader analytical framework for an analysis of social inequality within the context of globalisation in the contemporary world (Farrugia 2014). The contributions from human geography provide tools for analysing the symbolic and spatial dimensions of urban segregation (Bayón & Saraví 2017) and their impact on women’s transitions. More and more, the spatial dimension of social life configures access to differentiated networks and resources among young people from different social sectors, where highly differentiated female identities are constructed. In times of globalisation, these ties are presented in spatial scales differentiated according to areas of connectivity, which are framed by household access to economic and social resources. In this regard, Hopkins (2015) emphasises the importance of considering spatial scales not only as a framework but also as the result of a process, arguing that ‘the places used, inhabited and occupied by young people matter and often have an important influence in shaping their personal identities’ (p. 762). As a way of studying the spaces that contextualise and determine youth experiences in different fields, and contributing to the debate on youth transitions, we have developed the concept of the grammar of youth. This concept expresses our concern about the relationship between the activities and approaches that contemporary societies offer to young people and the normative frameworks that support expectations of compliance. These expectations are built into a value and hierarchical system that tends to stigmatise young people. One of the challenges in this chapter is linking the conceptualisation of youth grammars, belonging and scales to an analysis of the trajectories of young women who live in the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Area, the main urban agglomeration of Argentina. The study of spatial scales is of great importance for Latin American countries since they shape widely diverse experiences of transition and senses of belonging. In this respect, we present two contrasting forms of belonging. The first form, called elective belonging, is flexible, liquid and fluid. Following Savage (2010), elective belonging is understood as ‘the way that middle-class people claimed moral rights over place through their capacity to move to, and put down roots in, a specific place which was not functionally important to them, but which also mattered symbolically’ (p. 116). The second form, known as hard place belonging, is rigid, firm, stable, impenetrable and strong. The findings of our research indicate that upper- and upper-middle-class women have ample space for socialisation and independent mobility where the limits go beyond the southern region of South America. As part of this process, among those women integrated into global flows, the extension of youth status,

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independent mobility and the postponement of motherhood are available and socially valued options. However, for women from low-income households, the neighbourhood is the most important space for socialisation and identity construction. For those women living in less privileged neighbourhoods, the dilemmas are configured among territorially located networks, where subjectivities are arranged according to family reproduction formats. In these cases, maternity and caregiving tasks become the main activities and chief expectation which form their transitions. In the data, these inequalities appear to be powerfully contrasting in the major urban centre of Argentina. Below we introduce empirical evidence based on the testimonies of young women who live in different spatial scales. First, we present the characteristics of the stories of upper-middle-class women, emphasising their sense of belonging in the global scale. To show contrast, we then concentrate on women who live in underprivileged neighbourhoods, their territorial attachment and its influence on the definition of their trajectories. Elective belonging in middle-class women The data gathered on middle-class young women within the wider sample make it possible to analyse transitions that take place within the socially structured parameters for youth in a particular time period. After secondary education, the university experience during the young women’s twenties continues through different work experiences that around the age of 30 lead to job stability (Miranda & Arancibia 2017). During this time, professional women with full-time jobs stand out. These women may have an autonomous life in which they make decisions individually; this means without ties to their families of origin. Arguably, during this time the grammar of youth enables the affirmation of a career and the consequent postponement of tasks associated with family life. Indeed, the time devoted to study and work is inversely proportional to the likelihood of forming a family group of their own, which is delayed even after the age of 30. However, this process, which occurs strongly among women who participate in a ‘modernised youth’ culture (Bendit et al., 2008), is not risk free since the current configuration of labour markets proposes the postponement of the assumption of parental roles up to increasingly advanced ages, often leading to the medicalisation of reproductive activity (Fraser 2016). If we pay attention to the spatial dimension of transition trajectories to adult life, specifically the analysis of the relation between space and identity, the concept of elective belonging can be applied. For example, among the interviewees is Barbara3, who had temporary jobs during her university studies until she began a stable job as part of the experiences which contributed to her professional training. Shortly before graduating as a psychologist, she got a job in the public sector, which at present she combines with teaching and private clinical practice. The combination of studying and working was developed in a virtuous and reflexive circle that ended in a trajectory of professional integration and the delay of motherhood. In her early thirties, Barbara was in graduate school and among her future expectations was to have children with her current partner. Furthermore,

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she planned to move to a bigger house but did not want to leave the city of Buenos Aires, where she has always lived. In her own words: The quality of life in Buenos Aires is awful. However, I can’t even imagine myself leaving this town. I’ve never imagined myself far [because of] my family, the learning spaces, my friends. Don’t ask me why, but I have never imagined myself far from university. There’s a rally and I can see it from a window. I’m interested in having access to political issues. (Barbara, 2013, personal communication, 20 December) In this regard, it is possible to observe in the women interviewed ‘the recognition that they can choose to live in one amongst other places, and that this choice is highly telling and evocative for them’ (Savage 2010, p. 118). The trajectories of these women, we argue, are constructed by successive approximations and have as their central feature the privatisation of personal life (Warr 2015). In the case of Susana, an upper-middle-class young woman who completed higher education and worked as an independent photographer, the combination of studying and working was also developed to consolidate her professional position. Her propensity to mobility, within the framework of global cities, is part of her expectations. In her story, she said: I have a very strange fantasy that is to buy a studio and go live in Europe. So knowing that I have a place to return to, I can easily leave. I could go live in Barcelona, Paris; they’re the cities where I most imagine myself living. Or maybe Italy, but I don’t know. (Susana, 2013, personal communication, 5 December) Again, the sense of belonging communicated by Susana is shown in imaginings without territorial anchoring, which refer to feelings that have as a starting point her personal choice and her conscious decision to move. The positioning of identity is related to a belonging that is sustained in global flows, in highly connected cities. Susana’s identity is associated with aesthetic and class distinctions as part of a selection of cultural elements (Cuervo & Wyn 2017; Savage, Bagnall & Longhurst 2005) which build a feminine identity that differs from family caregiving tasks, at least until the first years of the fourth decade. An elective belonging is constructed within the framework of individualised and self-centred decisions, which allow the affirmation of an extended youth lifestyle and consumption (Savage 2010). This section has highlighted the stories of two privileged women; we now shift our attention to women from underprivileged neighbourhoods. Women in underprivileged neighbourhoods: hard place belonging In countries with scarce state provision where there is an existing family care model (Aguirre et al. 2014), young women are in charge of the caregiving sector

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from an early age, which often means their trajectories bear little relation to the labour market and their own income. The other side of the naturalisation of caregiving tasks is the reification of the role of provision among men, evidencing the strong rootedness of the sexual division of labour (Fraser 2016). Unlike the previous cases which discussed women of privilege, the vital decisions of the interviewees from underprivileged neighbourhoods are carried out as part of family strategies, where mutual collaboration generates strong relationships of interdependence. Such is the case of Raquel, a young woman who lives in an informal urban neighbourhood, left high school early and did not join the labour market, dedicating herself to the care of her family. Her survival strategy combines welfare support with the sale of illegal goods and the help of neighbours and relatives. Her testimonies record her difficulties in keeping a stable job as she has to take care of her daughters alone since her partner spends most of his time in jail: ‘I had to take my daughters with me everywhere, that’s why I didn’t work’. (Raquel, 2017, personal communication, 16 January) Furthermore, Raquel considers her neighbourhood dangerous: ‘You entered there, and you didn’t know if you got out of that place; and, when you got out of that place, you didn’t know if you got out of there or if you returned home’. Although at some point she tried to move to a formal neighbourhood, during the move she lost many of her ties and resources that supported her in her daily life (such as help from relatives, neighbours, etc.), so she chose to return. In her own words: ‘The house was beautiful . . . but the way people treated you, the people there would see you and say “uh, who are you?”. . . . And I ended up leaving it . . . because I was alone’. In this regard, it can be assumed that the hard place belonging, and her bonds of affection, have greatly influenced Raquel’s trajectory and her decision to return to live in the slum in a condition of extensive deprivation. The territorial dimension of these trajectories has allowed us to observe the particularity of belonging to a place of those women living in underprivileged neighbourhoods as well as their paradoxes. For instance, Pamela quit high school in the first year because she had to take care of her siblings: ‘In that time, my mom and dad had to work more, so I was more required. . . . What I did was stay home and try to help with the kids’ (Pamela, 2017, personal communication, 25 January). During her twenties, she had some part-time work (as a waitress and babysitter) while still performing caregiving tasks at home: I was still here, doing the house chores: at lunchtime, lunch had to be ready, the kids have to go to school. I was always here, when it wasn’t the kids, it was the grown-ups. . . . Always home, home, home . . . never got out of it. (Pamela, 2017, personal communication, 25 January) Most of her jobs were in the neighbourhood, and she got them through neighbourhood contacts. This has been noted in other studies (MacDonald et al. 2005;

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Reynolds 2015) where it is apparent that local social networks provide support and belonging, while at the same time they become part of the reproduction of inequalities. In fact, although our interviewee was aware of the problems of the neighbourhood, such as crime and drugs, she argued she had no reason to abandon it: The neighbourhood. . . . I lived all my life here. . . . It’s nothing out of common. There’s everything, people who get up and go to work at 4 or 5 in the morning, those who arrive at 4 or 6:30, like me, and so on . . . and then there are those who are bad. But the good thing is that, all in all, those who are bad grew up here, so, they know and respect . . . and behave. (Pamela, 2017, personal communication, 25 January) When we focus on the form of belonging of women of disadvantaged backgrounds, the data also indicate strong ties with neighbourhood-based networks. These ties delineate a form of transition that is different from that of the women in the previous group. According to Gabriela: When I was a little girl, I used to go to my aunt’s to spend the weekend and I would die of boredom. Silence used to kill me. It is never silent here, we all know each other, go out the street, ‘good morning’. I’ve heard people who left the neighbourhood and ended up coming back because they couldn’t adapt. It’s like everything’s colder, there’s no getting close, no getting to know your neighbour. They feel very lonely, very isolated. (Gabriela, 2017, personal communication, 3 January) As we emphasised in the analysis of privileged women’s trajectories, the centrality of productive work together with elective belonging contributed to building feminine identities within normative parameters. However, we can see in Gabriela’s discourse how historical roots and family history are anchored, reaffirming a sense of belonging and a situated identity. In the cases of Pamela and Raquel, their identity is affirmed in the vital availability of caregiving tasks and the essentialist nature of motherhood, which, while giving shelter, strengthens the reproduction of the sexual division of labour within a framework of scarce social mobility. Affections, mutuality networks and rootedness are present in the decisions. As part of a local grammar affirmed in the division of tasks rooted in gender, available female identities are built on belonging to family, community and territorial groups. Theoretical models of transition that are centred on employment obstruct reflection on social reproduction processes where women participate actively.

Conclusions In Latin America, inequality manifests itself in the coexistence of areas of great economic development and geographies of extensive deprivation, shaping widely unequal urban spaces. The processes of residential segregation have expanded

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at different paces and intensities in different countries, polarising the trajectories of young people, particularly women. It has been widely demonstrated that inequality impacts more on women, especially in relation to their prospects for economic participation, resulting from their caring work in households. In this context, we have argued that the field of youth studies is indebted to women’s studies. To contribute to the debate about social justice in broad terms, this chapter has analysed the trajectories of young women in relation to education, productive work and reproductive work in the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Area, extracting from a longitudinal data set. It has incorporated an analysis of the scales of and sense of belonging to place to understand their role in the definition of women’s activities and their possible social conditioning. Additionally, it has set out to understand identity from a lived space approach, that is, the connections between different places and the ways in which spaces produce power relations (Worth 2015; Marchbank & Muller Myrdahl this volume; McEwan 2019). The starting point of the analysis was a set of questions about space, the construction of identities and the sense of belonging. The original contribution is based on relating the sense of belonging with work and family trajectories, territorial segregation and the construction of different grammars of youth among different groups of women. Contrastingly, our fieldwork findings have shown senses of belonging built on different spatial scales, with a strong influence on the women’s identity construction. Women from upper-middle-class sectors have greater economic and social resources during their transition to adulthood, which enables the construction of selective and symbolic identities, crossed by global flows. As part of this process, and as a social grammar that is permissible for professional women, productive work acquired great centrality, based on the postponement of motherhood until at least the middle of the fourth decade of the life course. On the other hand, among women living in underprivileged neighbourhoods where decent work is non-existent, the postponement of reproductive tasks is not part of the available choices. Indeed, educational and work continuity was interrupted at various times by maternity or the assumption of family care, which put these women in disadvantageous positions when it came to finish their studies and getting a job. In a context of great instability and vulnerability, the strong bond of belonging to the neighbourhood signalled locally situated trajectories, constituting an alternative to the hegemonic grammars of youth, with little social recognition and strong stigmatisation. The coexistence of highly differentiated youth identity patterns is perhaps one of the region’s main features. In this context, the analysis of spatial scales allowed us to reflect on the construction of feminine identities, where participation in family groups and caregiving tasks configure ‘territorialised’ youths and women’s participation in global spaces generates ‘modernised’ youths. Faced with these differences, we hold that the development of policies aimed at women rights and identities is a key element of the fight against inequality. The conceptual development of senses of belonging, the recognition of the place of affections and the ways that identity is structured among young women constitute all-important elements

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in the development of affirmative youth policies. The expansion of known worlds by means of guaranteed access to education, employment and respect-based caring groups among young women are key elements in achieving social justice.

Notes 1 In Latin America, young poor women are typically in charge of caring for children and dependent persons from a very early age (Batthyány 2008). 2 In 2013, women spent far more of their work time than men on caregiving work (88.9% for the former against 58.2%) (Rodríguez Enríquez & Marzonetto 2015). 3 Pseudonyms are used to preserve the identity of the interviewees.

References Aguirre, R., Batthyány, K., Genta, N. & Perrotta, V. 2014, ‘Los cuidados en la agenda de investigación y en las políticas públicas en Uruguay’, Iconos: Revista de Ciencias Sociales, no. 50, pp. 43–60. Batthyány, K. 2008, Género, cuidados familiares y usos del tiempo: informe final de investigación, UNIFEM, Montevideo. Bayón, M.C. 2015, La integración excluyente: experiencias, discursos y representaciones de la pobreza urbana en México, Bonilla Artigas, Mexico City. Bayón, M.C. & Saraví, G.A. 2017, ‘Place, class interaction, and urban segregation: Experiencing inequality in Mexico City’, Space and Culture, published online 25 October. doi:10.1177/1206331217734540 Bendit, R., Hahn, M. & Miranda, A. 2008, ‘Introducción: Creciendo en un contexto de cambio y globalización’, in R. Bendit, M. Hahn & A. Miranda (eds.), Transiciones juveniles: procesos de inclusión social y patrones de vulnerabilidad en un mundo globalizado, Prometeo, Buenos Aires, pp. 13–29. Bendit, R. & Miranda, A. 2017, ‘La gramática de la juventud: un nuevo concepto en construcción’, Última Década, vol. 25, no. 46, pp. 4–43. doi:10.4067/S0718-22362017000100004 Bendit, R. & Miranda, A. 2016, ‘Turning thirty: Youth transition process in Argentina in 21 century’, Journal of Applied Youth Studies, vol. 1, no. 3, pp. 96–108. Bourdieu, P. 2008, El sentido práctico, Siglo XXI de España Editores, Buenos Aires. Cerbino, M. 2012, El lugar de la violencia: perspectivas críticas sobre pandillerismo juvenile, Taurus, Quito. Connell, R. 2007, Southern theory: The global dynamics of knowledge in social science, Allen & Unwin, Sydney. Cuervo, H. & Wyn, J. 2017, ‘A longitudinal analysis of belonging: Temporal, performative and relational practices by young people in rural Australia’, Young, vol. 25, no. 3, pp. 1–16. doi:10.1177/1103308816669463 Cuervo, H. & Wyn, J. 2014, ‘Reflections on the use of spatial and relational metaphors in youth studies’, Journal of Youth Studies, vol. 17, no. 7, pp. 901–915. doi:10.1080/1367 6261.2013.878796 Farrugia, D. 2014, ‘Space and place in studies of childhood and youth’, in J. Wyn & H. Cahill (eds.), Handbook of children and youth studies, Springer, Singapore, pp. 609–624. Fraser, N. 2016, ‘Contradictions of capital and care’, New Left Review, no. 100, pp. 99–117. Hopkins, P. 2015, ‘Scales of young people’s lives’, in J. Wyn & H. Cahill (eds.), Handbook of children and youth studies, Springer, Singapore, pp. 761–774.

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MacDonald, R., Shildrick, T., Webster, C. & Simpson, D. 2005, ‘Growing up in poor neighbourhoods: The significance of class and place in the extended transitions of “socially excluded” young adults’, Sociology, vol. 39, no. 5, pp. 873–891. Marchbank, J. & Muller Myrdahl, T. 2019, ‘Queering Timmies: Theorising LGBTQ youth claiming and making space in Surrey, BC, Canada’, in S. Habib & M.R.M. Ward (eds.), Youth, place and theories of belonging, Routledge, Oxford, pp. 39–50. McEwan, K. 2019, ‘Precarious class positions in Spam City: Youth, place and class in the “missing middle”’, in S. Habib & M.R.M. Ward (eds.), Youth, place and theories of belonging, Routledge, Oxford, pp. 122–133. Miranda, A. & Arancibia, M. 2017, ‘El futuro está incompleto: la construcción de trayectorias laborales sobre principios de siglo 21’, Revista Trabajo y Sociedad, vol. 28, pp. 195–217. Prebisch, R. 1949, ‘El desarrollo económico de la América Latina y algunos de sus principales problemas’, El trimestre económico, vol. 16, no. 63, pp. 347–431. Reguillo Cruz, R. 2000, Emergencia de culturas juveniles: estrategias del desencanto, Volume 3, Norma, Bogotá. Reynolds, T. 2015, ‘“Black neighborhoods” and “race”: Placed identities in youth transition to adulthoods’, in J. Wyn & H. Cahill (eds.), Handbook of children and youth studies, Springer, Singapore, pp. 651–663. Rodríguez, M.C., Di Virgilio, M.M., Procupez, V., Vio, M., Ostuni, F., Mendoza, M. & Morales, B. 2007, Políticas del hábitat, desigualdad y segregación socioespacial en el área metropolitana de Buenos Aires, AEU-IIGG/FSOC-UBA, Buenos Aires. Rodríguez Enríquez, C. & Marzonetto, G. 2015, ‘Organización social del cuidado y desigualdad: el déficit de políticas públicas de cuidado en Argentina’, Perspectivas de Políticas Públicas, vol. 4, no. 8, pp. 105–134. Saraví, G.A. 2015, Juventudes fragmentadas: socialización, clase y cultura en la construcción de la desigualdad, FLACSO México/CIESAS, México. Sattar, M. 2019, ‘Politics of class and belonging in Pakistan: Student learning, communities of practice and social mobility’, in S. Habib & M.R.M. Ward (eds.), Youth, place and theories of belonging, Routledge, Oxford, pp. 160–170. Savage, M. 2010, ‘The politics of elective belonging’, Housing, Theory and Society, vol. 27, no. 2, pp. 115–135. Savage, M., Bagnall, G. & Longhurst, B. 2005, Globalization and belonging, Sage, London. Tiramonti, G. & Ziegler, S. 2008, La educación de las elites: aspiraciones, estrategias y oportunidades, Paidós, Buenos Aires. Valenzuela Arce, J.M. 2015, El sistema es antinosotros: culturas, movimientos y resistencias juveniles, Gedisa, Mexico. Warr, D. 2015, ‘The ambivalent implications of strong belonging for young people living in poor neighborhoods’, in J. Wyn & H. Cahill (eds.), Handbook of children and youth studies, Springer, Singapore, pp. 665–677. Worth, N. 2015, ‘Youth, relationality, and space: Conceptual resources for youth studies from critical human geography’, in J. Wyn & H. Cahill (eds.), Handbook of children and youth studies, Springer, Singapore, pp. 343–354. Wyn, J., Cuervo, H. & Cook, J. 2019, ‘Expanding theoretical boundaries from youth transitions to belonging and new materiality’, in S. Habib & M.R.M. Ward (eds.), Youth, place and theories of belonging, Routledge, Oxford, pp. 12–24.

Chapter 8

Brotherhood and belonging Creating pedagogic spaces for positive discourses of Aboriginal youth Nayia Cominos, David Caldwell and Katie Gloede

Introduction This chapter presents the findings from an Australian federally funded research project,1 Real Language in Real Time (RLRT), which aimed to identify a new means of supporting students from disadvantaged groups to increase their access to higher education. The partners in this project were the University of South Australia (UniSA) and the South Australian Aboriginal Sports Training Academy (SAASTA), a state Department of Education initiative which identifies and supports Australian Aboriginal elite athletes and provides an adapted upper high school programme as a pathway into higher education. The on-field language of a team of Aboriginal boy students was recorded, transcribed, analysed and used to inform the creation of online, multimodal classroom resources based on the documentation and analysis of these language practices. The project was highly innovative in two respects. The first was the documentation and analysis of the language of the on-field interactions of a group of Aboriginal students and their coaches. There is a notable lack of literature, data and linguistic analysis of Aboriginal voices in youth sport. The second was the creation of online, multimodal classroom resources for Aboriginal students based on the documentation and analysis of these language practices. Our overall objective was the valorisation of Aboriginal voices in youth sport – to recognise them as an emerging discourse and to present them as a constructive counternarrative in the classroom and beyond. In this chapter, we draw exclusively from the RLRT project – its findings, insights and the resources developed – with the ultimate aim of identifying realisations of belonging, examined through an emerging counter-theoretical framework to critical discourse analysis called positive discourse analysis (PDA) (Martin 2004). We begin with a review of three key areas we see as related to belonging and the themes of the RLRT project: Aboriginal education (as belonging), sport (as belonging), and positive discourse analysis (PDA) (as belonging). We then outline the methodology: the novel method of data collection and the method and framework for text analysis (PDA, drawing on systemic functional linguistics [SFL] and the specific language systems of genre and appraisal). The application of PDA, and its relationship to belonging, is then exemplified through the English Language and Literacy modules (Cominos, Caldwell & Gloede 2016).

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Before proceeding, it is important to briefly outline our working conceptualisations of belonging. We broadly follow Antonsich (2010), who neatly distinguishes between the individual, affectual realisation of belonging and its more macro discursive realisation: I argue that belonging should be analyzed both as a personal, intimate, feeling of being ‘at home’ in a place (place-belongingness) and as a discursive resource that constructs, claims, justifies, or resists forms of socio-spatial inclusion/exclusion (politics of belonging). The risk of focusing only on one of these two dimensions is to fall in the trap of either a socially de-contextualized individualism or an all-encompassing social(izing) discourse. (p. 644) In the context of this chapter, therefore, we conceive of and shift between belonging as both the personal ‘place-belongingness’, as exemplified by feeling belonging on the sports field or in the classroom, and a ‘politics of belonging’, such as the exclusion of/‘belonging’ of Aboriginal voices in Australian classrooms. Further, and related to this, we recognise the need for a dual conception of belonging as it plays out in this project – specifically, belonging as it is realised in the students’ texts (e.g. nicknaming in their on-field language practices or images of Aboriginal Australians construing solidarity) and belonging in the classroom (e.g. a legitimated voice given value, agency and prominence in an otherwise exclusive/nonAboriginal space). We describe this as belonging in text and belonging through text, that is, belonging being played out through the identification and description of a new positive counter-discourse (in text) and the use of that discourse to inform pedagogy (through text), which offers opportunities for hope, liberation and agency in the classroom context. It is also important to clarify our use of the term solidarity, which we draw on throughout this chapter. Broadly speaking, we see the expression of solidarity (in our case, as it is explicitly realised through language) as the ‘formation of community’ (Martin 2004, p. 189). In these terms, solidarity is integral to belonging; it fosters identification with and recognition of oneself as a member of class or group, while at the same time it reinforces the exclusion or distance of oneself from another class or group (Sattar 2019; Loewenthal & Broughton 2019). Solidarity can be a stimulus to include others and/or extend the boundaries of belonging, such as the welcoming and acceptance of refugees. However, it can also be a means to marginalise and exclude an ‘other’. In the context of this study, and as demonstrated by the literature, we do not gloss over this but note that the dual function of solidarity is in evidence in sports discourse.

Current issues in Aboriginal education Scholars have documented how much of the discourse related to Australian Aboriginal culture has been, and continues to be, embedded with notions of

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deficit – it generally focuses on what is going wrong in Aboriginal communities and cultures, when measured against normative, Eurocentric epistemologies, ontologies, axiologies and cosmologies. A typical example is the Australian government’s ‘Closing the Gap’ initiative (Gardiner-Garden 2012), in which ‘success’ is explicitly and only measured against criteria for non-Aboriginal Australians. In the context of education, this deficit discourse is especially marked, whereby improvements in Aboriginal students’ educational outcomes (again, in comparison with the outcomes of non-Aboriginal students) are generally considered derisory in governmental and public discourse. In the case of the ‘Closing the Gap’ initiative, for example, a key target is: ‘to halve the gap in reading, writing and numeracy achievements for children within a decade’. Despite significant investment, interventions and actions from the Australian government (see e.g. Ministerial Council for Education, Early Childhood Development and Youth Affairs (MCEECDYA) (2010)), progress in this domain has been negligible, and in some cases the statistics (at least when compared with non-Aboriginal Australians) have worsened. This is due in part to the conceptualisation of the desired outcomes and the normative methods by which Aboriginal student performance is measured. For example, many of the measurements and outcomes are created using a monolingual (English), mandatory national literacy and numeracy test (NAPLAN) (see ACARA 2016) for all Australian students in Years 3, 5, 7 and 9. The test has been criticised for significant flaws in its conception, preparation and implementation (e.g. Caldwell & White 2017; Thompson & Cook 2012), as well as its lack of representation of Australia’s cultural and linguistic diversity, most notably in relation to Aboriginal Australians (e.g. Angelo 2013). Aboriginal education as belonging In contrast, the discourses relating to Australian Aboriginal culture in contemporary scholarship are generally more progressive, attempting to foreground Indigenous knowledge, systems and practices in education (see e.g. Nakata 2007). One of these progressive educational interventions is Osborne and Guenther’s (2013) ‘Red Dirt Curriculum’, which foregrounds belonging in Aboriginal community as a complement to mainstream schooling, locating itself within, against and beyond the kinds of normative schooling discourses that have traditionally positioned Aboriginal students as deficit: Red dirt thinking on remote education asks: How can we improve the formal schooling ‘outputs’ that students like Yami failed to attain, but retain and amplify the strength, identity, confidence and character (funds of knowledge) that Yami acquired to achieve ‘success’? . . . If education is to move beyond its obsession with the externally derived data and data-based deficit discourse that seems to be choking the space for imagination, creativity, long-term adaptive approaches and risk-taking that is required to respond to the complex nature of the field, then it stands to reason that educators and

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education systems will need to better understand the power of this tool called ‘education’ when applied outside the limited constructs of a homogenised, westernised and urban-centric construct of what a ‘real’ education is. (Osborne & Guenther 2013, p. 95) In the context of Aboriginal literacy and numeracy, Rennie (2006) and Malcolm and Sharifian (2002) also offer a progressive, alternative discourse to the dominant deficit model, identifying a number of practices in communities which can be drawn upon to create continuity and belonging between community learning and mainstream schooling. These include: the use of narrative, recount and procedural genres which are comparable with key Aboriginal schema (e.g. travel schema, hunting schema, family schema) in that they have identifiable templates for framing and structuring activities; knowledge of how to read the environment; traditional print and digital text forms; skills to locate oneself and others in time and space; and numeracy practised in sharing and dividing up hunting spoils. Ultimately, these scholars recognise the need to identify, describe and integrate Aboriginal genres to draw on Aboriginal students’ existing cultural capital and to use this as a means to reshape mainstream educational spaces so that they are inclusive, fostering both ‘place-belongingness’ in the classroom and belonging in the broader socio-politics of education. Sport as belonging There is a growing body of research which recognises sport as a site for and enabler of belonging. Research by Bilinzozi (2017), for example, examines the positive impact of sport on youth in Tanzania though a lens of belonging. The extract below not only foregrounds sport in the belonging process but gives a sense of an emerging field of inquiry in which the tendency to assume belonging in youth sport is analysed: Youth sport is inherently social and places adaptive demands for belonging and identity work on young people that often resemble those found in real life (Holt 2016; Perkins & Noam 2007). When young people learn sporting and social skills, they also learn the skills that foster long-term friendships, justice principles, confidence and respect (Perkins & Noam 2007), which are key elements of belonging. In this respect, youth sport can be seen as a space where participants can develop a strong sense of belonging through their engagement in meaningful group activities in a supportive youth-focused environment (Holt & Jones 2016). (Bilinzozi 2017, p. 7) In the context of Aboriginal Australians, and specifically Australian Aboriginal youth education, the same positive attributes regarding sport as a site of belonging have been identified. As Caldwell, Cominos and Gloede (2017) noted, there is

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substantial research evidence that supports the proposition that sport is a positive element in the lives of young Aboriginals (e.g. Doyle et al. 2013; Rossi 2015): it is ‘a passion for most Aboriginal youth’ (Mohajer, Bessarab & Earnest 2009, p. 10). Drawing on a rich ethnographic study of what is considered to be an exemplary Aboriginal sporting organisation in Australia, the Rumbalara Football and Netball Club, Doyle et al. (2013) highlight the ways in which a sporting club can provide a space for Aboriginal belonging whereby players, supporters and associates of the club can ‘belong’ in/through Aboriginal culture, as well as in/through nonAboriginal or ‘mainstream’ culture: The Club seeks to ‘raise the bar’ – it takes people out of their homes in ‘suburban’ areas into a place where Indigenous culture and language are visible. It places greater expectations on Indigenous people to contribute to and interact within community as well as being a place where they can interact with mainstream community – but on Indigenous terms and conditions. Thus, RFNC promotes equality and takes all involved on a journey of tolerance and acceptance towards leadership and Indigenous and non-Indigenous healing through the sports arena. (pp. 18–19) Of course, not all research literature is glowing in its appraisal of the role of sport in Indigenous communities. Some studies, for example, caution against the mythologising of Aboriginal as ‘athlete’ (e.g. Rossi 2015), while others, such as Tatz (1994), question the validity of claims that there is a clear correlation between sport and positive social and welfare outcomes. The role of sport as a positive influence on the lives of Aboriginal youth is itself a nuanced and contested space. While sport is clearly a potential site of belonging in/for Aboriginal Australians, we are more specifically interested in the role of language in sport as a realisation of belonging. A canon of sports discourse is emerging, with examples of scholarship which have closely examined the kinds of genres and communicative practices of sports discourse. Caldwell et al. (2016), for example, examine some of the vast and varied language practices that constitute the world of sport, including contexts such as the language of real-time coaching, the language of post-match interviews, sports commentary and online sports news media. Giorgianni and Lavric (2013) have also developed an online football and language bibliography, which lists more than 2,000 titles broadly related to sports and language. We note, however, that there are minimal examples of analysis of Aboriginal language practices in sport (see Caldwell, Cominos & Gloede 2017 as the exception), and no major studies of Aboriginal sports discourse. We therefore situate this chapter within this emerging canon and propose that such linguistic analyses are critical to its argument: not only do they present analyses of previously uncharted contexts, but they help to validate the kinds of sports discourse we aim to bring into the classroom. In the next section, we describe our theoretical approach for the study.

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Positive discourse analysis as a way to explore belonging Positive discourse analysis (PDA) was first described by Martin (2004) as an alternative to dritical discourse analysis (CDA) (e.g. Fairclough 1995). While acknowledging the contribution of CDA to ‘exposing power as it naturalises itself in discourse and thus . . . part of the struggle against it’ (Martin 2004, p. 6), Martin concurs with Kress (1996), who cautions that: Critical language projects have remained just that: critiques of texts and of the social practices implied by or realised in those texts, uncovering, revealing, inequitable, dehumanising and deleterious states of affairs . . . if critical language projects were to develop apt, plausible theories of this domain, they would be able to move from critical reading, from analysis, from deconstructive activity, to productive activity . . . CL or CDA have not offered (productive) accounts of alternative forms of social organisation, nor of social subjects, other than by implication. (cited in Martin pp. 15–16, Martin 2004, in original emphasis) Martin (2004) suggests PDA as a complementary focus to CDA to foreground community and belonging: ‘taking into account how people get together and make room for themselves in the world – in ways that redistribute power without necessarily struggling against it’ (p. 6). According to Martin (2004), this paradigm shift provides pathways for designing the future with ‘heartening accounts of progress [rather than] discouraging analyses of oppression’ (p. 7). Martin chose to illustrate PDA by applying it to the report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families (Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission 1997). The report documented the government policy of separation of tens of thousands of Aboriginal babies and children from their mothers over a seventy-year period. Despite the horrifying nature of the events recounted in the report and its heavily nominalised and bureaucratic discourse, Martin used PDA to identify several innovative and unexpected textual elements in the report, such as verbatim accounts, informal spoken testimonies, provocative images and formal written reports. Together, these elements were found to not only construe positive values from and towards Aboriginal Australians but were defined as new and distinct genres. The report had a profound effect on the understanding of non-Aboriginal Australians, resulting in a formal apology in 2008 from the Australian Prime Minister and opening up a space for debate regarding the recognition of Aboriginal Australians in the Australian Constitution – arguably, the ultimate legal externalisation of belonging. Further work in PDA has been undertaken in a range of domains, including exploring the discourse and values of restorative justice (Martin & Zappavigna 2016), global media reporting of the Russian–Chechen conflict (Macgilchrist 2007), the Truth and reconciliation commission of South Africa report (Martin &

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Rose 2008), agency in literacy teacher education (Rogers & Wetzel 2013), and racial literacy (Mosley & Rogers 2015). Rogers and Wetzel (2013), for example, summarise positive discourse analysis as ‘a shift in analysis to moments of agency, hope and liberation . . . [which does not] ignore the constraints of structure, but more fully recogniz[es] moments of agency’ (pp. 88–89). They concur with Bartlett (2012) that, rather than being reactive, PDA can focus on ‘analysing how the [resultant] counter-discourses celebrated can gain a foothold within those institutional contexts in which they will be expected to operate’ (p. 6). In this way, PDA follows Antonsich (2010), engaging with the macro discursive realisation of ‘below’ (institutional contexts), while at the same time describing and analysing the micro affectual realisations of ‘belonging’ as realised through individuals’ language practices. This brief review of the literature identifies the dominant discourses at play in the context of Aboriginal Australia, Aboriginal education and the role of sport in Aboriginal life. The literature highlights the continuing need for, and possibilities of, a culturally sensitive pedagogy in which the capital of Aboriginal Australians is identified, acknowledged and integrated into schooling, with the ultimate aim to shift the discourse towards one of belonging, as distinct from one of difference, deficit and otherness. With this in mind, we argue that PDA offers a complementary approach to analysing and valorising counter-discourse in relation to Aboriginal youth and belonging on two levels: identifying and describing a new positive counterdiscourse to the prevalent negative and deficit discourse surrounding Aboriginal youth (belonging in text) and using this discourse to inform pedagogy which, by legitimising its use in traditional and non-traditional classroom contexts, offers opportunities for hope, liberation and agency (belonging through text/pedagogy). In these terms, we see sport and in particular the real-time, authentic language practices of intrinsically motivated Aboriginal youth as the ideal space to ‘move forward’ in PDA terms.

Methodology In this section, we explain the background of the project, the collection of the on-field language of the students and the methodology for applying PDA, as a theoretical approach, to the data. PDA, we argue, allowed us to see where belonging was most salient for the boys in the study. Project background The study which we are presenting in this chapter was a pilot project in which we worked with a group of 16- to 18-year-old Aboriginal boys and their coaches and coaching assistants from the SAASTA representative Australian rules football team. The students were primarily from urban or near-urban settings, with one student from the Anangu Pitjantjara Yankunytjatjara Lands (an outback Indigenous

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community located in South Australia). They had been playing together for over twelve months. The research team comprised two applied linguists who had worked in Aboriginal language revival and Aboriginal academic literacies and the Coordinator of Sport Science programmes at UniSA College, who specialised in a range of multimedia education platforms. Collecting the on-field sports language data The method of data collection for this project was novel. It involved the students wearing a specially constructed sports training vest that housed an unobtrusive, ultrasensitive, audiodigital recording device with a unidirectional microphone that exclusively ‘picked up’ the voice of the individual player wearing the device. There were nine recording devices in total. Data were collected over six training sessions and two football competition games, one against another Indigenous team from a similar interstate academy and one against a local private school team. The resulting corpus was comprised of twenty-two player recordings, of a total duration of more than fifty hours of on-field language. The data were transcribed verbatim and de-identified. From there, a set of three English Language and Literacy modules were produced (Cominos, Caldwell & Gloede 2016). PDA frameworks for analysing the data and developing the educational resources PDA, briefly reviewed above, draws on systemic functional linguistics (SFL) as its guiding analytical framework. In this overview, we will briefly focus on two specific linguistic frameworks from SFL: genre and appraisal. Genre theory, as defined in SFL, provides a framework for exploring language in context and more specially the role of specific text types that function to construe specific social purposes, for example, to inform, to persuade, to entertain and so on. The approach to genre developed in SFL is defined as ‘a recurrent configuration of meanings and . . . these recurrent configurations of meaning enact the social practices of a given culture’ (Martin & Rose 2008, p. 6). Genre offers the possibility of moving beyond formal organisational features of texts, such as describing form and staging, to identifying the rhetorical strategies of a particular text type, as realised (and analysed) through the grammatical choices of a given speaker/writer. It foregrounds a social semiotic approach to text analysis, as distinct from, for example, a cognitive or ethnographic approach. In these terms, genre, in the service of PDA, is not prescriptive in its orientation; it sees language as evolving and the identification and examination of new genres (such as the on-field language practices of Aboriginal youth) as a critical space for social linguistics. As a complement to genre, appraisal offers the possibility of identifying and tracking discourses at the sentence level of spoken and written texts (Martin &

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White 2005). Appraisal is specifically concerned with the interpersonal function of language, that is, how language functions to construe social relationships: The subjective presence of writer/speakers in texts, as they adopt stances towards both the material they present and those with whom they communicate. It is concerned with how writers/speakers approve and disapprove . . . with how they position their readers/listeners to do likewise . . . [and] how they construe for themselves particular authorial identities or personae, how they align or disalign themselves with actual or potential respondents, and with how they construct for their texts an intended or ideal audience. (Martin & White 2005, p. 1) The framework identifies three key areas of analysis: attitude, which is concerned with feelings, judgements of behaviour and the evaluation of things; graduation, which attends to grading phenomena whereby feelings are amplified and categories blurred; and engagement, which deals with sourcing attitudes and the play of voices around opinions in discourse. The identification of these language patterns, and the manner in which they unfold in spoken and written texts, offers a means to describe and deconstruct discourses which are typically invisible or impenetrable to certain social groups (in this case, marginalised Aboriginal youth), thus excluding them from those discursive spaces. In less technical terms, these are the language systems which function to signify solidarity (or distance) between interactants and, in turn, can help to identify instances of belonging (or otherwise).

Applying PDA to Aboriginal discourse In this section, we demonstrate how the application of PDA to the on-field spoken discourse of Aboriginal football players can create pathways for Aboriginal youth to access previously closed discursive spaces, challenge the prevailing negative discourse and create new discourses of solidarity and belonging. Our research identified an emerging genre in which Aboriginal youth (and their Aboriginal coaches) are the creators, moderators and users of their own discourse. This agency is in sharp contrast with the deficit construal of Aboriginal youth as passive subjects. The process of documentation, informed by PDA, also provided a means to recognise and valorise Aboriginal social interactions, privileging Aboriginal voices and within that the even less-represented voices of Aboriginal youth. It also opened the possibility of teaching and learning about the ‘on-field’ genre as one of a range of literacies in a mainstream educational context. This is highly significant in terms of belonging (both place and political). The Aboriginal students were able to participate in a classroom in which their voices and genre formed the basis for the teaching and learning resources and informed the manner in which the activities were enacted to favour shared understandings, group work and the integration of students’ everyday experiences. To illustrate this, we draw on the online resource Solidarity and Language

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(Cominos, Caldwell & Gloede 2016), which was developed as part of the project and informed by PDA principles. The resource is constructed as a series of three interrelated stages with the purposes of valorising the students’ everyday experiences, valorising their spoken language on and off the sports field, identifying the ways in which they create belonging and initiating them into academic literacies required by the curriculum: 1 2 3

Considering the meaning and practice of solidarity Becoming aware of how solidarity, exclusion and belonging are expressed through language through analysing examples of solidarity in match and training recordings Analysing a series of multimedia texts to see how see solidarity and persuasion are expressed through language with the aim of constructing a persuasive text drawing on the language resources and discourses the students have learnt.

We present a brief summary of each stage, demonstrating how the resource functions to identify and transform spaces of belonging for Aboriginal youth. Stage 1: considering the meaning and practice of solidarity This stage invites the students to define solidarity through the double prisms of their personal understanding of the term and academic understandings of the term as defined in formal dictionaries. The students are presented with an image of their team in a circle touching hands and shouting the team slogan prior to going onto the field for a match (see Figure 8.1). They discuss what solidarity means to them and what it looks like and then try to describe or define solidarity in their own words. This activity is largely student-centred. The discussion may take place in small groups or pairs and, as ideas emerge, one or more students take the role of scribe to summarise the results of the discussion. The teacher’s role is deliberately backgrounded. The next exercise is designed to develop literacy skills, specifically, how to research a word in a dictionary and understand the codes and conventions of the genre. The students begin by looking up the word ‘goal’. The teacher then explains what the different symbols and surrounding text mean and their purpose, illustrated in Figure 8.2. After looking for other words based on the root word goal, such as goalkeeper, goal kick, goal line, which is designed to stimulate vocabulary extension, the students look for the word solidarity in the dictionary, and there is an ensuing discussion as a class comparing the dictionary definition with their own understandings of the word from the previous exercises. These and similar exercises foster belonging in several ways. The starting point for the literacy exercise is the students’ everyday experience and language. It is deliberately shaped around them so that there is no struggle to belong; they bring

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Figure 8.1 Solidarity and language

Figure 8.2 Activity 2: Group work

their belonging to the classroom. There is a circular process in which the students’ everyday discourse is valorised in the academic context. It is then deconstructed and extended so that they have the tools to understand and access specific academic genres (such as how to use a dictionary), validating the students’ own meaning making (relating the dictionary definition back to the students’ definition).

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Step 2: the expression of solidarity through language The next step in the process is to expand and enrich the students’ understanding of the concept of solidarity and how it is related to language (specifically the appraisal framework) while maintaining reference to their lived experience (belonging in text). The primary source is the transcribed on-field excerpt (see Table 8.1) from one of their pre-AFL match motivational talks. The students then work through a series of language analysis tasks in pairs or small groups, guided by the teacher, coming together after each analysis to look at an answer/ model slide. In the appraisal analysis shown in Table 8.1, underlining represents Table 8.1 On-field excerpt COACH (before match)

. . . as I said we are probably pretty good at it, I‘ll back yous every day to win your one-on-ones, all right? Last time we played them . . . beautiful, alright. The way we played, the way we structured the way we moved the ball, it was a team performance, alright. We want no individuals today, the team will win the game.

CAPTAIN (in team huddle)

. . . everyone’s got a role to play, alright boys. Don’t be selfish. Don’t take it lightly just cause we beat them last time. They are coming back hungry. They beat us here last year and they want to beat us again. Boys no individuals, straight from the start.

ALL

ONE TWO THREE BROTHERHOOD [boys all cheer and yell together in the huddle]

Table 8.2 Activity 6: Group discussion Language feature

Example

How it creates solidarity

Separation, unification

Using ‘we’/‘us’ and ‘they’/‘them’

Grouping players

No individuals today, the team will win the game. Everyone’s got a role to play Mattie that was a good block. Good work. You’re doing good back there. Come on boys it’s not over. Be yourself; that was a perfect time to shoot. Good work, bro. BROTHERHOOD!

‘We’ groups together the people on our team. ‘They’ separates our team from the others. Makes everyone feel that they are important in team, that the team needs everyone in order to win. Recognises individual effort for the team. Keeps players motivated when the game is not going well.

Encouraging individual players Encouraging whole team Not getting angry about mistakes Using family relationship words

Focussing on positive things. Team is not just a group of random people, they are part of a family, with the positive ideals of a family.

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pronouns that talk about ‘us’ and ‘them’, separating teams, and grouping the players within the teams; bold represents explicit examples of positive and negative language; a box represents collective words and phrases; and italics represents the coaches’ offers of support. The exercise culminates in a table summarising the rhetorical devices that the students and their coach had used in their on-field interactions to construct solidarity as a team and with the coach. This stage consolidates the students’ understanding of how language can be used to construct solidarity, inclusion and exclusion, providing them with a metalanguage to describe how this is done. Step 3: constructing a persuasive text The students then analyse three other multimodal texts which feature Aboriginal voices and the creation of discourses of solidarity and inclusivity. The three texts are on the theme of quitting smoking for Aboriginal people: an online advertisement in which a young Aboriginal woman is interviewed; a poster which shows traditional use of smoke compared with tobacco smoking; and an online article from the Aboriginal website Creative Spirits (2016) which discusses the social and economic issues involved in Aboriginal tobacco consumption. This topic is also relevant to the students’ learning about health and as Aboriginal athletes. These texts are then used to inform the teaching and learning of other educational genres, such as persuasive writing. Following deconstruction of these texts in terms of genre and the ways in which persuasion is expressed, the students’ final exercise is to choose a topic of interest to them, and each writes a persuasive essay, using the rhetorical techniques they have been learning and practising.

Figure 8.3 Activity 10: Group work

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Persuasive writing exercise ( Cominos, Caldwell & Gloede 2016 ) Choose a topic that you are interested in which involves a problem and a solution. Some ideas could be: • •

How to improve Aboriginal health outcomes through sport How using renewable energy can help remote Aboriginal communities

Write your position and three reasons to support it on a piece of paper. Now begin writing your essay. Structure your essay so that it has an orientation which gives background, explains your position and your main arguments. Then write three paragraphs, one about each of the arguments. Finish with a conclusion which summarises the position and arguments.

This final stage is integral to the process of both consolidating the students’ academic literacy through the individual construction of a persuasive text and providing them with an opportunity to use this literacy to create a positive counternarrative of belonging based on their priorities and hopes. The pedagogy helps to ensure that students are immersed in legitimised Aboriginal culture, language, images and discourses and construed as valued ‘insiders’ with knowledge and experience and legitimate participants in educational and other broader discourses.

Conclusion The above example demonstrates that PDA offers the possibility of deconstructing a text to understand its full meaning, and in turn the means to reconstruct other texts (belonging through text/pedagogy), through the identification and utilisation of genre and detailed textual analysis using appraisal (belonging in text). We argue this pedagogy is both enabling and empowering for the Aboriginal students as it demystifies the process of text creation and opens up the possibility of participation in discourses from which they were previously excluded, simultaneously construing place belongingness in the classroom and countering traditional conceptions of classroom politics of belonging. The pedagogy we studied provides the means to challenge existing discourses and offers counternarratives which celebrate and integrate the values and discourses of Aboriginal youth. PDA offers a powerful means to resituate ‘outsiders’ as ‘insiders’ through the legitimisation of emerging genres, and the explicit teaching of how to bring those genres into other discursive spaces, to challenge discourses of exclusion and to provide counternarratives which celebrate and forge agency, belonging and hope. Returning more broadly to our multiple conceptualisations of belonging – as individual personal feeling and macro political discourse (Antonsich 2010) – realised

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in text and through text/pedagogy – we argue that this chapter has presented an alternative theoretical and methodological approach which offers possibilities of pluralism and nuances of belonging. We also postulate that emerging genres which are themselves fluid and in the process of legitimisation, such as sports discourse, may offer possibilities for carving out new discourses of belonging, as we have seen for here for Aboriginal youth. Ultimately, we see this work as a contribution to ‘Red Dirt thinking’, whereby an innovative, creative and positive possibility is, quite literally, ‘grounded in the reality of the local community context’ (Osborne & Guenther 2013, p. 88) – the red dirt of the ‘footy field’.

Acknowledgements The authors gratefully acknowledge the Australian government’s Higher Education Participation Programme for funding this project; UniSA for their support in receiving the funding, including Stephen Dowdy, Deb Turley and Lalita McHenry; SAASTA, specifically Andrew Smith and Melissa-Kate McPharlin; and the SAASTA coaching staff (Eugenie Warrior), the training staff, and especially the SAASTA students who participated in the project.

Note 1 The project was funded by the Higher Education Participation Programme.

References Angelo, D. 2013, ‘NAPLAN implementation: Implications for classroom learning and teaching, with recommendations for improvement’, TESOL in Context, vol. 23, no. 1/2, pp. 53–73. Antonsich, M. 2010, ‘Searching for belonging: An analytical framework’, Geography Compass, vol. 4, no. 6, pp. 644–659. Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) 2016, NAPLAN, ACARA, . Bartlett, T. 2012, Hybrid voices and collaborative change: Contextualizing positive discourse analysis, Routledge, New York. Bilinzozi, J.C. 2017, ‘Youth sport and belonging in Tanzania’, in H. Cuervo, J. Wyn, J. Fu, B. Dadvand & J.C. Bilinzozi (eds.), Global youth and spaces of belonging in China, Australia and Tanzania, Youth Research Centre, Melbourne, pp. 7–9. Caldwell, D., Cominos, N. & Gloede, K. 2017, ‘My words, my literacy: Tracking of and teaching through the on-field language of Australian Indigenous boys’, Boyhood Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, vol. 10, no. 2, pp. 11–36. Caldwell, D., Walsh, J., Vine, E.W. & Jureidini, J. 2016, ‘Discourse, linguistics, sport and the academy’, in D. Caldwell, J. Walsh, E.W. Vine & J. Jureidini (eds.), The discourse of sport: Analyses from social linguistics, Routledge, New York, pp. 1–13. Caldwell, D. & White, P.R.R. 2017, ‘“That’s not a narrative; this is a narrative”: NAPLAN and pedagogies of storytelling’, Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, vol. 40, no. 1, pp. 16–28.

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Cominos, N., Caldwell, D. & Gloede, K. 2016, Solidary and language: Real language real time language and literacy modules, University of South Australia, Adelaide. Creative Spirits 2016, Aboriginal smoking: A serious problem, Creative Spirits, . Doyle, J., Firebrace, B., Reilly, R., Crumpen, T. & Rowley, K. 2013, ‘What makes us different? The role of Rumbalara Football and Netball Club in promoting Indigenous wellbeing’, Australian Community Psychologist, vol. 25, no. 2, pp. 7–21. Fairclough, N 1995, Critical discourse analysis: The critical study of language, Longman, London. Gardiner-Garden, J. 2012, Closing the gap, Parliament of Australia, . Giorgianni, E. & Lavric, E. 2013, The football and language bibliography online, University of Innsbruck, . Holt, N.L. 2016, Positive youth development through sport, Routledge, New York. Holt, N.L. & Jones, M.I. 2016, ‘Future directions for positive youth development and sport research’, in N.L. Holt (ed.), Positive youth development through sport, Routledge, New York, pp. 122–132. Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission 1997, Bringing them home: Report of the national inquiry into the separation of aboriginal and Torres Strait islander Children from their families, HREOC, Sydney. Kress, G. 1996, ‘Representational resources and the production of subjectivity: Questions for the theoretical development of critical discourse analysis in a multicultural society’, in C. Caldas-Coulthard & M. Coulthard (eds.), Text and practices: Readings in critical discourse analysis, Routledge, London, pp. 15–31. Loewenthal, J. & Broughton, J. 2019, ‘Travel imaginaries of youth in New York City: History, ethnicity and the politics of mobility’, in S. Habib & M.R.M. Ward (eds.), Youth, place and theories of belonging, Routledge, Oxford, pp. 66–79. Macgilchrist, F. 2007, ‘Positive discourse analysis: Contesting dominant discourses by reframing the issues’, Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis across Disciplines, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 74–94. Malcolm, I.G. & Sharifian, F. 2002, ‘Aspects of Aboriginal English oral discourse: An application of cultural schema theory’, Discourse Studies, vol. 4, no. 2, pp. 169–181. Martin, J.R. 2004, ‘Positive discourse analysis: Solidarity and change’, Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses, vol. 49, pp. 179–200. Martin, J.R. & Rose, D. 2008, Genre relations: Mapping culture, Equinox, London. Martin, J.R. & White, P.R.R. 2005, The language of evaluation: Appraisal in English, Palgrave, London. Martin, J.R. & Zappavigna, M. 2016, ‘Exploring restorative justice: Dialectics of theory and practice’, International Journal of Speech, Language and the Law, vol. 23, no. 2, pp. 215–242. Ministerial Council for Education, Early Childhood Development and Youth Affairs (MCEECDYA). 2010, The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Education Action Plan, 2010–2014, MCEECDYA, Carlton, VIC. Mohajer, N., Bessarab, D. & Earnest, J. 2009, ‘There should be more help out here! A qualitative study of the needs of Aboriginal adolescents in rural Australia’, Rural and Remote Health, vol. 9, no. 2, pp. 1–11. Mosley, W.M. & Rogers, R. 2015, ‘Constructing racial literacy through critical language awareness: A case study of a beginning literacy teacher’, Linguistics and Education, vol. 32, part A, pp. 27–40.

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Nakata, M. 2007, ‘The cultural interface’, Australian Journal of Indigenous Education, vol. 36 (Supplement), pp. 7–14. Osborne, S. & Guenther, J. 2013, ‘Red dirt thinking on aspiration and success’, The Australian Journal of Indigenous Education, vol. 42, no. 2, pp. 88–99. Perkins, D.F. & Noam, G.G. 2007, ‘Characteristics of sports-based youth development programs’, New Directions for Youth Development, 2007, vol. 115, pp. 75–84. Rennie, J. 2006, ‘Meeting kids at the school gate: The literacy and numeracy practices of a remote indigenous community’, Australian Educational Researcher, vol. 33, no. 3, pp. 123–140. Rogers, R. & Wetzel, M.M. 2013, ‘Studying agency in literacy teacher education: A layered approach to positive discourse analysis’, Critical Inquiry in Language Studies, vol. 10, no. 1, pp. 62–92. Rossi, T. 2015, ‘Expecting too much? Can Indigenous sport programmes in Australia deliver development and social outcomes?’, International Journal of Sport Policy and Politics, vol. 7, no. 2, pp. 181–195. Sattar, M. 2019, ‘Politics of class and belonging in Pakistan: Student learning, communities of practice and social mobility’, in S. Habib & M.R.M. Ward (eds.), Youth, place and theories of belonging, Routledge, Oxford, pp. 160–170. Tatz, C. 1994, Aborigines: Sport, violence and survival: A report to the criminology research council, Centre for Comparative Genocide Studies, Macquarie University, Macquarie, NSW. Thompson, G. & Cook, I. 2012, ‘Manipulating the data: Teaching and NAPLAN in the control society’, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, vol. 35, no. 1, pp. 129–142.

Chapter 9

Belonging without believing? Making space for marginal masculinities at the Young Men’s Christian Association in the United Kingdom and The Gambia Ross Wignall

Introduction This ethnographic research explores the interconnected geographies of space, place and attachment in the lives of the young men I worked with at the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) in the United Kingdom and The Gambia. An ecumenical, youth-oriented faith-based organisation (FBO) operating in 128 countries, the YMCA claims to be the largest and oldest youth organisation in the world (YMCA 2018) and plays a vital role in the circulation of ideas about and definitions of youth1 in the global sphere. However, each YMCA centre stands alone, operating autonomously in each different context and working trans-locally through informal, bilateral partnerships which draw on established development networks whilst bypassing the unwieldy global mechanism of transnational North–South development. In this chapter, I analyse these informal connections through the sense of belonging fostered at YMCA centres which is embedded in local contexts but also connected into global moral economies centred on youth transformation (Spurr 2014). Characterising their work as ‘belonging without believing’,2 I suggest that YMCA spaces instil forms of institutional masculinity which allow their centres to retain a homogenous character in quite different local environments. By tracing this sense of belonging through two connected local centres, in this chapter I show how the YMCA invokes its transformative power in different contexts and, in doing so, simultaneously makes space for and re-inscribes the moral-spatial coordinates of marginal youth identities. In the next section, I discuss the role the YMCA plays in circulating different forms of youth identity before situating my study in the research contexts of the United Kingdom and The Gambia.

‘Christian DNA’: a brief history of the YMCA From its inception in 1844, belief and belonging have been vital components of the YMCA’s model of engagement. Founded by a group of tradesmen’s apprentices in

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London, the movement was designed to tame the moral impropriety of young men entering the rapidly expanding city, turning them into ‘spiritual entrepreneurs’ equally adept at demonstrating Christian values as commercial ones (Muukkonen 2002, p. 104). Male-to-male relations were central to the success of this model, as were spaces where intimate discussions, prayer and worship could take place (Gustav-Wrathall 1998). As the organisation expanded, this ‘associational’ model became enshrined in its core tenet of developing ‘whole men’ who were transformed in ‘mind, body and spirit’ and able to spread the now secular message of the organisation (Spurr 2014). Today, the YMCA embeds these values more implicitly in its programmes, becoming implicitly non-gendered and blended with a range of organisational and societal goals to transform the lives of young people, creating what we might call a ‘whole person’ (YMCA 2018). To understand the contemporary YMCA, this chapter focuses on a specific programme (Sports Leadership) for young people out of school in the United Kingdom and out of employment in The Gambia, West Africa. Located on the south coast of the United Kingdom, the city of Brighton and Hove (pop. circa 300,000) is known for its tourist attractions and nightlife and boasts a vibrant local economy. Founded in 1919, Sussex Central YMCA struggled through much of the twentieth century as a local community centre before developing in the last twenty years to become a leading organisation in homelessness and youth development. In comparison, The Gambia is currently undergoing a period of change and revolution, with a new government replacing the anti-Western autocrat Yahya Jammeh and a renewed feeling of hope and optimism. A small country of 1.4 million people, The Gambia is a poor country with pockets of wealth generated by a vibrant tourist industry. Fieldwork was conducted at the Greater Banjul headquarters of The Gambia YMCA situated in the commercial district of Kanifing, located between religious buildings, Gambia University, various local and international NGOs and the huge US Embassy but also very close to the affluent tourist areas on the Atlantic Coast. Founded in 1979 as a vocational training institute, The Gambia YMCA developed with assistance from English missionaries and YMCA connections, growing with the Gambian economy to today play a leading role in the regional NGO landscape and working closely with the Gambian government on youth issues. In a strange quirk of fate, the YMCA in The Gambia was founded by a Muslim, who witnessed the YMCA’s work in Senegal and decided to start his own centre before a group of local Christians and missionaries ousted him, citing his nepotistic practices as just cause.3 This incident alone illustrates how vital it is to understand the links between FBO spaces and their impact on emergent youth identity.

Methods For the purposes of this study, I followed a series of Sports Leadership courses in each location, spending six months with the Sussex Central YMCA and twelve

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months with The Gambia YMCA between January 2011 and June 2012. The Sports Leadership course targets disengaged young people (aged 13–25) and involves four main foci, spread over thirty-three hours of teaching: planning and running a coaching session; health and fitness; communication; and leadership. These teaching points offer a fruitful basis for analysing how the YMCA combines embodied practice with a discourse of leadership and self-development. In each location, I combined participant observation with a series of focus groups and interviews with young people, YMCA staff and in some cases family members.4 As a practitioner worker, the research presented a series of ethical dilemmas over ‘blurred boundaries’ (Wolff 2004, p. 202) which meant being open and transparent with my informants, creating a transparent dialogue of consent and mutual trust and working closely with key gatekeepers to continually reflect on any troubling issues that arose (see Wolff 2004).

Marginal masculinities in the neoliberal landscape In both the United Kingdom and West Africa, palpable anxiety over the role of disruptive young men has placed increased focus on intervention programmes targeted at engendering forms of desirable, acceptable (Ward 2015) and respectable masculinity (Batsleer 2014). In this climate, organisations such as the YMCA have grown in stature due to their focus on producing productive young men able to act as capable citizens and to enact positive, non-disruptive modes of masculinity (see Ward et al. 2017). Yet, whilst studies of masculinity which focus on white working-class boys have increasingly focussed on how a sense of belonging is configured through space (Farrugia & Wood 2017), less is known about how ideas of space are reconfigured through non-institutional settings which combine their own organisational imperatives with government agendas, policies and objectives (see Robb et al. 2015; Roberts 2011). Even less is known about how these organisations operating in the transnational sphere promote forms of deracinated youthhood based around generic, neoliberal goals usually founded on narrowly defined economic parameters (see Wignall 2016). Consequently, I argue that a contradiction exists at the heart of the YMCA’s work between producing mainstream forms of masculinity and reproducing forms of prejudice against the very types of men they are designed to help. To explore these tensions, I analyse the YMCA’s ‘whole man’ masculine model as a form of space-specific ‘hegemonic’ or dominant masculinity (Connell & Messerschmidt 2005) determined by a precise masculine ‘habitus’ into which young men can be inducted (Bourdieu 2001). Described as ‘the permanent internalisation of the social order in the human body’ (Eriksen & Nielsen 2017, p. 130), habitus can play an important role in establishing forms of embodied behaviour linked to moral and social hierarchies (Bourdieu 1991). At the YMCA, young men are ‘responsibilised’ through a series of tests, challenges and obligations, with the ultimate prize being integration into the YMCA system. Sport is key in this context as a way of ritualising embodied behaviours and integrating individuals both

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into wider corporate group structures and broader skeins of social meaning (Mellor & Shilling 2014; Bourdieu 1991). An ethnographic approach centred on spatially embodied processes can reveal how young masculinities are fashioned by way of ‘power geometries’ in which ‘groups and individuals are placed in distinct and unequal relations’ (Massey 1996, p. 176, quoted in Farrugia & Wood 2017, p. 213). In the United Kingdom, many of the YMCA’s clients are drawn from working-class or lower-middleclass backgrounds or communities where particular social issues (anti-social behaviour, truancy from school, violence, criminality) are painted as problematic, cast as part of a general social ‘backwardness’ that requires remedial action (see Ingram 2009; Ward 2015). For many working-class men, this has meant that, rather than ‘learning to serve’, they reject dominant notions of new masculinity and form their identities from the areas where they are comfortable, the ‘margins’ (McDowell 2000; Willis 1977). However, recent scholarship has noted how young people also powerfully exert their sense of agency through space, challenging and subverting forms of dominant masculinity and developing different forms of agency which rely on complex assemblages of space, place and belonging (Ward et al. 2017). Across West Africa, the pathologisation of young masculinities is exacerbated by the prescient fear of violence and instability and neo-colonial discourses of ‘idle’ young men (see Wignall 2016; cf. Honwana 2012). This leads to polarised narratives of youth and masculinity centred on either being productive economic actors or destructive political actors, with little room in between for ambiguity, nuance or lived realities (Wignall 2016). In the Gambian context, categories of manhood are dictated by The Gambia’s paradoxical recent history as a self-styled Islamic state and a hedonistic tourist destination (see Wignall 2017). In the midst of these intersecting global and local forces, young men experience exclusion and marginalisation through both febrile and exclusive ethnic5 and governance structures and from the older generations who see youth as a threat (Janson 2013). Coupled with the difficulties of finding a sustainable livelihood due to the unbalanced Gambian economy, young men often feel multiply marginalised and access NGOs both as routes to local empowerment and as portals to another realm, both real and imagined, of global opportunity. However, it is important to note that, like young working-class boys in the United Kingdom, young Gambian men are also exerting their agency in innovative ways and many of the young men I worked with were using the Sports Leadership course as a stepping stone to coaching careers, community work or even teaching (see Wignall 2017). With this ambiguity in mind, in the following sections I explore these tensions through a series of ethnographic moments and portraits of young men in the Sports Leadership course, highlighting how YMCA spaces operate as sites of negotiation, agency and expression for young people struggling with their own situatedness in the local and global sphere.

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‘It’s good for your mind’: embodying aspiration in the UK Today, on a brisk March afternoon, I am sat amidst the faded green paint of the YMCA youth centre’s upstairs training room. I’m here to observe and assist a Sports Leadership session run on behalf of the local council for young people excluded from mainstream education. Sat around a group of hastily arranged tables, a group of young people sits, or rather slouches, their hands tucked deep in their pockets or playing with their mobile phones. Some slouch onto the table, their heads resting on folded arms, looking like they’d rather be elsewhere. All are dressed in a variety of sportswear blazoned with big brand names like Nike and Adidas. One is dressed conspicuously in a dull grey tracksuit and hoody, a grey beanie hat perched precariously on the top of his head. This is Benny, and he is currently playing with his mobile phone. I drift behind him to see what he is doing and he is moving his fingers rapidly over the screen, playing a well-known football game highly popular with young people in the UK and around the world. I return to my observation seat at the back of the class as the tutor Stacey6 calls for the students’ attention. I notice that most ignore her, some partially and others completely. Rather than get annoyed she says with, a heavy sigh, ‘Come on guys.’ And then, referring directly to Benny, ‘What have I told you about mobile phones?’ Benny looks up from his game and simply nods. A few of the other students smirk in Benny’s direction. One yawns emphatically to show his disinterest. Earlier in the day the students successfully took charge of coaching sessions at a local school, with Benny performing particularly well. Now, Stacey begins going through the day’s sessions, asking the students to write down some of their reflections on their activities: Have they done well? What could they have done better? She tells them they need to fill out their learning diaries, to which one student rolls his eyes. She then turns to the board and begins writing up some example sentences for them to copy, at which point Benny surreptitiously resumes his game under the table. Eventually Stacey stops writing and turns and with exasperation says ‘Benny!’ Benny looks up with a sheepish grin and, with Stacey still glaring at him, slips his phone into his trouser pocket, his hand resting there as if ready to resume his game at any second. (Fieldnotes, 16th April 2011)

This vignette demonstrates the delicate and often problematic process of trying to transform the young men who join the course. For many of the Sports Leadership candidates I met, YMCA spaces operated as safe havens away from complicated home and school lives where they felt alienated, confused or even threatened. YMCA courses were designed to counter these feelings, as for working-class boys especially crossing the threshold from their local neighbourhood to more formal institutional settings can create problematic feelings of inferiority and

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ambivalence that drastically impact their long-term aspirations (Ingram 2009, p. 422; cf. Evans 2006; Roberts 2011). In Benny’s life, the tension between his own fragile aspirations, his sense of place and his embodied pleasure were worked out through the Sports Leadership course. As he told me, the Sports Leadership course has changed the way he thinks about his own life, helping him to identify possible paths that were seemingly closed to him: [I]t’s alright like, if I didn’t come here, I would of [sic] just spent my teenage years being in school . . . here I’ve been fishing on a boat, I’ve worked in a school. . . . I’ve done rock climbing. . . . I’ve done kayaking. As he was encouraged at the YMCA, Benny’s passion for sport began to develop into something more: a viable career option and the opportunity to do what he enjoys: Sport is a bit of a religion. You can have debates about it. You can talk about it forever. It’s a good life to live, to have a bit of sport in your life. It’s good for you. It’s good for your mind. It gets your mind off things. If I got paid to do sport, even if it was just minimum wage, I’d be happy. Benny’s summation of the reasons he loves sport replicate the plural impact sport can have beyond the body. First, it has shaped his body and embodied practice, making him ‘healthy’ and ‘fit’, which he codes as ‘good’. Second, he suggests that sport has distracted him from his problems, giving him an improved sense of wellbeing unavailable to him in other institutional settings. Finally, sport has helped Benny to be more ‘social’, able to communicate his feelings, express himself and connect with people, an integral part of the YMCA re-engagement process. Moreover, Benny’s equation of sport to religion points to deeper connections between behaviour, language and emotions, which are carefully structured in religious rituals to produce specific types of people (see Mellor & Shilling 2014). Benny discusses this idea in terms of how the Sports Leadership course has led him on a journey of re-invention, starting with re-narrating his past: Before I didn’t have something to look forward to, just a . . . dull future. It gave me more options and made me look, more open-eyed and that. I’ve seen . . . that there’s more in life, and it’s nice when you’re just teaching kids . . . you’re working to make them better. Re-visioning his past through his present has also given him new ways of seeing his future. Benny’s ‘dull future’ was going to be being a plumber, a job many workingclass families encourage as good, solid work but which leaves Benny cold: I wanna be a PE [physical education] teacher or coach, or like they do here. I wanna do something with sport, a job, career in sport . . . that’s my dream.

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What I wanna do with plumbing? I don’t want to spend my life under a toilet seat. Benny’s attachment to the YMCA has allowed him to gradually draw away from the tightly woven fabric of aspiration and place which he felt he was destined to inhabit. A key element of this movement has been his budding relationships with some of the staff at the YMCA like Stacey and me who were prepared to offer him a chance to chase his dream of becoming a sports worker. Many of these workers have also been young people coming through the YMCA system themselves. For example, both staff members Justin and Stacey joined the YMCA as volunteers after completing the Sports Leadership course. This personal experience of transformation often helps them to form meaningful bonds with young people, as they find points of commonality and identification. They are also close in age to the young people and may come from similar areas or schools offering multiple coordinates of familiarity for the students to identify with (see Robb et al. 2015). However, the system is far from foolproof. As Benny’s resistance suggests, the fragility of the emergent subjectivities makes them prone to volatility and unpredictability (see Batsleer 2014; Robb et al. 2015). Many YMCA tutors have been threatened with violence during a course or had to fire students for serious breaches of discipline, a violent reminder of the limitations of this template. For example, another young man in Benny’s cohort who identified as a potential YMCA leader was less inclined to leave behind his destructive past. I first met Callum on a previous Gambia exchange programme, where he impressed with his confidence and willingness to help out. However, he finished the trip under a cloud by repeatedly disregarding group rules and subsequently disappointing tutors like Stacey who had placed their faith in him. As he went on to tell me, despite severe acts of violence leading to his expulsion from school, he had ‘changed a bit’ and ‘matured quite a bit’. However, he confessed that he was still in trouble with the police for various offences which, although they had occurred in the past, were having an impact on his present ability to attend the course. In contrast, Callum’s journey and ongoing problems reflect the provisional nature of YMCA transformation, where the permeable nature of YMCA spaces is reflected in the mutability of young lives in flux and the ‘local’ is forever threatening to reclaim its occupants. Reflecting on these issues, in the following section I transfer my analysis to The Gambia, showing how local systems of authority were both undermined and reinforced by the bonds forged within the YMCA’s walls.

‘It’s like a family to me’: spaces of care in the Gambia It’s a blistering hot Saturday morning and I have taken my Sports Leadership students out of the YMCA training room onto a half-built basketball court in order to run some coaching exercises. The students are lined up to one side of me and they are taking turns to deliver their coaching sessions. One by one they are stepping into the role of ‘coach’, taking command of their peers and taking them through a series of drills and exercises. At the end of each session, I step

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Ross Wignall forward, take them to one side and give them feedback, what they did well, what they could improve, etc. Later we will return to class and they will write this feedback up and it will help them improve their practice. As we are nearing the end of the session a young coach called Bubba steps up and starts taking the students through his drill. However, he seems to forget what to say, mumbling and looking down at his coaching sheet. His fellow students gaze at him patiently, waiting for him to take charge of the situation. Joe tells him to take his time and to ‘be confident’. He then begins to speak again but does so very quietly. The other students gaze on bemused as they can’t make out what he’s saying. Joe asks him to ‘speak up’ and reiterates the need to ‘be confident’. He coughs to clear his throat and re-starts his session. This time his voice is louder and, though he stumbles over some of the words, the students can understand him and begin carrying out his instructions. Occasionally he falters and the students hesitate and look to him for instruction, but he consults his session plan and gets the students going again. At the end of the session, the students and tutors give him a hearty round of applause, and he steps away looking pleased with himself. When I take him away to discuss his session, I keep it short and simple and tell him simply to remember to ‘be confident’ next time he coaches. He smiles, nodding vigorously and apparently pleased with this feedback, jogging back to the group for the final session of the day. (Fieldnotes, 12th December 2011)

In the UK Sports Leadership course, the ritualisation of sport was used to convert young men from a ‘tough’ street-based version of masculinity (Ward et al. 2017) to ‘whole man’ versions based around the YMCA principles of transforming body and spirit for positive social engagement. Gambian young men presented a different set of challenges. In the broader schematic of African youth ‘stuck’ in between youth and adulthood, many of the young Gambian men were also part of a ‘sandwich generation’, caught between intractable elders and even more discouraged school-age siblings (see Janson 2013). Bubba’s reticence was symptomatic of a recurring issue in the course of young men not being able to find ways to appropriately express their authority. As I explore, this problematic negotiation indicated the complex ways YMCA masculinities are embedded in local and global senses of belonging. In Bubba’s case, his reluctance to speak up was intricately linked to both his self-styled Islamic identity and a sense of intergenerational respect deeply embedded in local Gambian culture. In a number of West African contexts, timidity is equated with a complex combination of respect for elders; respect for authority and tradition; and Islamic tenets of humility, kindness and care (see Janson 2013). As one of his managers who was also Muslim remarked to me, Bubba is a ‘good person’ who is ‘very humble’, which equated to a very positive form of masculinity in her view: ‘One thing that has made Bubba the man he is, is his religion; he’s very spiritual because religion teaches a lot of tolerance’. Bubba’s attachment to the YMCA also reflected a stark socio-economic reality for Gambian young men as they tried to carve out a future for themselves

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amidst intergenerational discord and rapid shifts in societal patterns of consumption, labour and political power imagined in relation to global inequality (see Wignall 2017). As Bubba put it to me, his future, ambition and achievement are firmly rooted in the precarious realities of daily Gambian existence: ‘The future is a dream. . . . I work hard to achieve what I want to achieve but what I want to be in the future is not in my place to think’. Bubba saw the YMCA as his route into a ‘modern life’ as he strives to differentiate himself from his peers: ‘You could be in a ghetto but don’t stay in the ghetto . . . the smart ones or the lucky ones are the ones that are gonna leave the girl behind’. For many young men like Bubba, the YMCA offered a sense of security both away from their peers in ‘the ghetto’ but also linking them into a global organisation where their aspirations could be realised. When I asked him whether the Christianity of the YMCA worries him, he used the kinship idiom to emphasise the powerful emotional, interpersonal attachment he feels: ‘it’s like a family to me. It doesn’t matter, as far as we are all as a family’. Bubba’s narrative illustrates that it is worth problematising negative portrayals of African young men as perpetually trapped in ‘waithood’ when in actuality they are striving to escape or transform their circumstances (Honwana 2012). Whilst young people in The Gambia often speak of ‘just managing’ to make ends meet, they are also deftly ‘managing’ an array of responsibilities, expectations and obligations (see Wignall 2017). This precarious positioning in Gambian society became evident when talking to the most taciturn member of the group, Peter. Aged 25, he is a devout Christian and a central figure at the local Methodist church, playing guitar in the choir. However, on the coaching field he was timid and reserved, embarrassed to express himself or be noticed. A trained electrician, he had recently become a part-time coach at the YMCA, though he admitted he would love to go full-time if he could. The Sports Leadership course helped him begin to overcome his timidity and to emulate other students’ examples of assertive and vocal communication. It also helped him to develop a greater sense of confidence in his own abilities. As he described here, the combination of session planning and behavioural reflection helped him to hone his sense of expression: ‘I’m always a shy guy. The course helps me to learn what it would be like to be a good and proper coach: that you should not be shy. It helped me to know myself and express myself properly’. Though he was aware of his ‘shyness’, Peter’s experience of coaching had been coloured by the aggressive nature of many older, Gambian coaches: Anything you do they will talk . . . positive or even negative they will talk, ‘This guy’s very cool, he’s very calm – a coach should not be that cool’. [If] you be [are] aggressive they will say, ‘Ah he is very aggressive, a coach should not be this aggressive’. As Van Klinken (2012) has shown in the context of Pentecostal worship in Zambia, masculinities are refined by morally coding certain behaviours as ‘feminine’

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or ‘weak’. Peter’s professed ‘weakness’ or ‘shyness’ could easily be read as a sign of humility or respect. The YMCA space offered a chance to escape this scrutinising atmosphere, a chance to nurture and rehearse a respectful masculine demeanour that connected with his own aspirations. For other students on the Sports Leadership course, sport itself offered a very concrete way of partially transforming their dreams into reality whilst gaining credibility in their local context. Like Peter, Gabriel was volunteering with Joe at the YMCA and at 19 was a soft-spoken young man. Unlike Peter, but like a number of young men from wealthier backgrounds (Proctor 2011), he gave off a self-assured confidence and was using the Sports Leadership course to accelerate his ‘big man’ trajectory. As Gabriel told me, sport has allowed him to travel and visit ‘many, many countries’, offering a double chance of distinguishing himself locally as both a sportsman and well-seasoned traveller. As he discussed, the course and his new responsibilities at the YMCA had helped him to understand the value of leadership as an end in itself: You have to lead. You have to set the example. You have to be their friend. You have to talk to them, advise them. They always look up to you, like ‘is Gabriel going to score 100 runs? If the captain can score 100 runs, why can’t we score 100 runs?’ So I always have to lead them. Gabriel’s valorisation of his sporting achievements indicated how the YMCA was helping to foster alternative notions of youthhood intimately woven into local and global understandings of social becoming. This process helped many young men transform their sporting currency into masculine credibility in the local context (see Ward et al. 2017).

Conclusion: ambivalent associations at the YMCA As I have demonstrated, nascent versions of selfhood emerging at the YMCA are directly tied to both the immediate experience of spaces, places and feelings of attachment and the complex imaginaries and aspirations these spaces help to generate, resulting in sometimes conflicting feelings of ambivalence and alienation (Sattar 2019). In this context of ambiguous and processual senses of belonging, YMCA leadership models designed to engage young men can be understood as a form of ‘hybrid habitus’ (Mellor & Shilling 2014) that combines strict discipline with feelings of gratification and achievement. Tracing these formations of habitus in the transnational sphere can help an understanding of how these change between both local – global and local – places and can create difficult tensions in young people’s lives (Farrugia & Wood 2017; Nayak 2016; Wyn, Cuervo & Cook 2019). For the UK-based students, the YMCA space could be considered a liminal or ‘third space’ (Robb et al. 2015, p. 12) in the sense of a temporary suspension of normality, a waystation or escape from their everyday lives. For young men in The Gambia, the YMCA space also held multiple meanings (see Robb et al.

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2015), acting simultaneously as a temporary escape from everyday life, a place to develop their own ambitions away from the familial glare and crucially a way of engaging with the increasingly present field of global opportunity. At the same time, young men are enacting their masculinities in the context of growing inequalities, where unfolding ‘landscapes of poverty and privilege’ shaped by shifting global ‘geographies of production and employment’ create new forms of localised inequality and alienation (Farrugia & Wood 2017, p. 213; cf. Wignall 2016). Consequently, it is also important to question the rising value of YMCA models of the self-transforming, entrepreneurial subject for a global, neoliberal economy seemingly at odds with the YMCA’s core Christian values of love, equality and friendly association. Particularly in countries such as The Gambia stuck in postcolonial forms of exploitation and economic dependency, young people’s lives are inherently unjust, and their responsibilisation through belonging only serves to underline their sense of injustice and disaffection. By exploring how YMCA spaces and senses of belonging help reconcile these ambiguities, however incompletely, we can begin to understand how these inherent contradictions are written back into young people’s lives and, in turn, how they are written into the spatial, corporate and intimate histories of the YMCA itself as it powers forward into a new era of global prosperity.

Notes 1 I analyse youth as a situational category but generally defined as anyone aged 13–35 (Wignall 2016). 2 Davie (2006) characterises the use of religious space in the United Kingdom as becoming more like ‘believing without belonging’ (p. 284). 3 Interview with former The Gambia YMCA manager, 12 February 2012. 4 United Kingdom: seven focus groups, forty-one interviews; The Gambia: nine focus groups, sixty-two interviews. 5 The Gambia is a peaceful, multi-ethnic society but has seen recent tensions around the favouring of certain groups such as the Jola over others by Jammeh’s outgoing administration (see Janson 2013). 6 All names are pseudonyms.

References Batsleer, J.R. 2014, ‘Against role models: Tracing the histories of manliness in youth work, the cultural capital of respectable masculinity’, Youth and Policy: The Journal of Critical Analysis, vol. 113, pp. 15–30. Bourdieu, P. 2001, Masculine domination, Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA. Bourdieu, P. 1991, ‘Sport and social class’, in C. Mukerji & M. Schudson (eds.), Rethinking popular culture: Contemporary perspectives in cultural studies, California University Press, Berkeley, CA, pp. 357–373. Connell, R. & Messerschmidt, J. 2005, ‘Hegemonic masculinity: Rethinking the concept’, Gender and Society, vol. 19, pp. 829–859. Davie, G. 2006, ‘Religion in Europe in the 21st century: The factors to take into account’, European Journal of Sociology, vol. 470, no. 2, pp. 271–296.

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Eriksen, T.H. & Nielsen, F.S. 2017, A history of anthropology, Pluto Press, London. Evans, G. 2006, Educational failure and working-class white children in Britain, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke. Farrugia, D. & Wood, B.E. 2017, ‘Youth and spatiality: Towards interdisciplinarity in youth studies’, Young, vol. 25, no. 3, pp. 209–218. Gustav-Wrathall, J.D. 1998, Take the young stranger by the hand: Same-sex relations and the YMCA, University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Honwana, A.M. 2012, The time of youth: Work, social change, and politics in Africa, Kumarian Press, West Hartford, CT. Ingram, N. 2009, ‘Working-class boys, educational success and the misrecognition of working-class culture’, British Journal of Sociology of Education, vol. 30, no. 4, pp. 421–434. Janson, M. 2013, Islam, youth and modernity in The Gambia: The Tablighi Jama’at, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Massey, D.B. 1996, Space, place, and gender, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN. McDowell, L. 2000, ‘Learning to serve? Employment aspirations and attitudes of young working-class men in an era of labour market restructuring’, Gender, Place and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography, vol. 7, no. 4, pp. 389–416. Mellor, P.A. & Shilling, C. 2014, ‘Re-conceptualizing sport as a sacred phenomenon’, Sociology of Sport Journal, vol. 31, no. 3, pp. 349–376. Muukkonen, M. 2002, Ecumenism of the laity: Continuity and change in the mission view of the world’s alliance of YMCAs, 1855–1955, University of Joensuu Publications in Theology, Joensuu, Finland. Nayak, A. 2016, Race, place and globalization: Youth cultures in a changing world, Bloomsbury, London. Proctor, H. 2011, ‘Masculinity and social class, tradition and change: The production of “young Christian gentlemen” at an elite Australian boys’ school’, Gender and Education, vol. 23, no. 11, pp. 843–856. Robb, M., Featherstone, B., Ruxton, S. & Ward, M.R.M. 2015, Beyond male role models: Gender identities and work with young men, Open University and Action for Children, Milton Keynes, UK. Roberts, S. 2011, ‘Beyond “NEET” and “tidy” pathways: Considering the “missing middle” of youth transition studies’, Journal of Youth Studies, vol. 14, no. 1, pp. 21–39. Sattar, M. 2019, ‘Politics of class and belonging in Pakistan: Student learning, communities of practice and social mobility’, in S. Habib & M.R.M. Ward (eds.), Youth, place and theories of belonging, Routledge, Oxford. Spurr, G. 2014, ‘Lower-middle-class masculinity and the Young Men’s Christian Association, 1844–1880’, Histoire Sociale/Social History, vol. 47, no. 95, pp. 547–576. Van Klinken, A. 2012, ‘Men in the remaking: Conversion narratives and born-again masculinity in Zambia’, Journal of Religion in Africa, vol. 42, no. 3, pp. 215–239. Ward, M.R.M. 2015, From labouring to learning: Working-class masculinities, education and de-industrialization, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke. Ward, M.R.M., Tarrant, A., Terry, G., Robb, M., Featherstone, B. & Ruxton, S. 2017, ‘Doing gender locally: The importance of “place” in understanding young men’s masculinities in the male role model debate’, Sociological Review, vol. 65, no. 4, pp. 797–815. Wignall, R. 2017, ‘From swagger to serious: Managing young masculinities between faiths at a Young Men’s Christian Association Centre in The Gambia’, Journal of Religion in Africa, vol. 46, no. 2–3, pp. 288–323.

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Wignall, R. 2016, “Leave no one behind”: The post-2015 universality agenda and youth employment (IDS Evidence Report 212), IDS, Brighton. Willis, P. 1977, Learning to labour: How working-class kids get working class jobs, Columbia University Press, New York. Wolff, S. 2004, ‘Ways into the field and their variants’, in U. Flick, E. von Kardoff & I. Steinke (eds.), A companion to qualitative research, Sage, London, pp. 195–202. Wyn, J., Cuervo, H. & Cook, J. 2019, ‘Expanding theoretical boundaries from youth transitions to belonging and new materiality’, in S. Habib & M.R.M. Ward (eds.), Youth, place and theories of belonging, Routledge, Oxford, pp. 12–24. YMCA 2018, YMCA: Our vision and values, viewed 5 January 2018, .

Chapter 10

Precarious class positions in Spam City Youth, place and class in the ‘missing middle’ Katy McEwan

Introduction [A]re these people working class? By the brands of their tongues they are. (Byrne 2005, p. 808)

Teesside, in North East England, is a conurbation of post-industrial towns. Interestingly, Teesside does not exist on any map, and it has no distinct boundaries. Yet this apparently absent place is very present to locals; the place name is meaningful, tied to a powerful industrial heritage (Warren 2017). Furthermore, Teesside University, one of the area’s largest employers, beams the name across the region. Much sociological research has been undertaken within marginalised and excluded communities in Teesside (see MacDonald & Marsh 2001; MacDonald et al. 2005; MacDonald & Shildrick 2007). Byrne (2005), however, posited that a significant population of young people within a short few miles have avoided both this and the wider sociological gaze. This chapter hopes to contribute towards efforts, such as that by Snee and Devine (2014), to fill this gap, specifically questioning how meritocratic ideology informs the lives of those in contradictory and unclear class locations. Ingleby Barwick,1 which sits geographically and economically in the middle of Teesside, provides an ideal environment to research what Roberts (2011) calls the ‘missing middle’ of class analysis and youth research. This chapter will predominantly capitalise on the work of Skeggs (1997, 2004, 2011, 2015) and Tyler (2013, 2015), who utilise the theories of Bourdieu (1984, 1985) to make sense of classed subjectivities and struggles. Drawing on empirical research, I address the ‘messy and uncertain process of belonging’ (Benson 2014, p. 3110) in a notoriously contentious and intermediate place. I argue that belonging in Ingleby Barwick is tied implicitly and explicitly to classed identity and neoliberal notions of meritocracy. People ‘make it’ to Ingleby if they are deserving; success, as measured by the status this place offers its inhabitants, is demonstrably earnt as a reward for what Mendick, Allen and Harvey (2015) call the ‘day-in, day out’ hard work that ‘overcomes obstacles’ and which is wrapped up in ‘a broader rhetoric of individual strength, resilience and agency’ (pp. 166–167). By

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concentrating a sociological gaze on the middle – where arguably class practices merge, conflict and overlap – and weaving theories of belonging and place into that analysis, the chapter contributes to understandings of struggles for ‘authentic’ value and class positioning in contemporary England. In interrogating the preponderance of meritocratic rhetoric, the focus is on how this middling place has been co-created as a moral place for moral people. There is a worldwide auditory phenomenon in science fiction named ‘the hum’, which presents as a low droning sound, imperceptible to some and maddening to others (Dickey 2016). Class similarly hums in the background in Ingleby Barwick, apparent in the ‘notoriously slippy’ work of ‘imagined personhood’, where ‘who and what matters’ (Skeggs 2011, p. 496) is decided. To understand belonging in Ingleby Barwick, in this chapter I invoke the concept of ‘the hum’, attempting to tune in to the background noise of active, embodied classed practices which serve to legitimate class inequality (Tyler 2015). To address the relationship between belonging, class and place, I first provide a short ‘biography of place’ (Warren 2017), noting the political and cultural era, labour market and geographic locale. I then set out the theoretical framework, noting the symbolic production of place through ‘classificatory struggle’ (Tyler 2015) and deliberate ‘place-making practices’ (Jackson & Benson 2012), along with the qualitative method of data collection. The findings highlight the implicit and explicit classed languages and behaviours that arose in the ‘missing middle’ interviews. Finally, the discussion and conclusion tie together the struggle for authenticity and value, under the shadow of a pernicious meritocratic ideology, for those in precarious times and class positions. Benson’s (2014) demonstration of a dual process of belonging, wherein habitus informs neighbourhood choice, yet neighbourhood goes on to inform individuals’ habitus as they strive to ‘fit’, underlies the principle analytical position taken herein – specifically, that place begets people as people beget place.

Context Spam City Ingleby Barwick in Teesside appears to be a sociologically unstudied place. Currently home to around 21,000 residents, construction commenced in the late 1970s and continues to date; locals share with both hubris and horror that Ingleby was once reputed to be the largest private housing estate in Europe.2 Ingleby has a distinct identity and reputation; to local people, it is a place bound up in class complexity. Many locals who directly participated in or shared observations for the research described those arriving at this destination from nearby traditional working-class locales as having ‘made it’. Often described as a ‘neat’ and ‘clean’ place, it is, by intentional design, geographically and ideologically separate from bordering industrial areas. It appears as a new post-industrial place for a new postindustrial time, wiped clean of symbols of local manufacturing heritage.

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Ingleby Barwick is known locally as Spam City. This moniker, which utilises the name of a well-known cheap tinned meat, suggests the superficial nature of the place and by extension its populace. Historically, residents of Ingleby have often undertaken very short-distance social mobility, making the move to this new ‘posh’ place directly from neighbouring working-class areas and estates. The name Spam City suggests that these local migrants suffered both financial and personal expense because of their move. First, the nickname implies that the stretch of resources required to undertake this upward social mobility has reduced families’ capacity to eat well. This implication is a significant threat to familial morality, as there is a longstanding virtuosity in housekeeping and well-husbanded resources among the working class. Feeding your household appropriately is a principal way to (re)establish respectability (Lawler 1999; Skeggs 1997). Furthermore, the secondary inference is that the place itself, like the processed food ‘spam’, is an imitation or substitute, as are the people who choose to live there. The overall implication is that many residents do not possess the economic or cultural capital to undertake authentic social mobility. Subsequently, Spam City residents attract wrath and scorn for what Lawler (1999) calls ‘pretensions’ of middle-classness. A sense of belonging In such a divided social landscape in contemporary North East England, lives are made, senses are produced and social standings are negotiated. Bloodworth (2016) describes the prolific rise of meritocracy, an ideology that frequently proclaims the agency of those who have limited capacity and perniciously obfuscates the power of class and so (re)produces and legitimates inequality. The discourse of meritocracy is centred around a powerful mythology of individual agency that is imbued with notions of striving and deservedness (Walkerdine 2003). Young people are particularly exposed to such trends of individualism, alongside decreasing labour market security, facing circumstances where the resources to serve them are increasingly precarious (Mendick, Allen & Harvey 2015). For a young person to belong in Ingleby requires access to significant financial resources, including large mortgage deposits and secure wages, which appear ever more difficult, yet ever more important, to acquire. Being of something, and of somewhere, is sincerely important to young people, enough that marketing agencies recognise it as an active lack they can offer to fill. For example, the British Army’s current national advertising for young people puts front and centre that the belonging gained in the armed forces is purposeful and meaningful: ‘A sense of belonging may sound like a small thing. Yet it fuels you as much as food and water, because it doesn’t just feed your body, it feeds your mind and soul’ (British Army Campaign 2017). This chapter posits that ‘Spam City’ powerfully demonstrates the complication, and resulting pathologisation, of class identity in the ‘missing middle’ and signifies the associated struggles for authenticity or acceptance and, most significantly, belonging. Furthermore,

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the dominant ideology of meritocracy, a powerful narrative of neoliberal times, provides for a belonging in this place predicated on ‘choices’ of being and in so doing creates a moral place for moral people. The theoretical framework of how belonging is earnt (or lost) through the assiduous self-mastery of aspirational and individualistic routines of class identity is set out next.

Theoretical framework Belonging in Ingleby is extrapolated from meritocratic notions of deservingness. Aspiring to and residing here is imbued with meaning, and as such is symbolic; it signals the moral character of residents, who have ‘bettered’ themselves by being in, and of, this place. Yet this is confused by a strong reclamation of ‘real’ status by those in working-class areas apparently left behind, who through the nickname ‘Spam City’ declare the plastic status of Ingleby and its residents. This section outlines the work of theorists who adopt an approach inspired by Bourdieu to make sense of the co-production and recognition of such symbolism, while still recognising that belonging here remains ‘messy and uncertain’ (Benson 2014, p. 3110). The principal identity process which underpins the theoretical framework is what Bourdieu (1984) terms ‘distinction’. This is the performance of cultural practices and markers that demarcate one’s position in the hierarchical structure while simultaneously re-creating it. Participating in this production, and justification, of social stratification takes effort and is negotiated through the active practice, recognisable to others, of (dis)taste. In this sense, like many other places, Ingleby is defined by what it is not as much as what it is, and its meaning is continually co-created by all who ‘do’ class identity here to establish distance between themselves and others (Tyler 2015). Skeggs (2005) demonstrates that groups attain value through the ‘symbolic production of class’ (p. 46). Skeggs explains that this process occurs through a means of symbolic exchange produced through ‘transference’, an active ‘process by which value is transported into bodies and the mechanisms by which it is retained, accumulated, lost or appropriated’ (p. 46, original emphasis). Place is an active dimension of this process: it provides a group with a platform that possesses demonstrable boundaries (Miranda & Arancibia 2019). These are used to legitimate and distinguish class practices, which are converted to value. Symbolic value, however, is not always clearly produced or read from such practices. Within intermediate areas, where the working-class and middle-class converge, what Bourdieu (1985) would call the ‘rules of the game’ become murky. Affinity becomes evasive where legitimacy and authenticity are difficult to ascertain. Of note to this research, a sense of ‘real-ness’, as the opposite of pretension, was crucial in Lawler’s (1999) research. Working-class women who undertook upward social mobility would often incompletely or incorrectly signal their new class position’s behaviours, losing potential value and opening themselves to ridicule. Similarly, Stahl and Habib (2017) found claims to authenticity to be crucial for young people in working-class areas to build a sense of value through belonging.

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Cuervo and Wyn (2017) state that shared practices create a ‘common experience’ which ultimately ‘builds a sense of belonging’ (p. 228). Considering the relationship between place and belonging, Jackson and Benson’s (2012) ‘placemaking practices’ become what Ravn and Demant (2017) call ‘people-making practices’. For many young people, meritocratic discourse is ubiquitous (Mendick, Allen & Harvey 2015), and we can therefore recognise the potential for ‘deservingness’ to be built into Ingleby and its people. Therein, explicitly following the idea, expanded from Benson (2014), that people beget place as place begets people, this analysis focuses on this middling place that, it is claimed, is demonstrably for the worthy, a moral place for moral people. In drawing attention to the nexus of youth, place and a sense of belonging, I draw upon what Tyler (2015, p. 506) defines as ‘classificatory struggle’ to consider who can, and cannot, fit into place. In presenting this small section from a wider data set of families who ‘made it’ to Ingleby, I outline senses and practices of belonging. I also consider associated ongoing claims to moral integrity and personal worth in times so precarious they may mean that young people here cannot mobilise the resources to make their own transitions to stay (Sayer 2005; Skeggs 2004).

Methods I gathered qualitative data as part of a PhD project between late 2015 and late 2016, and in total seventy participants contributed. The data collection primarily took the form of focus groups in local further education colleges and a youth club. Following this, I developed a framework for interviews and, via gatekeepers and a snowball sample process, undertook in-depth intergenerational interviews in and among families. These took place in participants’ own homes or in cafes and pubs in Ingleby.3 The interviews and focus groups were audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim, and arising themes were then analysed through NVivo. After the pilot investigation stage, I chose to alter the definition of ‘youth’ from 16–25 to 16–30 years of age for the project. This ensured that those young people who appeared to be struggling to make complete education, employment and housing transitions until well into their late twenties were included.

Findings Precarious aspirations Aspiration, as a demonstrable action and practice for achieving success in a meritocracy, was significant in the data. Forms of aspiration, be it as want, desire or intention, were utilised by young people to legitimate and demonstrate who can have access to Ingleby residency and so by extension belonging. This was epitomised most strongly through the continual suggestion of an individual taking the prescribed action, mostly described in vague terms as ‘hard work’, to ‘move

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up’ to Ingleby, and so ‘better’ themselves in the process. The participants consistently referred to moving to Ingleby Barwick from local working-class areas as an achievement, a reward for individual practices of good intention and hard work. Young people often accepted as a given that they would stay in Ingleby should they continue to follow the same individualised steps they proscribed to outsiders. When asked whether someone from a local working-class area would ‘fit in’ in Ingleby, many suggested that depended on who they were, who they wanted to be and what they were prepared to leave behind in that other place. They could come, Joe (25) told me, but they had to be ‘willing to work for it’. This conception of work appeared explicitly cultural and performative, the process producing what Skeggs (2004) describes as a ‘subject of value’. In this research, such value was often signalled through routes of conspicuous consumption. Gia (44) explained that a lot of people who originated from working-class locales used their property on Ingleby to say something about their self and status. Gia stated that some Ingleby residents presented their homes to look like a ‘Next catalogue’,4 as they believed ‘their house sums up who they are and what they are’. In Ingleby, the geographical and economic proximity of those in a lower social class, or even closer still in a lower stratification of the same class, instigates what Ehrenreich (1989) characterised as a ‘fear of falling’. Parents’ efforts to create a conspicuous ‘safe’ distance from schools located in working-class areas appeared to demonstrate this, with concerns that they could perhaps ‘contaminate’ their children. Participants frequently laboured how poor behaviour was notably absent in the schools which serviced these estates compared to others in the wider region. Rebekah (22) had friends in her early teenage years near her grandparents’ house in an established working-class locale: ‘they would tell me these stories where the teachers and the kids would get into verbal fights. . . . I think the most crazy thing I seen at my school is when a boy turned off the interactive whiteboard behind the teacher’s back’. A coterie of characteristics was used locally to describe the habitus of the people of Ingleby; most often, the range of classed subjectivities was neatly encapsulated in the use of the word ‘posh’. This distinction was rarely accepted by the residents themselves. Rachel (20) said she felt at pains to refuse this label: ‘on nights out in Middlesbrough I have been like, oh I am from Ingleby and they are like oh, you are posh and I am like, no!’ There appeared to be a sliding scale of prestige, and therefore posh-ness, as Josh (22) explained: ‘so The Rings is posher than my end because there is new houses there, so it would look more new, does that make sense? It is more-new, so it would look more upper class’. Such newer areas are not merely fresh in terms of bricks and mortar but are generationally new: the latest developments on the estate have the youngest residents. There are practical and style-based explanations for why this would be so, such as developer and government schemes for first-time buyers for new builds or the more desirable aesthetics construction companies adopt to make newer homes more attractive. Certainly, difference, characterised by newness, was important to the attribution of personal value and social status.

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Imagined place There is no shortage of nicknames for Ingleby Barwick across Teesside, albeit the two most dominant and recognised were ‘Spam City’ and ‘Toy Town’. When pushed to explain what these terms meant, people explained that they were to do with a perceived lack of ‘authenticity’, wherein legitimacy of social mobility was denied and attempts at traditional middle-class boundary making were rejected (Skeggs 2011). Ingleby was frequently described as a shallow place, one that was unreal and almost plastic, and this was then often seen as a reflection on the people who lived there: KATY: Have you heard it called toytown? LAURA : No DIANE (PARENT) : Yeah [laughs] LAURA : Where have you heard that from?

I know what that means though, like it is not a proper place? HAYLEY: It’s like a place, but it’s all houses, there is nothing else there. LAURA : It’s squashed, and everything is HAYLEY: The same. (The Johnsons, 48, 16, 14) Massey (2005) explains that ‘words such as “real”, “everyday”, “lived”, “grounded” are constantly deployed and bound together’ (p. 185) to invoke security and as a way of making a place out of space. Yet the attempt to do this, as an act of place making, was rejected by many residents themselves, as well as those on the outside looking in. Ingleby was described as ‘soulless’, Brent (18) told me, because everything looked ‘the same’. Similarly, when asked if she liked Ingleby, Phoebe (21), whose family home was up for sale after her father had left and they had struggled to manage the household on a single-parent income, was sharp in her response: ‘No! I think it is a show here, it is so unreal’. Melissa (28) described the pressure to actively perform and display one’s access to commodities: When I first moved there I had my first car and it was a really old Clio and when I drove up to view the house and I saw all the cars and I thought, my car is going to look awful on this street. And we went out and bought me a new car, just because we had moved to Ingleby Barwick, just so that the neighbours didn’t think anything bad of us. Spam City refers to the idea that to be in and of Ingleby requires a stretch of both material and cultural resources. Being over-stretched financially was a theme returned to often in the interviews. Warren (20) explained this to me: ‘people there put on a front of wealth as opposed to actually really having things’. Many residents of Ingleby felt the general impression of them from the outside was that they were ‘all fur coat and no knickers’ (Gia, 44). Lisa (21) explained that, despite

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all the resources deployed to the task, many outsiders still saw residents as incorrectly or inauthentically performing class: If I tell people that I am from Ingleby they either tell me that it is not Yarm [local established middle-class area] or it’s Thornaby [local established working-class area] or Spam City. I literally get that every time I tell somebody. Even my family still say it to me, those who don’t live in Ingleby, that we are trying to be posh and everything. Arthur or Martha? Belonging in Ingleby was often predicated on being with ‘people like me’. In my dialogue with Danny (23), he noted: ‘if someone says they are from Ingleby you know straight away they are kind of going to be on the same wavelength as you’. All the young people in this study took part in some form of this practice of locating people with reference to place, through a process of ‘what goes with what’ or ‘who goes with where’. Being of Ingleby, to some, clearly marked them as ‘strivers’ and allowed them the cultural capital and freedom to take pride in that status. To older generations, it was more confused: they do not know if they are ‘Arthur or Martha’, a local commented. Indeed, many young people did describe slightly unclear positions, such as rejection of any privilege while concurrently recognising they had accrued certain advantages. Similarly, while young people were rarely willing or able to class themselves, when parents did it on their behalf, they would rarely place themselves firmly in either the working or the middle class. Annie (52), providing a common composite, stated: ‘I suppose I am working-middle’. Massey (1994) states that ‘no place’s “sense of place” is constructed without relations with and/or influences from elsewhere’ (p. xiii). Jay (27) demonstrated this in his description of how people’s jobs go with places: [M]y next-door neighbour on one side at my mam’s house [established working-class area], one is a lollipop lady [laughs] and then the people on the other side, he is a taxi driver, so like it was sort of a step up for me . . . in Ingleby everybody in the street had a job but everybody was doing shit jobs like my job now [restaurant manager], everybody was doing jobs where you just like turn up, them sort of jobs. Whereas people who lived on [exgirlfriend’s] street, where she used to live [established middle-class area], they were all like proper proper legit jobs, like proper proper jobs. For all their efforts at creating distinction, Ingleby residents are perceived as often falling short of being ‘proper’. Based on this research, the habitus of its residents was frequently claimed to be unnatural and ill-fitted. I now discuss the findings on the precarious nature of classed identity and what this may mean for authenticity and struggles over value and belonging.

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Discussion This study was planned as a flexible investigation into the phenomenon ‘Spam City’; as such, I hoped to avoid the shroud that Ormston et al. (2015) call the ‘theoretical or methodological straitjacket’ (p. 19). Limitations were, however, imposed: the PhD project brought constraints of time, experience and positionality5 and the method evolved. The ‘whiteness’ of the research is problematic, albeit it reflects the estate and wider region,6 and this is something that I will seek to address in future studies. Furthermore, I brought to the research field an undeniable passion for Bourdieu’s theories, so it is no happenstance they underpin the approach, questions and analysis. While this study is limited, and as such does not claim a universal understanding of or application to the lives of young people in Ingleby and beyond, it does provide insight into the phenomenon ‘Spam City’, a name used extensively across Teesside. This research indicates that some young people in Ingleby experience multiple layers of precarity around class (dis)identity and belonging, and they discuss this in a tone and manner which implies this is not unusual among their peer group. The crucial narrative which arose was the at-once contested and accepted connections made between aspirations, deservingness, acceptance and belonging. Baker (2016) explains that ‘aspiration’ is a politically prevalent term, tied explicitly to moral value and self-worth. Notions of aspiration were frequently returned to in the interviews and were often used to signal deservingness: getting to, or staying in, Ingleby was presented as a deliberate and intentional choice, earned through a meritocratic process, open to anyone prepared to undertake what Mendick, Allen & Harvey (2015) call the appropriate ‘hard work’. Yet this was complicated by the attraction of stigma as much as praise from outsiders; participants received negative labelling for their apparent ‘pretentiousness’ (Lawler 1999) and attracted the wrath of those left behind because they accepted the values of the ‘dominant symbolic’ (Skeggs 2011, p. 506). Young people demonstrated acute awareness of this, and they accepted some of the criticisms, most often about the physical nature of the built environment. Belonging in Ingleby appeared to be derived through what Stahl and Habib (2017) called ‘a continual negotiation’; a successful habitus for Ingleby is built on a foundation of economic and cultural capital resources which are insecure and changeable. Benson (2014) describes this variable process: ‘while belonging may be generated through a “fit” between habitus and field, this “fit” may be made, re-made, challenged and even dismantled as a result of the dynamic relationship’ (pp. 3109–3110). Price (1977, p. 99) depicted concerns over lower middle-class jingoism from the late 1800s, a reaction, he claims, to an attempt to manage their proximity to those in the established middle class above them and the working-class just beneath. People inhabiting this in-between class position were ‘propelled from behind’, he states, reminded of their status insecurity by those they were only just above. In this sense, the class insecurity demonstrated in Ingleby is nothing new; it is an inherent feature of the damaging nature of class (Sennett & Cobb

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1972). Tyler (2015), however, notes the powerful reinforcement of this fear in the neoliberal era, led in no small part by the ‘prolific cultural crafting of “revolting” depictions of the working classes by middle-class media workers since the 1990s’ (p. 506). Consequently, continued research into the accessibility and precarity of belonging for those in precarious class positions and places is needed.

Conclusion Ingleby Barwick was purposefully established as a post-industrial place for a post-industrial people: it was built in the context of a specific labour market, geographical locale and a determined social and political period. It is ultimately classed in terms of who could, and who would, aspire to live in this new, ‘posh’ place. Belonging for young people in this selective neighbourhood is a symbol of achievement in the neoliberal ideology of meritocracy and is an active, continual process. Such a perpetual co-creation, accessed through notions of worthiness and deservingness, results in the creation of a moral place for moral people. Yet this place is one of much local migration, both up and down, now and in the everpossible future, creating significant and ongoing status insecurity. In whichever way it is felt by the residents, class hums in Ingleby as a subtle and ineffaceable covenant, justifying inequality, concealing opposition and threatening belonging. Realness or authenticity is not easily afforded, and in Spam City it often requires the purchase of commodities which then, in turn, are claimed to be demonstrative of inauthenticity. The effort to become and belong takes sustained economic and cultural activities that are determined to be ‘hard work’ (Mendick, Allen & Harvey 2015) and which concurrently recreate and obfuscate inequality. Simultaneously, this is all undertaken at the risk of derision for getting above one’s station (Lawler 1999; Skeggs 2004) and feels all too easily lost in a precarious economic region.

Notes 1 Ingleby Barwick is not a pseudonym as I believed that so many markers of Ingleby Barwick would be recognisable to locals that any attempt to mask its identity would be purposeless. All participants’ names are, however, changed, appropriating the cast list of the 2017 Twin Peaks television series. 2 While this is a significant piece of local folklore (the full narrative often extended to hold that the title was subsequently lost to an estate in Germany but then regained when development continued at Ingleby Barwick), I have been unable to find any evidence to back up this claim. 3 Around these interviews, I would often chat to locals about the research and their feelings about people regarding place. So, while the PhD was not in any way an ethnographic project, there were ethnographic elements which added depth and context. 4 Next is a UK higher-end price point High Street shop, aimed predominantly at females aged 35–60, which sells clothes and homewares. 5 Participants tended to assume I was ‘one of them’, when in fact I live and brought my children up in the circumstances they frequently described using ‘less than’ descriptors. 6 ‘Whilst the population of Tees Valley is predominantly White British (93%), Tees Valley is home to a small Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) community with Middlesbrough

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having an ethnic make-up that more closely reflects the national picture (86% of Middlesbrough’s population is White British compared with 80% of England’s)’ (Tees Valley Combined Authority 2016, p. 12).

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Chapter 11

Arenas of empowerment? Case study of a ‘multicultural’ high school in Oslo, Norway Paul Thomas, Maren Seehawer and Sandra Fylkesnes

Introduction Norwegian academics have long argued that the ‘assimilationist model’ of integration in Norway, which persists in the belief that learning Norwegian and securing a job leads to integration, is erroneous (Engebrigtsen & Fuglerud 2009). Djuve and Hagen (1995) contend that they do not find such a correlation: ‘To have a job and to be self-reliant does not lead to better mastery of Norwegian and contacts with Norwegians. Employment has not led to social integration’ (p. 209). It is significant that the majority of these students attending East High who were born and bred in Norway – a country which has invested heavily in their integration – disidentify with the category ‘Norwegian’. The salience of this study is the call to pay greater attention to issues of identity and belonging among impressionable adolescents from minority backgrounds if the current trend is to be ameliorated. This chapter explores identity and belonging among minority-background students in one ‘multicultural’ high school (the pseudonym ‘East High’ will be employed) in Oslo, Norway. Issues of identity and belonging are growing in importance in a country which until recently was ethnically homogenous but has witnessed a steep rise in immigration1 from the Global South (mainly Africa and Asia) and Eastern Europe in the last few decades. The school, located in the conurbation of Oslo, the capital of Norway, has approximately 650 students enrolled in either general studies (allmenfag), oriented towards college/university, or vocational training (e.g. carpentry, construction, plumbing). The study was conducted in August 2013 to June 2014 and August to October 2014. For reasons that will be explored in this study, students from minority backgrounds comprise a majority in this high school, a trend that is spreading to other urban centres in Norway. Minorities are projected to increase to 47 per cent of the capital’s population by 2040, up from the current 30 per cent (Akerhaug 2012). We argue that this increased proportion of minorities enhances the salience of this study. Research in Norway suggests that school catchment areas with more than 40 per cent minorities experience higher rates of ‘white flight’ (Sundell 2008, p. 72). Socio-economic factors also play a role. As Sundell suggests, ‘it is therefore reasonable to assume that

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“White flight” and “White avoidance” are causal factors driving the segregation of schools in Oslo’ (Sundell 2008, p. 75). This study considers the challenges involved from the perspective of these students, for whom issues of belonging and acceptance play a significant role.

Methods section Four classrooms in total – three first-year classes and one final-year class – constituted the locus of study (ninety-one students in total). The data was accumulated employing an ethnographic lens. The main author was employed as a full-time teacher at the school for three years. Classroom discussions, notes and interviews with students were augmented by official documents from Statistics Norway and government publications on education and social inclusion. The objective of the study was to arrive at a rounded understanding by employing a multipronged methodology that focussed on privileging the voices of the marginalised (LeCompte, Tesch & Goetz 1993). Pseudonyms have been used to conceal the identities of the interviewees. Oral and written tasks were administered to enable introspective reflection and debate on issues of identity and positionality in this segregated school. The questions and assignments were interlaced with and timed to coincide with syllabus topics covered in English, such as ‘Somewhere I belong’, which sensitises students to the plight of First Nations in Anglo-American contexts, and ‘Global Dignity Day’ (GDD) in a religious education class. GDD is an annual, nationwide celebration of individual worth and self-esteem in all upper secondary schools in Norway initiated by Crown Prince Haakon Magnus, who serves as its patron. Scholars in Norway consider a district segregated when about 40 per cent of the population of a school catchment area have immigrant backgrounds (Ellingsen 2012; Sundell 2008). Statistics Norway (2017, online) defines immigrants as ‘Persons born abroad of two foreign-born parents and four foreign-born grandparents’. Another category, ‘Norwegian born to immigrant parents’, is defined as ‘Persons born in Norway of two foreign-born parents and four foreign-born grandparents’ (Statistics Norway 2017, online). The challenge is that the two categories are often conflated under the term ‘innvandrere’ (immigrants). In what follows, students’ responses will be explored employing the concepts of ‘sameness’ and ‘belonging’. The focus on the manner in which issues of race and ethnicity intersect with education, we argue, is instructive for educators concerned with rapid demographic changes in a Scandinavian country which until recently was ethnically homogenous. In privileging student views about important concepts such as ‘sameness’ and ‘belonging’ in egalitarian Norway, we seek to understand the qualities and attitudes of this segment of the population – i.e. the way they construct their identity in the face of competing forms of national, regional, ethnic and religious identities, among others.

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‘Sameness’ and belonging Gullestad (2002) argues that the Norwegian ideal of ‘sameness’ (Norwegian: likhetsidealet) inadvertently contributes to a sense of alienation among non-ethnic Norwegian minorities. ‘Sameness’ loosely refers to a tacit yet palpable discourse of cultural standardisation and homogenisation which, to Gullestad’s mind, is both imaginary and counterproductive to integration: For the sake of simplicity, I call it ‘imagined sameness’. It is not only tied to the term likhet, but also to a whole range of other expressions such as ‘to fit in together’ (å passe sammen) and ‘to share the same ideas’ (ha sammenfallendesynspunkter). Often it implies that there is a problem when others are perceived to be ‘too different’. Then the parties often avoid each other. Open conflicts are seen as a threat to other basic values, such as ‘peace and quiet’. (Gullestad 2002, p. 47) The discourse of integration, mostly transmitted through the all-pervasive official networks, appears to perceive successful integration in terms of conformity to this imagined ideal of ‘sameness’. The paradox, however, is that, at the same time as the call for minorities to conform to this ideal of ‘sameness’ has been growing louder, the schooling landscape in Oslo has become more ethnically fragmented. Guibernau (2013, p. 5) captures this ‘paradox of belonging’ in modern multinational societies: ‘while some individuals who are loyal to the nation are not permitted to belong, others who belong despise their nation and place their loyalty elsewhere’. Students in this study who engaged in classroom discussions about the degree to which they identify with Norway typically volunteered views such as: I am a Norwegian-Pakistani girl who is 18 years of age. I was born and brought up in Norway. Despite this, Norwegians still say that I am a foreigner (utlending). When I am on holiday in Pakistan, the Pakistanis consider me a foreigner from Norway. I am a bit confused. (Aisha, 18-year-old female) Thus, for several of the students in this study, the perceived rejection of their legitimate claim to ‘Norwegian-ness’ triggered a new search for a community where their multi-layered identities would find acceptance. There are parallels with the observation by Hall (1996) below: Above all, and directly contrary to the form in which they are constantly invoked, identities are constructed through, not outside, difference. This entails the radically disturbing recognition that it is only through the relation to the Other, the relation to what it is not, to precisely what it lacks, to what has been called its constitutive outside that the ‘positive’ meaning of any term – and thus its ‘identity’ – can be constructed. (Hall 1996, pp. 4–5, original emphasis)

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Often, students who were silent during our open discussions would wait until we were alone in the classroom before sharing intimate details. Juan, whose parents come from the Dominican Republic but was born and bred in Norway, stated: Don’t get me wrong. I love Norway and had plans to represent the country in athletics when this Norwegian woman, a total stranger, came up to me and told me that I would never be accepted as a Norwegian. (Juan, 17-year-old male) Left despondent by this episode, this interviewee has since always responded that he is from the Dominican Republic. Fredrik Barth’s (1969, p. 167) observation that boundaries are ‘fluid and permeable’ but also situationally contingent and hence subject to constant negotiation is consonant with the process that leads these students to embrace what has been called a ‘third space’ of becoming (Soja 1996). For Stuart Hall (1997), identities that are rooted in ‘nationalist’ discourse are questionable in a global world characterised by migration, diaspora and cultural hybridity, while he simultaneously is not averse to the progressive role that the national-popular can play. In accordance with Hall (1997), however, the participants in this study appear to be struggling to find a place within a national identity that is currently perceived in essentialist terms. A participant, who self-identified as a Somali, pointed out one example of this: My affinity towards Norway has undergone some changes since I moved back after a few years in the UK in 2011. While in England I felt a connection with Norway, since I was born and brought up in western Norway. Since I returned, I feel less Norwegian. The rhetoric of politicians, the language and agenda of the media, all this makes people with immigrant backgrounds feel less Norwegian, although we are actually Norwegians. (Ahmed, 19-year-old male) When asked to elaborate, the participant alluded to the rise of the right-wing Progress Party, which is currently in a coalition government and the devastating attacks perpetrated by the Islamophobic terrorist Anders Behring Breivik, who ruthlessly murdered seventy-seven people. The participant further shared: ‘Whenever we are mentioned, it is only as a problem’. Contextualised in this way, what the participant is saying sheds light on important developments in what is now considered ‘acceptable’ rhetoric in the Norwegian political landscape. International trends – such as the rise of the political far right in the West in general, increased labour mobility and visible cultural/ethnic diversity – are perceived as a threat to national identity. In the Norwegian context, for example, these social transformations are seen as a threat to the national ideal ‘imagined sameness’ (Gullestad 2002). This clearly impacts on and limits these young and impressionable students’ possible

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identity constructions. Gilroy (1999) uses the metaphor of ‘camps’ in writing about the dilemma of belonging for non-Westerners: The idea of diaspora becomes significant here. I have used it to conjure up an altogether different cultural ecology. It introduces the possibility of an historical and experiential rift between the location of residence and the location of belonging. Diaspora demands the recognition of interculture. The complex and ambivalent identifications it promotes exist outside and sometimes in opposition to the political forms and codes of modern citizenship in its debased, camp form. (Gilroy 1999, p. 190) When pressed to specify precisely how the recent rise of the right-wing Progress Party has affected their sense of belonging to Norway, some students spoke of the pressure to ignore the culture of their parents – what Gilroy (1999) calls ‘the recognition of interculture’ (p. 190). There is a sense in which they feel certain politicians pressuring them to assimilate into the ‘camp’ of the mainstream at the expense of their parents’ culture. Goffman (1963, p. 16) considers stigma ‘an ideology of inferiority’. Stigma and stereotype function together as arbiters in the encounter between the normal and abnormal. The responses highlight some of the ways in which these students from minority backgrounds cope with stigma understood as attributes that are deeply discrediting (Goffman 1963). In what follows, we will consider some of the boundaries erected by these students. Of significance is the finding that some of the students opted to enrol in this school despite having secured admission to schools that were higher up the ‘league table’. Although there are no official league tables in Norway, Oslo Municipality2 keeps a publicly accessible record of each school’s performance (for example, the average intake scores and the dropout/completion rates). When asked why they enrolled in this school despite its poor reputation, one student referred to an incident that had drawn international attention: ‘I used to attend Bjerke High School in Oslo, but I changed to East High. I like this school because it is a multicultural school (Abdul, 17-year-old male)’. The other high school that this student of Iraqi ethnicity referred to was embroiled in a scandal in 2011 when students were segregated into classrooms according to ethnicity in the hope of forestalling the haemorrhaging of white students, who were down to 30 per cent (Wilden 2011). Only when students of all backgrounds united in a show of force, along with support from academics and the international media (Orange 2011; Ohemeng 2011), did the leadership nip this pigmentocratic policy in the bud. In a bizarre twist, the former head of the city’s school boards, Robert Wright, publicly defended this school’s policy: ‘Bjerke School has come up with a radical solution to a real problem, but the politicians have just said “no”’ (Orange 2011). East High, then, is the antithesis of schools like Bjerke – a bulwark against the forces of bigotry that seek to recreate a pre-Brown v. Board of Education schooling landscape in Norway. Brown v. Board (1954) was the US Supreme Court ruling which declared the

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earlier Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) decision permitting state-sponsored segregation of public schools unconstitutional. While this was welcomed by the Civil Rights Movement, the failure to explicitly spell out how this would be enforced along with persistent inequitable distribution of resources and segregationist violence ‘ultimately rendered Brown’s egalitarianism more symbolic than real’ (Gaines 2004, p. 21). When probed further, the students unanimously perceived that ‘Islamophobia’ was at the heart of decisions such as that of Bjerke High School. It is a thinly veiled fact that much of the xenophobia that has resulted in drastic measures like the one at Bjerke have piggybacked on the global rise of Islamophobia, particularly post-9/11. According to one representative study, 23 per cent of Norwegians responded that they would dislike having a Muslim as a friend (Bangstad & Døving 2015, p. 92). The exponential rise of individuals adhering to Islam – a 48 per cent rise in members receiving state aid between 2006 and 2016 (Statistics Norway 2016) – has fed into notions of ‘sneak’ or ‘covert islamisation’ of Norway (Thomas & Selimovic 2015). The UK-based race equality think tank Runnymede Trust (1997) defines Islamophobia as fear, hatred or hostility towards Islam, Islamic culture and Muslims. Of significance is the Trust’s statement that ‘Islamophobia can result in Muslims experiencing discrimination in education, employment, housing and delivery of goods and services, as well as a lack of provisions and respect for Muslims in public institutions’ (Runnymede Trust 1997). Clearly, this appears to be the case when promising students, mainly from Muslim backgrounds, feel unwelcome in schools like Bjerke and settle for much less attractive schools such as East High. Sayyid and Vakil (2017, n.p.) compare the 1997 and 2017 Runnymede Trust reports on Islamophobia; while commending the 2017 report for defining Islamophobia as anti-Muslim racism, they argue that ‘the volume makes little effort to engage let alone convey or build upon the mounting and increasingly diverse body of academic scholarship on Islamophobia produced across the world’. They further argue that Islamophobia cannot simply be taken as a ‘euphemism for bigotry’; rather, ‘Islamophobia belongs to the genre of racism understood as racialised governmentality’ (Sayyid & Vakil 2017, n.p.). Our study at East High evinces several commonalities with Sayyid and Vakil’s (2017) arguments. Not only were Muslim students in the majority in most classrooms (for example, twenty-four of twenty-seven in the final year self-identified as Muslims), but they often made statements which revealed solidarity with the global Muslim community, which they believed was the victim of Islamophobia. In keeping with Sayyid and Vakil’s (2017) contention, these students were less concerned about the etymology of Islamophobia and more about its tangible effects upon their lives, such as the attempt at segregation of students at Bjerke, which a Norwegian Professor of Law, Henning Jakhelln, called ‘Apartheid’ (Wilden 2011). Following Sayyid and Vakil (2017), the professor’s indignation is laudable but imprecise because the leadership at Bjerke school deliberately targeted students from Muslim backgrounds, who are the overwhelming majority in the catchment area. It should be

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called Islamophobia. The discussion about Bjerke school also convinced some students that the time was perhaps ripe for Norway to be open to Muslim schools (see Thomas 2017). The next section employs Wimmer’s (2013) ‘contraction’ and ‘blurring’ as a useful heuristic to situate student’s boundary-making strategies. A social boundary, according to Wimmer (2013), is enacted when boundary is employed both as a categorical and behavioural dimension. It is in the confluence of the two – the script provided and the interaction between ‘us’ and ‘them’ – that social boundaries are created. The aim is to explore what social boundaries students appropriate in constructing representations advantageous to their self-image.

Contracting and blurring In classroom discussions about notions of belonging, we registered that almost none of the students could bring themselves to say unequivocally that they were Norwegians despite having been born and bred in Norway. Nearly all reported that they spoke Norwegian most of the time, even with their parents and were not sufficiently embedded in the cultures of their parents. I was born in Oslo. My parents are originally from Kosovo. I’m raised with a mix of the Norwegian and the Albanian culture. I have lived in Norway my entire life, but I have never felt Norwegian. In the summer vacation, my family and I always travel to Kosovo, but the Albanian people say, ‘Here is the Norwegian girl’. So I have never felt Norwegian nor Albanian. People look at me in Norway and think that I am an ethnic Norwegian girl. However, I feel more like an Albanian than Norwegian. (Nora, 16-year-old female) While we as teachers and researchers sought to ‘affirm’ these students’ rightful place and identification with Norway, the students seemed to be understandably more concerned to ‘disidentify’ with this particular pre-assigned category. For instance, each time the lead author (who was known to many of the students, having been head class teacher for some and subject teacher for others) emphatically stated that the students were Norwegians, none of the students could bring themselves to agree. Responses on the whole suggested that the students did not feel that Norway was genuinely ready to expand the notion of ‘Norwegian-ness’ to non-Western immigrants, especially those from Muslim backgrounds. Research conducted by Habib (2017) in the United Kingdom similarly shows young ethnically diverse people describing Britishness as exclusionary and racialised. Wimmer (2013) defines ‘contraction’ as a strategy of narrowing boundaries with the aim of ‘disidentifying with the category one is assigned to by outsiders’ (p. 55). This, according to Wimmer (2013), is achieved through fission – a rupture of an existing category – or opting for more precise nuances in multitiered systems of ethnic classification. Nora, originally from Albania, is phenotypically

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Nordic but was observed during the early days of the study strenuously emphasising her Albanian heritage. What emerges is a pattern of identity construction at East High that appears to begin with these students initially divesting themselves of attributes associated with mainstream ‘Norwegian-ness’, followed by efforts to reassure themselves that they are embedded, however ambivalently, in a foreign/ home culture. This exercise, where students disinvest themselves of ‘Norwegian-ness’ and identify with their parents’ culture, is consistent with Guibernau’s (2013) contention that ‘self-identity is constructed both through belonging and through exclusion – as a choice or as imposed by others’ (p. 26). Loaded descriptions, such as the aforementioned utlending, served to exclude and simultaneously provide the impetus for a new identity construction alongside other students with similar experiences in Oslo. East High, then, has been transformed into an arena of empowerment where this quest for a sense of belonging is in keeping with Guibernau’s (2013) observation that ‘Once a strong or influential community or group has accepted the individual as a member, his or her own self-identity melts into the mould of the new “we” identity’ (p. 30). While other studies have found that ‘minority members tended to be less glad to belong to their in-group than were majority members’ (Brewer & Hewstone 2004, p. 283), it appears that schools such as East High furnish a haven where oppressed identities can undergo a transvaluation from disempowerment to empowerment. We argue that East High functioned as a ‘third space’ (see also Robb et al. 2015) where low-status/ oppressed identities were not perceived as something to be ashamed of but carried as a badge of honour. For some students, ethnicity and ‘Norwegian-ness’ were jettisoned in favour of a religious identity – mainly Muslim. ‘First and foremost, I am a Muslim’ was a common refrain among these participants. This is what Wimmer (2013) refers to as ‘blurring strategies’. The ethnic category is swapped for a non-ethnic one. Wimmer (2013, p. 59) provides the example of multi-ethnic cliques of adolescents in Britain. In other words, the clique takes on greater significance than the individual member’s ethnic group, which is ‘blurred’. For the students at East High, a ‘divinely sanctioned’, transcendent Muslim identity appeared to shore up the confining and excluding boundaries drawn up by mainstream Norwegian society. Zehra, a 17-year-old female, pointed to her skin colour and said, ‘My religion does not discriminate against this’. This statement followed a prolonged discussion about the degree to which, to borrow verbatim from Amina (18-yearold Norwegian-Moroccan female), ‘the red, white and blue of the Norwegian flag colours are mature enough to swallow up every shade of brown and black of the over 600,000 new sons and daughters of Norway’. Another student was concerned about the blue cross on the flag and added, ‘Is there room someday for the crescent also?’ (Farzaad, Afghani background, 18-year-old male), which drew many laughs and smiles in the classroom. The above exchange led us to conclude that for some of these students, who were persuaded that the notion of ‘Norwegian-ness’ carried an ethnosomatic (i.e. white)

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aspect, Islam offered a more secure haven. In such blurring strategies, religion’s appeal lies in its simple demarcation between ‘believers’ and ‘non-believers’, as opposed to the perceived complexities of negotiating a ‘Norwegian’ identity. Not all Muslims feel like this, but it appears to be the case with some of our students. When asked whether she was Norwegian, Fatima (17-year-old NorwegianMoroccan female), who wore a hijab, stated: I would never answer that I am Norwegian if someone asked me where I was from. One thing which does not confuse me is my religion. Although I am born in a Christian country, I am confident that I am a Muslim. I am born and bred in a Muslim family and have been conscious of this since childhood. This is not just something I have been groomed into saying. Now as an adult who can make up her own mind, and can make decisions, I have examined the religion I have called ‘mine’ and concluded that it is true Fatima’s statement, ‘I have examined the religion I have called “mine”’ bears testimony to religion’s ability to enhance self-esteem and dissipate the miasma of national membership, which is fraught with debate and hurdles for this student. Another stated: I am a 17-year-old boy from Afghanistan. My religion is Islam. I used to attend Bjerke High School in Oslo, but I changed to East High. I like this school because it is a multicultural school. The school has many different students from all over the world. Here we all respect each other regardless of your country of origin. (Mehmet, 18-year-old male) Again, religion appears to be Mehmet’s main identity marker. Significantly, Mehmet is in favour of multiculturalism, which would include diverse faith traditions, but elevates his adherence to Islam as preeminent. During the course of two English lessons in two different classes, eleven out of seventeen students in one class and fourteen out of seventeen in the other supported the proposition: ‘Should females wearing niqabs (religious facial covering) be permitted to enrol in teacher training colleges?’ It came as a surprise to the minority-background students in the class that the only female student who identified as ‘ethnically Norwegian’ supported the proposition: ‘I agree with the class, it should be an individual choice’. The prelude to the discussion above was an English text about the importance of body language such as facial expression, gesture and body posture in oral communication. The place of niqabs in the public space has attracted much debate and rancour nationwide, resulting in a ban on their use in some colleges and all upper secondary schools. However, these students’ attitudes appear to be shaped by a perception of ‘Islamophobia’ among the majority. Mustafa, a 16-year-old male of Kurdish origin, said, ‘It’s not just the niqab. Why have they banned Muslim prayer rooms in Ulsrud High School?’ This high school, also in Oslo, made

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national headlines in 2011 when many of its Muslim students and the school leadership were locked in a heated debate about the allocation of a prayer room. NrK, the national broadcasting company, reported: ‘After the students at Ulsrud High School were denied permission to pray in the school’s premises, the students had to be content with a parking lot near the school’ (Nordlie et al. 2011). The report went on to register complaints about students freezing in the winter while praying in the parking lot. At East High, the students have been praying in the school basement for years; when journalists brought this to light, however, it stirred a heated discussion among politicians, with one prominent politician threatening to scupper budget negotiations if East High and other Oslo schools were permitted to establish prayer rooms (Hvidsten 2012). In the face of such perceived affronts to a salient dimension of their overall identity construction, these students engage in blurring strategies where religion is co-opted to re-build self-esteem and ward off secular forces. In this sense, religion can be said to play an anti-hegemonic role. The alienating effects of a postmodern world, or what Zygmunt Bauman (2000) calls ‘liquid modernity’, where affiliations are dispersed, ephemeral and fragile, coupled with a general hardening of attitudes towards Islam in the aftermath of 9/11, are dislodged by students’ recruitment of an explicit Muslim identity. The concept of ummah is germane in this regard. This is the transnational Muslim ‘imagined community’ (Anderson 2006) which transcends local parochialism.

Conclusion This chapter has explored issues of identity and belonging among minority-background students in one ‘multicultural’ high school in Oslo, Norway. The findings are salient for studies that explore a reconfiguration of majority–minority relations in a growing number of schools (Butler 2019). Faced with a media, political and mainstream discourse which excludes and delegitimises vital aspects of their identities, these students perceive East High as ‘their’ school, one where they can go about the task of rebuilding their self-esteem with other stigmatised fellow students from roughly similar backgrounds. In particular, we have explored what has been called the ideal of ‘imagined sameness’ (Gullestad 2002), a discourse that eschews difference and non-conformity in Norway, in grappling with notions of belonging among these youths. What emerges in a school like ‘East High’ is, we argue, a space for developing a ‘new identity’, a third space terrain which is uncharted. Strategies such as contraction, where they disidentify from the tainted labels applied by the majority (e.g. utlending) and blurring, where students reinforce their fidelity to more powerful categories like religion, were the main boundary-making strategies employed. The study challenges stakeholders in education to go beyond platitudes such as ‘inclusion’ and ‘a school for all’ and grapple with some of the reasons for the attractiveness of schools such as East High. Some of the reasons that crystallised in our findings – e.g. policies of intentional ‘ethnic segregation’ in schools such as Bjerke – ought to be monitored and confronted rather than expending money and

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effort to explore ways to de-segregate schools in boroughs in the east and south that are increasingly minority-dominated. Politicians have debated ‘coerced busing’ of students to ‘whiter’ schools in the west, following the example of Denmark (Hagesæther 2013), but were slow to uncover the not-so-subtle ethnic segregation at Bjerke in 2011, which enjoyed the support of some (e.g. the former city councillor for Oslo). Clearly, the intermittent media reports about the continuing disparity between east and west Oslo are a major concern for a country that has long prided itself in being egalitarian. The magnitude of the challenges ahead, of which East High is symptomatic, throw down the gauntlet to the authorities to abandon the naïve belief that an assimilationist policy that earmarks money to eliminate ‘unwanted’ behaviour is the way forward.

Notes 1 In 2004, the total number of upper secondary students with an ‘immigrant’ background in Norway – the focus of this study – was 13,800 (8% nationally). In 2013, this student cohort stood at 22,300, comprising a 52 per cent increase over the course of just four years (2009–2013) (Thomas, Changezi & Enstad 2016, p. 213). 2 Available at minOsloskole.no

References Akerhaug, L. 2012, ‘47 prosent innvandrere i Oslo i 2040: Advarer om ghettotilstander (47 per cent immigrants in Oslo in 2040: Warning about ghetto conditions)’, VG, 14 March, . Anderson, B. 2006, Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism, revised edn, Verso, London. Bangstad, S. & Døving, C.A. 2015, Hva er rasisme? (What is racism?), Universitetsforlaget, Oslo. Barth, F. 1969, Ethnic groups and boundaries: The social organization of culture difference, Universitetsforlaget, Oslo. Bauman, Z. 2000, Liquid modernity, Polity Press, Cambridge. Brewer, M.B. & Hewstone, M.E. 2004, Self and social identity, Blackwell, Oxford. Butler, R. 2019, ‘Local and refugee youth in rural Australia: Negotiating intercultural relationships and belonging in rural places’, in S. Habib & M.R.M. Ward (eds.), Youth, place and theories of belonging, Routledge, Oxford, pp. 147–159. Djuve, A.B. & Hagen, K. 1995, Skaff meg en jobb! Levekår blant flyktninger i Oslo (Get me a job! Living conditions among refugees in Oslo), Fafo, Oslo. Ellingsen, D. 2012, ‘Ikke bare i Groruddalen’, Nordic Studies in Education, no. 3–4, pp. 82–86. Engebrigtsen, A.I. & Fuglerud, Ø. 2009, Kultur og generasjon: tilpasningsprosesser blant somaliere og tamiler i Norge, niversitetsforlag, Oslo. Gaines, K. 2004, ‘Whose integration was it? An introduction’, The Journal of American History, vol. 91, no. 1, pp. 19–25. Gilroy, P. 1999, ‘Race and culture in postmodernity’, Economy and Society, vol. 28, no. 2, pp. 183–197.

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Goffman, E. 1963, Stigma: Notes on the management of a spoiled identity, Simon and Shuster, New York. Guibernau, M. 2013, Belonging: Solidarity and division in modern societies, Polity Press, Cambridge. Gullestad, M. 2002, ‘Invisible fences: Egalitarianism, nationalism and racism’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, vol. 8, pp. 45–63. Habib, S. 2017, Learning and teaching British values: Policies and perspectives on British identities, Palgrave, Cham. Hagesæther, P.V. 2013, ‘Tvangsbusses til bedre dansk (Bused by force to better Danish)’, Aftenpoten, 14 August, . Hall, S. 1997, ‘The local and the global: Globalization and ethnicity’, Cultural Politics, vol. 11, pp. 173–187. Hall, S. 1996, ‘Introduction: Who needs “identity”?’, in S. Hall & P. Du Gay (eds.), Questions of cultural identity, Sage, London, pp. 1–17. Hvidsten, I. 2012, ‘Ønsker ikke bønnerom (Do not want a prayer room)’, Dagsavisen, 12 September, . LeCompte, M.D., Tesch, R. & Goetz, J.P. 1993, Ethnography and qualitative design in educational research, Academic Press, New York. Nordlie, T.G., Melby, A., Hansen, A.H. & Lie, K.K. 2011, ‘Skoleelever ber på parkeringsplass (School students pray in the parking lot)’, NRK, 18 November, . Ohemeng, J. 2011, ‘Angrer segregering av elever’, Utrop, . Orange, R. 2011, ‘Norwegian school’s segregation sparks racism row’, News Europe, 26 November, . Robb, M., Featherstone, B., Ruxton, S. & Ward, M.R.M. 2015, Beyond male role models: Gender identities and work with young men, Open University and Action for Children, Milton Keynes, UK. Runnymede Trust 1997, Islamophobia: A challenge for us all, Runnymede Trust, London. Sayyid, S. & Vakil, A. 2017, ‘Reports of Islamophobia: 1997 and 2017’, ReOrient Blog, 17 November, . Soja, E.W. 1996, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and other real-and-imagined places, Blackwell, Cambridge, MA. Statistics Norway 2017, Immigrants and Norwegian-born to immigrant parents, 1 January, . Statistics Norway 2016, Religious communities and life stance communities, . Sundell, T. 2008, ‘“Hvit flukt” blant norske barnefamilier i Oslo? En kvantitativ studie (“White flight” among Norwegian parents in Oslo? A quantitative study)’, Master’s thesis, University of Oslo, Norway. Thomas, P. 2017, ‘The call for Muslim schools in Norway’, Nordic Studies in Education, vol. 37, no. 3–4, pp. 166–182. Thomas, P., Changezi, S.H. & Enstad, M. 2016, ‘Third space epistemologies: Ethnicity and belonging in an “immigrant”-dominated upper secondary school in Norway’, Improving Schools, vol. 19, no. 3, pp. 212–228.

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Thomas, P. & Selimovic, A. 2015, ‘“Sharia on a plate?” A critical discourse analysis of halal food in two Norwegian newspapers’, Journal of Islamic Marketing, vol. 6, no. 3, pp. 331–353. doi:10.1108/JIMA-05-2014-0041 Wilden, V. 2011, ‘Deler inn elevene etter etnisitet’, Nrk Østlandssendingen, 24 November, . Wimmer, A. 2013, Ethnic boundary making: Institutions, power, networks, Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Chapter 12

Local and refugee youth in rural Australia Negotiating intercultural relationships and belonging in rural places Rose Butler

Background Regional and rural Australian towns (referred to hereafter as ‘rural’) are commonly recognised as having become both increasing ethnically diverse (Jordon, Krivokapic-Skoko & Collins 2009) and economically divided (McLachlan, Gilfillan & Gordon 2013). A wide range of visa categories for humanitarian entrants, skilled workers, family members, working holiday makers and students have seen adults and young people from diverse ethnic backgrounds settle across a wider area of the country (Hugo 2014). These new migration patterns are central to the nation’s population strategy and migration reforms, to alleviating rural population decline and to the pursuit of rural economic and social stability (Hugo 2014; Boese & Phillips 2017). They have also led to increasing levels of cultural and linguistic diversity across Australia’s rural communities (Forrest & Dunn 2013; Schech 2014; Connell & Dufty-Jones 2014). For young people, this rural social change coalesces with significant place-based inequalities in resource distribution, with new settlement taking place within areas of existing high economic stress, insecurity and intergenerational poverty (Butler 2016). In such contexts, intercultural mixing among youth from diverse backgrounds may take place under conditions of marginalisation, economic precarity and intergenerational poverty, all of which present significant challenges to youth social cohesion. This chapter examines negotiations of intercultural relationships among youth from ‘local’ and ‘refugee’ backgrounds in rural Australia. Drawing on theories from everyday multiculturalism (Wise 2009, 2014) as well as class culture and rurality (Bryant & Pini 2009), I argue for the need to examine young people’s own processes for negotiating rural diversity from the ground up, within their situated intercultural histories and local forms of belonging and to consider how these inform social classed, raced and gendered identities. As Butcher and Harris (2010) argue in their research on everyday multiculturalism among urban youth, young people from refugee and non-refugee backgrounds who interact regularly are often those most likely to be living in lowincome marginalised neighbourhoods. As a result, these young people are negotiating immense and rapid change while having the least access to the opportunities

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that such global movement enables. Such negotiations are particularly acute in rural Australia. Rural communities are systemically under-resourced compared to their urban counterparts and experience higher levels of disadvantage across the board than in urban Australia (McLachlan, Gilfillan & Gordon 2013). In such places, disadvantages may include a lack of access to basic services, outmigration, business closures and the regionalisation or withdrawal of services, all of which culminate in an unequal distribution of resources across education and employment (Cuervo & Wyn 2012; Farrugia 2014). While impacts of such changes vary depending on local economic and environmental histories, young people in rural areas face enormous geographic inequalities as a result (Farrugia 2014). Given the social and economic transformations taking place among youth in rural communities, there is a pressing need to understand how young people from diverse backgrounds recognise, negotiate and connect with others in underresourced cultural environments in ways which enable local forms of belonging. Growing scholarship has examined multiculturalism, place making and belonging among adults in rural communities comprised of high numbers of humanitarian settlers and migrants, drawing attention to sources of affiliation, discomfort and racism within such community contexts (e.g. Schech 2014; Radford 2016; Boese & Phillips 2017). For example, research has considered the capacity of local communities to accommodate ethnic changes and to welcome new arrivals into existing rural communities (Forrest & Dunn 2013; Schech 2014; Radford 2016). As Forrest and Dunn (2013) surmise, the construction of a distinctive rural community, people’s socio-economic backgrounds and the nature of the ethnic mix present among immigrant newcomers will all affect how welcoming and tolerant a community can be. Schech (2014) likewise argues that some country towns and cities are working to ‘challenge the image of a white, mono-cultural and xenophobic regional Australia’ (p. 611) by adopting their own cultural diversity policies which draw on local multicultural histories, networks and organisations in forging new bastions of community support. The ‘context of reception’ for refugees in rural communities plays a vital role in shaping the capacities of locals to welcome newcomers, as well as the settlement experiences of refugees themselves. For example, the Greater Shepparton City Council has claimed to be ‘a vibrant, cohesive society’ based on cultural diversity and projects a welcoming attitude towards migrants (Schech 2014, p. 605). The growing body of adult-focused scholarship on rural intercultural relationships and community cohesion invites a fresh and related research agenda on the negotiation of difference and belonging among rural youth. Scholarship on rural livelihoods, particularly rural youth, frequently takes places either through flyin-fly-out interviews or phone interviews and quantitative data collection. Such methods on their own can obscure the complexities and ground-up orientation of children’s and young people’s intercultural lives in context. They can also lend themselves to a deficit model within broader depictions of rural decline. In education, for example, as Corbett (2015) discerns, research which has dealt with the intersection of rurality and education rarely takes place within rural spaces. This

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leads to abstracted analyses of rural ‘underperformance’ and essentially focuses on what is not in young people lives from the standpoint of middle-class urban expectations and experiences rather than what is (Forsey 2015 and see also Cominos, Caldwell & Gloede 2019). Nor can fly-in-fly-out interviews and quantitative data collection methods account for how young people’s negotiation of new intercultural relationships draws on local cultural resources and already existing intercultural relationships in sites of increasing diversity, as highlighted by Schech and others (Butler 2018). Recognising existing multicultural capacities, as well as existing racism and prejudices in rural areas, is crucial to understand the negotiation of intercultural relationships in the present, given that rural Australian places are already sites of diversity. Even in regions where the population is primarily ‘white’, Australia’s rural communities have been shaped by settler colonial relations (Cowlishaw 2004) and Indigenous and white/Anglo identities have always been co-constituted (Povinelli 1993). Many rural areas also have long histories of informal migrant and refugee settlement, often in response to employment and agricultural manufacturing opportunities (Jordon, Krivokapic-Skoko & Collins 2009). Recognising these longstanding, situated multicultural histories is crucial in how we conceptualise the reciprocal work of belonging among young people from local and refugee backgrounds in rural places.

Rural youth negotiating intercultural relationships and belonging in Australia In this chapter, I argue for the importance of everyday multicultural frameworks situated in place, in dialogue with theories of rurality and class culture and in how we make sense of young people’s negotiation of increasing rural diversity. These frameworks help excavate the work of young people to produce belonging within their everyday multicultural lives and how, as youth scholars stress, this is, in turn, reproduced and made anew within socially embedded circumstances (Nayak 2003; Back, Cohen & Keith 2008; Harris 2013). This chapter draws on empirical research which shifts away from attitudinal-based survey data to evidence of everyday lived engagement produced through long-term ethnographic research with children from refugee and non-refugee backgrounds in one rural Australian city. Research on ‘everyday multiculturalism’ more broadly examines how people from different backgrounds constantly negotiate their coexistence through routinised encounters with Others, notably in sites conducive to engagement with difference such as schools, neighbourhoods and workplaces (Amin 2002; Habib 2008; Wise 2009, 2014; Wise & Velayutham 2009; Noble 2013; Harris 2013; Wyn, Cuervo & Cook 2019). An everyday multiculturalism lens prioritises people’s capacities to live together while recognising and locating negotiations, conflict, hostilities and racism, all of which may coexist in sites of diversity (Wise 2009). Such sociability may include shared sensibilities which can coexist with a

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range of conflicting and contradictory perspectives and practices (Glick Schiller, Darieva & Gruner-Domic 2011). This is not to negate the conflicts and hostilities that may arise in such places, nor the everyday racism (Essed 1991) and incivilities (Noble & Poynting 2010) experienced by migrants and refugees in these spaces, or to presume harmonious relations. Nor is it to deny the complex ‘ethnicracial socialisation processes’ through which racist attitudes develop (Priest et al. 2016, p. 809). Rather, this theoretical focus on the everyday has stressed the ‘situatedness’ of encounter and engagement with others, and the conditions which underpin people’s ‘capacities to act’ in relation to difference (Noble 2011). This ‘everyday’ pertains to that which is lived, embodied and negotiated in everyday contexts. Making this the site of inquiry enables us to move beyond pre-forced biases in how people engage with difference, and in how we interpret social praxis (Wise & Velayutham 2009; Noble 2009). Rather, the negotiation of such relations and how they can work to normalise differences and enable openness to others is emphasised (Noble 2013). Scholars of young people’s ‘everyday multiculturalisms’ likewise stress the quotidian strategies of youth to negotiate challenges and opportunities of globalisation and diversity, including those brought about through migration and mobility (Butcher & Harris 2010; Noble & Poynting 2010; Harris 2013). Youth from diverse backgrounds have been shown to grapple with questions of citizenship, national identity, belonging and community through their everyday engagement with others in shared social spaces (Butcher & Harris 2010; de Finney 2010; Noble & Poynting 2010; Harris 2013; Stahl & Habib 2017; Habib 2018). Again, this is not to pursue a story of ‘easy conviviality’ (Neal et al. 2013) but to recognise how everyday multiculturalisms both amplify vulnerabilities and inequities at the same time as they create new avenues for resistance, solidarities and pathways to belonging among youth (de Finney 2010). Focussing on practices and capacities thus means paying attention to the specific ‘contextual’ and ‘situated’ logics which underpin practices of recognition among youth (Noble 2009). Noble (2009) provides examples of ‘respect’ and ‘honour’ here, dispositions which are often obscured by a pre-determined scholarly focus on common categories of difference such as class and gender. Pre-determined identity categories, Noble continues, may be unable to account for the diverse contexts that young people actually inhabit and recreate in everyday life. It may be that other logics have greater potential to inform our understanding of youth identity and sociality in sites of diversity (Noble 2015). Starting with this sort of ‘messiness’ of young lives, Noble (2009) contends, enables a different take on an array of cultural forms and this requires paying attention to ‘different kinds of recognition that revolve around legitimacy and competence’ (p. 876). Examining such pedagogical sources of selfhood can reveal ways that young people live with and negotiate the routine complexity of difference in everyday life at the scale of the local (Noble 2009). Importantly, this approach can enable us to find ways to recognise and articulate these domains of commonality which emerge in specific places (Glick Schiller & Çağlar 2016). As Butcher and Harris (2010) further contend,

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questions of belonging and community, as well as citizenship and national identity, are worked over in a myriad of ways among young people of diverse backgrounds in everyday life, which in turn become forms of everyday citizenship within multicultural sites (Butcher & Harris 2010; Harris 2013). This chapter builds on this scholarship on young people’s everyday multiculturalism to examine negotiations of intercultural relationships among youth from ‘local’ and ‘refugee’ backgrounds in rural Australia. Drawing on theories from everyday multiculturalism, as well as class culture and rurality, I argue for the need to examine children’s own processes for negotiating difference in rural places from the ground up within their situated intercultural histories and local forms of belonging. Working with ethnographic data, I show how children draw on local cultural resources in their situated negotiation of such ‘difference’ in ways which are embedded in their access to local classed cultural resources. These ‘domains of commonality’ can be seen to emerge in these specific sites (Glick Schiller & Çağlar 2016), highlighting local coalescing sources of conviviality with prejudices which appear to underpin recognition and affiliation as well as everyday racism.

The research This chapter draws on ethnographic research with children, including participant observations, interviews and research activities, undertaken over eighteen months in the rural Australian town of ‘Riverstone’.1 Riverstone, while located within a region of longstanding cultural diversity, is home to many newly arrived immigrants from the Middle East, Central Asia and Africa. The fieldwork consisted of ongoing participant observations in children’s schools and homes, semi-structured interviews with children and adults and visual media research methods with children. Sixty-three children between the ages of 8 and 13 participated in an interview, and many were interviewed twice over the course of the research. Forty-six parents and a further twenty professionals, including teachers, were also interviewed. Several of these interviews were undertaken with parents and children who attended neighbouring primary schools, both ‘public’ (government schools) and ‘private’ (non-government/‘independent’ schools), or who were in Year 7 in high school. This range provided a greater perspective on the diversity of this social landscape for children and families in Riverstone and supplemented the primary ethnographic research I undertook within two public primary school communities, Inner North and Redfield. During observations, I sat in on classrooms, joined in with games, listened to informal conversations, attended school excursions and initiated group discussions. I supplemented observations and interviews with data drawn from children’s own creative outputs in stories, photographs and drawings and initiated visual research activities. Where permitted by the children themselves, I read their schoolwork, school journal entries and creative stories. The data both revealed and signposted many ways in which local racism towards ‘refugees’ impacted significantly on the capacity of young people to forge

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and maintain inclusion in different social situations. This included overt criticism of ‘refugees’ from ‘local’ white/Anglo students, such as during a Year 5/6 class debate over a proposed Australia – Malaysia asylum seeker deal when Bronwyn, a 12-year-old girl from a white/Anglo background, called out, ‘I don’t think it’s fair Malaysia gets to send their people here!’ Or when Shane, a ten-year-old boy from a white/Anglo background asked me pointedly, ‘You know like refugees? And how they keep coming into Australia? There’s too many of them’ (Butler 2016). The young people in my research from non-white/Anglo backgrounds communicated that such overt racism increased once they attended high school, shadowing experiences among refugee youth more broadly in Australia (Gifford, CorreaVelez & Sampson 2009). For example, Hakim’s parents were concerned about how Hakim would fare with racism once in high school. Aged 10 when I first met him, Hakim’s parents anticipated he would have a much more challenging and distressing experience at their locally zoned high school than his sister, Sanaa. As his mother, Farrah, relayed, ‘Sanaa, she was ok because she is tough. Not tough like punch someone, but strong’, whereas Hakim was ‘sensitive’. Farrah went on to describe how Sanaa had often used her formal state citizenship as a means of security (Nunn et al. 2016), explaining, ‘if someone says something [to Sanaa] she says something back fast. . . . A boy says to her “Go back to your own country!” and she says straight away, “This is my country! I have citizenship!”’ Sanaa herself stressed that ‘students in the towns, small towns like Riverstone, have no idea what we went through . . . they’re shocked when they hear where I came from’. She had become involved in a group within her high school which focussed on educating students about the lives of refugees, explaining how they ‘went to other schools to speak’ about what they had experienced before moving to Riverstone. My research within two primary school communities showed racism and prejudice towards refugees to be less overtly expressed at this age than that which Saana experienced in high school. More evident were the moments in which children nattered over anecdotes about ‘refugees’ that they heard in the playground, picked up in media and from family networks, or when the topic was raised during class as mentioned above. Some children from white/Anglo backgrounds engaged in the negative tropes of ‘refugees’ in Riverstone, connecting refugee arrivals to ‘taking our land’ and questions of ‘fairness’. Such talk also encompassed far more subtle, nuanced and powerful indicators of who did and did not belong. As I argue elsewhere (Butler 2018), there appeared to be a common local lexicon around which such young people engaged to shore up belonging in particular social settings, which enabled them to identify with local white/Anglo claims to nationalism and belonging. My fieldwork notes recorded such iterations alongside the contradictions of the lived reciprocities that developed among local white/Anglo children and children from non-white/Anglo refugee backgrounds which came with sharing social spaces of the classroom and playground, working together in group work and playing sport. These could be thought of as what Wise (2009) calls ‘micro-moral’ economies which evolve within spaces of everyday multiculturalism and routine encounters with ethnic difference. In my data, this was

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evident in the development and expression of care among such children, such as local children enthusiastically ‘looking after’ new arrivals and the dignity this afforded them among their friends (Butler 2016). Importantly, the ‘differences’ that local children afforded to those from refugee backgrounds were not solely racial, and nor was racism clear cut. Just as relevant were the ways in which belonging and recognition were parcelled out by children to one another through a currency of rural ‘localism’ (see Bryant & Pini 2009; Koch 2016), which was made clear through local classed cultural distinctions (Butler 2018). Being ‘local’ in Riverstone was built through shared childhoods, acceptance within family networks such as parents being friends and families socialising together in the past and present, histories of shared sport and community events and a local identity tied to knowing place. This included shared hardships and insecurities and knowing the lexicon to communicate such experiences. Being ‘local’ could also encompass being ‘a country kid’, ‘a blocky kid’, ‘growing up here’ and being from ‘here’. These forms of localism indicated an embodied understanding of certain facets of rural life, an embedding of self in social networks and histories of relatedness and in many respects were a rejection of urban elitism. Claiming or performing such identities had value and traction within rural childhoods and was a key means by which children sought to shore up feelings of belonging. Whiteness was a facet in such identities, and this was made clear by the ease with which new students from white/Anglo backgrounds not from Riverstone could fit into this local class culture (Butler 2018). However, this racialisation of local belonging was also not definitive – long histories of Southern European settlement in the region, as well as more recent Pacific migrant mobilities, have meant that a range of non-white/Anglo residents have long been afforded the recognition of being ‘local’ through their shared inhabitancy of the region and their working contribution to the region’s economy. Children from refugee backgrounds who could not use localism as a form of symbolic capital established alternate strategies to obscure economic hardship and shore up belonging within social contexts. Hakim, for example, made sure that his friends knew that he ‘worked’ for his pocket money, as ‘work’ was a significant source of local morality. ‘He tells me he wants to do it like this’, explained Farrah, ‘where you work and you get money . . . he wants to be like his friends’. Hakim continued, ‘my main work is my room, or if I see a cushion I might put it back on the couch or something’. ‘Or he might help his dad outside’, Farrah added, with both Hakim and Farrah indicating how local forms of recognition and valued identities among children were embedded in local sources of moral worth within these working-class rural childhoods. Sitting in his lounge room with his parents one evening, his mother Farrah outlining these recent exchanges, Hakim described himself as ‘the next version of Iraq’. As his hands made a sweeping gesture across the room to encompass his family, Hakim continued, ‘I’m different from that . . . I’m different to these people’ (Butler 2018). Akat, Sudanese Australian, aged 11 and also from a refugee background, also drew on locally recognised currencies to shore up feelings of belonging in her

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Riverstone childhood. For example, she frequently visited the local shopping centre and took advantage of the many classroom opportunities to demonstrate this knowledge. She drew on her ever-increasing knowledge of popular culture, music, TV shows, toys, food, movie stars and supermodels as strong forms of currency, reiterating names and events and mobilising this knowledge when it mattered. In such ways, she used facets of commercial cultures as a form of cultural currency, interpreted and reworked in a range of ways to connect with local children (Chin 2001). Belonging was derived not only from having the material goods required to belong but knowing the ‘tokens of dignity’ which mattered among children and how to re-use them appropriately (Pugh 2009, p. 59). This was evident in many of the social games Akat engineered, such as ‘wedding disasters’, which she and a classmate Kayla, aged 10 and from a white/Anglo background, designed during a period of friendship. ‘You have to bring a boy and a girl together to get married’, Kayla explained as they lined up outside the art classroom, ‘and then they have to break up. There’s a disaster’. Both Kayla and Akat burst out laughing at this depiction of their gameshow, an infusion of cultural influences with a nod towards American-influenced reality TV, the emotive language of Australia’s news culture and the everyday circumstances of family life in Riverstone (Butler 2018). Different forms of play among children, and the ways in which the bodies of rural children are socialised into gendered behaviours, also impacted on processes of acceptance and belonging between children from refugee backgrounds and ‘locals’. Alana, for example, aged 12, in Year 6 and born in Tanzania, spoke on several occasions of her desire to ‘play’ with other kids but felt prevented by the policing of her body and social interactions from local girls her own age. Having recently moved to Riverstone from a coastal city of NSW, Alana found it exceptionally difficult to break into the long-established, small-scale friend and family networks of the region. She lacked the highly valued local knowledge and relationships that local children from diverse ethnic backgrounds develop over their situated childhoods, as well as access to the media and commercial culture mobilised by Akat. She frequently directed our conversations over several months towards solving this issue, and we discussed a range of options she might pursue to forge friendships with others. One option she considered was playing sport, a core facet of identity construction among children in Riverstone and a common means by which young people from non-white/Anglo backgrounds signal a sense of ‘being in Australia’ (Noble 2015, p. 69; Harris 2013). In Riverstone, shared childhoods, which included local histories of shared sport and community events, strengthened local identities as tied to local places. For Alana, this was a largely unknown terrain within her family. ‘No one in my family is really into sport’, she surmised, ‘sometimes they watch the soccer [on TV]’. Nor was it affordable, as significant financial difficulties made Alana’s extracurricular activities a low priority for the family budget. In Alana’s primary school, Year 6 girls had also halted active ‘play’, as she saw it. In fact, this gendering of the playground was one of the main organising principles of the playground space (Karsten 2003), as it was in Alana’s settlement

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process and her social labour of belonging. Boys in Alana’s school monopolised the open spaces for running and playing, particularly the oval and by Year 4 began to occupy their chairs, library couches and spaces on the floor in ways that were quickly ‘normalised’ as correct and acceptable. This included leaning back and stretching out their arms and legs over wide spaces and, by Year 6, policing and admonishing girls who did the same (and by then few did). In such ways, boys learnt to extend themselves outwards both in classrooms and into the ‘public’ spaces of the school, particularly increasing control and command over spaces of the playground (Prendergast & Forrest 1998). Such performances, coupled with talk, emotional practices and use of the body, were seen to be an acceptable part of achieving a masculine identity (Pascoe 2007; Wignall 2019). These seemingly ‘normal’ daily interactions of male adolescence worked to ritualise interactions constituting masculinity among boys and to deny girls’ right to space (Pascoe 2007). Different forms of play also carried different demands from children’s bodies as they were socialised into powerful gendered expectations and behaviours throughout primary school. Alana spoke on several occasions of her desire to ‘play’ with other kids but felt restricted by the significant policing from girls her own age. As she explained one lunchtime: The Year 6s don’t play what I like to play. . . . I would like to play Tiggy but they don’t like to . . . they talk about stuff that I don’t know about . . . and then I don’t know what they’re talking about and they say ‘What?! You don’t know this person?!’ I asked Alana if playing with the younger kids would help her to make friends. Alana replied thoughtfully: Yeah, you can ask the younger kids to play . . . and they say yes, but then the Year 6s come up to you and say, ‘Why are you playing with the Year 3s!?’ . . . You can’t hang out with the preps for too long. You can’t play with them for long because other kids will say that you don’t have any friends and call you a baby. Alana’s experiences were particularly acute when contrasted with that of Malik, an 11-year-old boy in Year 5 at her school and also from a refugee background. Malik clearly experienced different pathways to inclusion through the opportunities that gender afforded. Like other children from recent refugee backgrounds, Malik was significantly economically marginalised compared to his classmates and worked hard to obscure signs of this poverty. However, while far less adept in his cultural and English language skills than Alana, Malik appeared to have a licence to play, run and join in with active and physical games that encouraged inclusion and fostered belonging. This also would have enabled him to gain perspective on dominant cultural images to increase a more nuanced and complex

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grasp of his cultural world (Thorne 1993) and, through such actions, Malik built trust and evident signs of friendship with his classmates.

Conclusion These brief examples are not cited here to deny or play down the reality of racism experienced by rural children from refugee backgrounds or to dismiss local children’s participation in racist rhetoric around ‘refugees’ (see Butler 2018). Rather, the focus is on the contradictions of such engagements and how we might excavate local sources of affinity and junctures in places from the ground up – those in which children share morals and sources of dignity and self-worth in rural sites of economic and cultural marginalisation (Marchbank & Muller Myrdahl this volume; Baak et al. 2019). With increasing settlement of young people and families from refugee backgrounds in rural sites of economic insecurity and precarity, it is important to understand how local sources of recognition inform ways in which locals ‘welcome’ and ostracise newcomers, and both engage in convivialities which drive feelings of belonging as well as ostracise and divide through prejudices and racism. All such practices have implications for how we understand the work of belonging among young people from local and refugee backgrounds in rural places. Ethnography is crucial to drawing attention to these sources as they are accessible to different children in place, the paradoxes that surface, as well as the means by which young people may attempt to resolve them. In focussing on primary schools, this chapter also signposts avenues for examining how racism is produced and sustained among children moving into rural high schools, sites in which racism towards refugees is recorded as being more overtly experienced and sustained.

Note 1 The name of the town, schools, participants and some identifying features have been changed to protect privacy.

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Radford, D. 2016, ‘“Everyday otherness”: Intercultural refugee encounters and everyday multiculturalism in a South Australian rural town’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, vol. 42, no. 13, pp. 2128–2145. Schech, S. 2014, ‘Silent bargain or rural cosmopolitanism? Refugee settlement in regional Australia’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, vol. 40, no. 4, pp. 601–618. Stahl, G. & Habib, S. 2017, ‘Moving beyond the confines of the local: Working-class students’ conceptualizations of belonging and respectability’, Young, vol. 25, no. 3, pp. 1–18. Thorne, B. 1993, Gender play: Girls and boys in school, Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, NJ. Wignall, R. 2019, Belonging without believing? Making space for marginal masculinities at the Young Men’s Christian Association in the UK and The Gambia’, in S. Habib & M.R.M. Ward (eds.), Youth, place and theories of belonging, Routledge, Oxford, pp. 109–121. Wise, A. 2014, ‘Living multiculture: Why study the everyday?’, Keynote paper presented at the Living Multiculture Symposium, Open University, London, 22 October. Wise, A. 2009, ‘Everyday multiculturalism: Transversal crossings and working-class cosmopolitans’, in A. Wise & S. Velayutham (eds.), Everyday multiculturalism, Palgrave Macmillan, London, pp. 1–17. Wise, A. & Velayutham, S. 2009, ‘Introduction: Multiculturalism and everyday life’, in A. Wise & S. Velayutham (eds.), Everyday multiculturalism, Palgrave Macmillan, London, pp. 21–45. Wyn, J., Cuervo, H. & Cook, J. 2019, ‘Expanding theoretical boundaries from youth transitions to belonging and new materiality’, in S. Habib & M.R.M. Ward (eds.), Youth, place and theories of belonging, Routledge, Oxford, pp. 12–24.

Chapter 13

Politics of class and belonging in Pakistan Student learning, communities of practice and social mobility Muntasir Sattar

Introduction In this chapter, I explore the learning strategies of unemployed middle-class male university graduates in the pursuit of government employment in Pakistan. In looking at how these young men pursue their aspirations, my focus is on the ways in which they cultivate subjectivities to contest class boundaries. In exploring how young men strive to belong to an upper-middle class, through preparation for an annual national merit-based exam, I draw on ethnographic data from my fieldwork regarding their participation in informal ‘communities of practice’ (Lave & Wenger 1991) at an all-men’s hostel, Choudhury Mansion. Specifically, I show how the collaborative learning community of the hostel prepares young men through repeated practice, feedback and guidance. As they learn how to become government officers within these small communities of practice, this identity work can be understood as an attempt to distinguish oneself, to become what Bourdieu (1984) refers to as a ‘legitimate person’. The focus of analysis is on how these young men perceive themselves in relation to social space and the ways in which they go about attaining and operationalising the social and political capital required to achieve the employment they desire. The participants, all of whom voiced frustration about the difficulty of achieving their career goals despite having earned university degrees, had employment and class aspirations that reflected a deep anxiety about their future as well as their ability to overcome structural barriers and challenging economic conditions. Thus, the analysis situates their learning strategies in a larger field of relations of power, as well as in the political-economic context of Pakistan to highlight why they felt a sense of urgency. The class context is important because it provides insight into what it means to possess the cultural markers of belonging to the Pakistani middle class. Therefore, I show how the effort to make themselves worthy of selection is a process of cultural production (Levinson & Holland 1996) in which individuals creatively make use of discourse, practices and group processes to understand and creatively occupy particular positions (Willis 1981). The production of the ‘legitimate person’ (Bourdieu 1984) within these communities of practice, I argue,

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involves significant identity shifts and specific views, vocabulary and language skills vital to joining the ranks of the elite bureaucracy. The participants’ engagement in the community of practice, as part of the accrual of social capital, I argue, was a way of contesting the boundaries of class membership. However, despite their best efforts, the men encountered significant barriers to gaining acceptance as elite bureaucrats as they negotiated what Friedman, Laurison and Miles (2015) call the ‘class ceiling’. To explore how these men broadened the range of social spaces in which they could make a legitimate claim of belonging, I build upon Butler’s (2004) theorisation of performance and Liechty’s (2003) application of subjectivity. I use Butler’s conceptualisation of performance to show how education and class are imbricated. If Butler theorises performance as improvised, might performance also be learnt or refined through practice? Liechty (2003) argues ‘performance perspectives help shed light on how people actively produce class culture’ (p. 25), complicating conceptions of how ‘class’ is constituted. Taking class to be a process rather than a product, Liechty makes the case that class is constituted not exclusively by the relationship to the mode of production but through education, lifestyle and prestige, among other factors. This theoretical approach informs how I understand young men’s activities in the communities of practice as embodied performances or, as Butler (2004) refers to them, ‘repeated instantiations’ of their understanding of middle-class practice. Articulating certain viewpoints and speaking English confidently are examples of such embodied class performances. Their performances, arguably, serve as attempts to enact legitimate claims amidst power relations. They become performances of self-identification that communicate a sense of belonging to a particular social location (Yuval-Davis 2006) as well as a sense of entitlement (Baak et al. 2019; Wignall 2019). These performances, learnt through communities of practice at the Choudhury Mansion, are integral to their attainment of the necessary cultural capital required of members of the Pakistani upper-middle class. Lave and Wenger’s (1991) ‘community of practice’ framework allows insight into the process of cultural production in the hostel where novices and experienced test takers advise, teach, mentor and motivate one another as the community is shaped by the ‘structuring resources that shape the process and content of learning possibilities’ and perspectives (p. 91). In the absence of detailed guidance from the Federal Public Service Commission regarding what the civil service exams entail, new learners gain significantly from peers and masters who have been at it for years. This community of practice (Lave & Wenger 1991) that emerges in the hostel, as a source of social capital, becomes a crucial means to gain important cultural capital for unemployed young men. In this chapter, I briefly discuss theories concerning cultural capital and social reproduction broadly before examining recent research regarding how these strategies work in Pakistan and the wider subcontinent. Then I explain how I conducted the ethnographic study of informal learning in the hostel. Drawing upon ethnographic data, I illustrate the ways in which the environment of the

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community of practice contributes to the inculcation of class-based subjectivities and a feeling of belonging for these young men.

Theorising class and mobility Research on the relationship between education and class helps to shed light on the educational strategies of these young men living in the hostel. Although often more focussed on formal modes of education, this literature can help to theorise the relationship between non-formal education and stratification within Pakistan in light of current economic and political conditions. This section will briefly address some of the main theories of class and mobility broadly, which will serve as a background to the analysis of the empirical data. While class contributes heavily to the structuring of livelihoods or employment (Weber 1978; Bourdieu 1984), Weber and Marx differ in their understanding of how that structuring works. Though Marx (1990) saw class as a form of stratification based on an individual’s relationship to production, Weber (1978) saw not only a relationship to the market but understood economic production as just one form or aspect of stratification. Thus, social status, unlike class, could be considered to be constituted ‘culturally’ – by prestige, occupation and educational attainment. According to Bourdieu (1984), class privilege is maintained through an amalgamation of factors including education, which mediates between the subject and social space. For Bourdieu (1984), schools and educational institutions legitimate the power of the dominant classes and are the sole ‘agency empowered to transmit the hierarchical body of aptitudes and knowledge which constitutes legitimate culture and to consecrate arrival at a given level of initiation by means of examinations and certificates’ (p. 328). Privilege is also maintained through the strategic deployment of social and cultural capital (McEwan 2019). Social capital may be defined as contacts and social networks, while cultural capital could be defined as manners and taste, as well as credentials and qualifications. Bertaux and Thompson (1997) argue that education alone cannot explain social mobility. Instead, they argue that social mobility is ‘generated’ by the interaction of education with family, migration and even marriage. Acknowledging Bertaux and Thompson’s argument, Froerer and Portisch (2012) frame education as a strategy and highlight the agency of learners while emphasising the political and social conditions that shape the relationship between education and mobility, such as globalisation and economic liberalisation. According to Froerer and Portisch (2012), formal education is just one factor in the pursuit of social mobility, where pathways are shaped in relation to family histories, governments and development agencies and new opportunities afforded (or imposed) by transformations within the global division of labour. While a volume of work provides insights into social reproduction, I draw on Froerer and Portisch’s theorisation of mobility to think about the communities of practice that emerge around merit-based exams in Lahore. Understanding how

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agents are strategic in their informal learning helps frame how I understand the linguistic and pedagogical practices of these young men as class performances. The ways in which these unemployed middle-class men practice their newly learnt ideas and habits in the class cultural milieu of the hostel helps to conceptualise a Pakistani middle-class space as a space of ideas, values, goods, practices and embodied behaviour in which the terms of inclusion and exclusion are endlessly negotiated, tested and affirmed (Liechty 2003, p 16). Educational pathways, class and mobility on the subcontinent Like all education systems, Pakistan’s education system conditions how young people pursue their career aspirations. Rahman (2010) explains how the three different systems of education – the madrassa system, the much larger national education system and the private education system – cater to three social classes. The national education system, taught in Urdu, consists of ten years of education and a two-year intermediate qualification. Private education consists of both matriculation/intermediate and the Cambridge system (constituted by the O and A level examination system) and is English-medium. Rahman explains that Pakistan’s tripartite system is an instrument of class-based social reproduction in which those who have a Cambridge-style education tend to be better trained while the madrassa graduates attain the least marketable qualifications. However, the neat discursive lines that theorists like Rahman (2010) draw are muddied by the efforts of the educated men living in Choudhury Mansion to transcend the boundaries structured by the education system to pursue entry into an uppermiddle-class stratum. In the Indian subcontinent, the relationship between economic conditions, education and class has been explored in recent literature by Chopra (2005), Jeffrey (2010), and Osella and Osella (2000). In Social mobility in Kerala, Osella and Osella (2000) adapt Bourdieu’s framework to explicate how members of the low caste, Izhava, leverage multiple forms of capital to compete in a field of power relations, demonstrating how the accumulation of capital – through education, migration, marriage and occupations – is central to social mobility in India. Their research shows how decisions about employment and education in South Asia are taken by families rather than individually and that status has an important place in determining education and employment strategies. The position of a caste can change through social and economic changes such as the migration of Keralites and other Indians to the Gulf and the emergence of a commodity culture in which consumption indexes social status. Extending our thinking about mobility in the subcontinent, other scholars have examined the relationship between education and mobility. Chopra’s (2005) focus on education as a purposive strategy of the social reproduction of land-owning families speaks to a form of mitigating risk that is shaped by gender. They show how socio-economic considerations shape the choices made by parents to educate their children. Rao and Hossain’s (2012) study on informal learning in Bangladesh

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shifts the research focus away from formal education by demonstrating how learning in Dhaka represents a vehicle for migration but not necessarily for social reproduction. In applying Lave and Wenger’s (1991) theoretical framework, Rao and Hossain (2012) argue that men view learning through apprenticeships as a strategic choice in relation to both possibilities for mobility as well as livelihoods. Thus, men learn technical skills to become part of the global economy as bluecollar workers. This small body of literature on social mobility in the subcontinent brings a number of themes into a dialogue regarding the relationship between education and social mobility which has been largely unexplored. Research linking education with power relations and economic and political conditions forms the basis of an analytical approach for exploring some of the educational processes present in Choudhury Mansion. What follows is an attempt to build on this social mobility research to explore both the class and learning strategies of aspiring civil servants.

The study I was a participant observer at a private hostel in central Lahore in 2013–14 in preparation for the 2014 national civil service exam referred to as the Civil Superior Service (CSS) exam. My fellow hostel dwellers were all male university graduates, many of them studying for the CSS exam in the hope of securing employment in Pakistan’s elite civil service. Much of my time was spent in and around the hostel with Farhan and Shan, both of whom lived on my floor at Choudhury Mansion and were aged between 22 and 25. A third individual from the ground floor, Umar Saith, was an authoritative voice as he had been preparing for these exams over the course of several years and was respected as such. These three men were supported by their families and devoted their entire time to preparation for the exam. Each young man’s mother was a housewife; Umar’s father was a landowner and farmer, Farhan’s father had a small business and Shan’s father was a provincial-level bureaucrat. Each of them had had some work experience before moving to Lahore to commence exam preparation, with the exception of Umar Saith who had come to the hostel as an undergraduate student. Prior to coming to Choudhury Mansion, Farhan was a science teacher and Shan an IT manager. They each paid the equivalent of approximately $160 per month for room and board. As a participant observer over the course of one year, I looked at how the young men learnt and taught each other in their rooms and in public spaces. In and around the neighbourhood during tea breaks and holidays, I experienced and observed the nuanced ways anxieties and aspirations were both expressed and shaped. Living and learning with ambitious young men at an important juncture of their lives helped me connect their processes of learning with the socio-political context of Pakistan, which contributed to how their aspirations and anxieties were experienced.

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Exclusion and identity Before a study session one balmy summer morning, I noticed a few of the young men talking about an eventful evening the night before. One of them, Sohail, had been stopped by the police while going to the bank. He protested, explaining that he was a student. ‘They checked my pockets, but I had only 50 rupees. Wait until I am an officer, then I will take care of him’. Seething with resentment, Sohail went on to express his frustration with corruption and the selective application of the law in Pakistan: ‘It’s one rule for some, and another set of rules for others’. The retelling of the experience illustrated the young man’s feeling of inferiority and his desire to accrue power to gain the upper hand. The encounter reminded Sohail of the chasm between the social space he occupied and the social space he wanted access to. It drove him to try to break the ‘class ceiling’ (Friedman, Laurison & Miles 2015). Furthermore, it was a reminder of the liminality and precarity of the aspiring officer’s social position while living in the hostel. One way hostel dwellers and aspiring officers negotiate this attempted crossing is to present themselves as ‘students’ and, in some cases, as ‘officers’. Managing impressions in the hostel, hostel dwellers quickly sutured themselves into the subject position of the ‘student’ – a well-established discursive subjectivity (Hall 2000) in central Lahore. One evening, my two immediate neighbours got to know each other and introduced themselves. ‘I’m a student’, Farhan volunteered. ‘I’m from Balochistan’, he added. Like other hostel dwellers, Farhan highlighted his current status but rarely if ever shared his previous career as a teacher. Hostel dwellers’ identities are not only situational or sliding (Hewamanne 2011; Hall 1995); they are aspirational, improvised and reveal the stories the young men tell themselves in brief moments of hope and frustration. Shan’s aspirational identity came to the fore when he and I travelled to Karachi for a public holiday and decided to take the train. A coolie (‘porter’) helped us carry our luggage from our rickshaw but surprised us when we reached the platform. ‘250 rupees’, the coolie said gruffly. Shan was shocked and tried to intimidate him. In an improvisation I had never seen before, Shan exclaimed, ‘I’m an officer!’ The coolie, unimpressed, got 250 rupees from us anyway.

Belonging in the community of practice The indignity felt by these young educated men fuelled their ambitions to be included in the ranks of the powerful. Moments of exclusion, therefore, served as the impetus for participating in the community of practice and studying hard for competitive exams. In joining the community of practice in the hostel, they begin to shift their identities in relation to what they experience socially. Their new status as ‘students’ was indicative of their belonging in the hostel, but to be considered worthy of merit, the aspiring officers had to engage with one another to hone their ability to write, speak and present themselves like bureaucrats.

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Farhan, Shan and Umar Saith were part of a community of practice at Choudhury Mansion which was constituted by a shifting rotation of about a dozen young men, some of whom would leave and return. Young men could be seen sitting on the floors of their rooms individually or in groups reading and discussing material day and night. One hostelite explained: ‘in Choudhury Mansion I can talk to people about what books they use, where they go for tuitions and can study together as well’. Shan told me he chose Choudhury Mansion because of its academic environment, even though it was relatively expensive. Creating pedagogical partnerships in this environment was easy, as Umar once demonstrated with me. Over a cup of tea, he suggested that ‘if we were to speak in English regularly it would be beneficial’, establishing utility for each of us. I observed Umar exchanging notes with fellow hostel dwellers and noticed Shan would ask Umar for advice about specific books or resources when the need arose. He was not difficult to find; he was always in his room or in the canteen studying or at least talking about studying with a coterie of hostel dwellers at all hours. Umar Saith was widely respected in the hostel as a ‘core member’ and seen as an authority who regularly socialised with members of the civil service.

Learning what to write Farhan, my neighbour at Choudhury Mansion, exemplified how members of this community became familiar with the norms and expectations of a civil servant. Farhan struggled with English and consequently needed to learn the basics of English essay writing. In the hostel, he had access to resources and individuals who had the requisite skills. Over the course of his six months at Choudhury Mansion, a consistent set of individuals brought Farhan and his fellow ‘students’ into the community by exchanging essays and engaging in study sessions. I observed how he would sit in his room and read notes published by successful candidates and prep books from local publishers. As we got to know each other, Farhan began to show me some handwritten practice essays about a range of topics including democracy, economic sovereignty and the role of the Pakistani military. He asked me to make corrections, particularly focussing on his grammar. Others would read them, too, and give him theirs. In this way, essays were exchanged regularly, allowing each reader to learn and borrow each other’s ideas, all on the same set of topics. The focus on the quality of written English was not surprising given that learning English is limited to the upper class in Pakistan (Rahman 2005), but this did not explain why the essays were remarkably similar in the hostel and always on the same set of topics. Farhan’s most regular study companion would demonstrate how he signalled his acquisition and use of crucial linguistic capital. Shan would learn what to write by reading other essays but also by broadening his vocabulary. While civil service aspirants generally focussed on a few topics, I saw Shan work to broaden how he wrote about those few topics by borrowing key words and phrases from Pakistan’s leading English-language newspaper. For Shan, the newspaper of the

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elite was replete with discursive value. He would borrow a copy of the paper from someone and borrow phrases and ideas to incorporate into his essays, though not always correctly. Farhan and Shan’s prioritisation of English reflected the norm, a strategy where a significant amount of time was dedicated to learning English while less time was devoted to other subject areas. The cultural capital required to pass the exam and succeed in the subsequent interview – which required applicants to speak English confidently – are important markers of class performance for these young men, but just as important are epistemological markers. They improve their English skills as a way to belong to the hostel community of practice and eventually to become a civil servant. How my fellow hostel dwellers learnt to write and the ways in which they talked about their writing revealed the ways they began to adopt the conventions and exhibit norms expected of a higher social space. In the next section, I highlight how, even within the communities of practice, there were moments of exclusion where individuals ran the risk of transgressing norms.

Don’t be a ‘pendu’ Beyond the written exam, hostel dwellers also anticipated an oral exam (contingent on passing the written section). How hostel dwellers prepared for the oral component of this exam shows how political views as well as confidence in English were thought to be critical markers of competency and belonging. When I was in Umar’s room, I asked a friend of his how he knew what to expect in the oral exam. ‘Well, we are not told [by officials] but our friends and people we know explain what it’s about. The interview is about Pakistan, relations with other countries, Islam and about ourselves and our background’. One aspiring officer who had reached the interview stage advised other hostel dwellers to be patriotic and to remember to speak English without a colloquial accent. He recalled one case he had heard about in which a candidate had reached the interview stage but sounded like a pendu, or someone from a small village. Umar added that members of these interviewing panels were members of the country’s military and bureaucracy, underscoring the significance of holding acceptable political views. For these young men, negotiating their membership of a higher class strata involves developing the competency to pass a merit-based exam. I have shown how this competency is developed through the ways they acquire social capital in the informal ‘communities of practice’. Farhan, Umar Seth and Shan helped each other learn how to answer essay questions and how to respond in an interview should there be one. To achieve what Lave and Wenger call ‘legitimate peripheral participation’, ideas and points of view on certain topics would be learnt and then regurgitated in a style closely akin to formal texts the learner had been exposed to. My participants’ ability to articulate these ideas gave them confidence that they could become elite civil servants. Learning the skills to verbally communicate like an officer became a powerful form of capital in the community of practice,

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where it was considered an important basis for gaining access to and claiming membership of a higher stratum which would not only achieve their goal of social mobility; it would guard against feelings of inferiority.

Conclusion: culture of copying – achievement as subjectivity? The men I lived and studied with in the hostel voiced their desire to become part of what Bourdieu (1984) might refer to as ‘legitimate culture’, embodied and produced by the dominant classes. By participating in the community of practice, by committing ‘repeated instantiations’ (Butler 2004) of their understanding of middle-class practice, these men created the basis of a new self-identification or identification by others (Yuval-Davis 2006) where, in their view, they would come to belong as an English-speaking, power-wielding class of government servants. Class practices in the subcontinent are central in this discussion, where the cultural markers including language and political or ideological uniformity are interpreted as part of the foundation on which belonging is determined. Young men thus incorporate into practice the norms they learn socially while contributing actively to the production of the cultural milieu of the hostel (Liechty 2003). We see how they are agentic as learners within certain political and social conditions which structure how they see the relationship between education and mobility (Froerer & Portisch 2012). The data shows how they contest class boundaries in the larger politics of belonging. However, despite their and their families’ investment, many of these men will not be accepted as elite bureaucrats. Though some men in the study did end up in the bureaucracy, few achieved the level they hoped for, experiencing what Friedman, Laurison and Miles (2015) call the ‘class ceiling’. This empirical fact raises important theoretical questions regarding class boundaries and class status in the subcontinent. Hostel dwellers have a nuanced sociological reading of their own society; they equip themselves with the very capital theorists like Bourdieu outline. Yet what Bourdieu refers to as internalised structure and schemes of perception (1984, pp. 170–172) appear to thwart their attempts to improvise when they get the opportunity to do so. Furthermore, what Liechty (2003) refers to as active class cultural production leads not to these men transforming their life chances but to reproducing the very life chances they began with. Failure to achieve their goals provides insight into what Cipollone and Stich (2017) call ‘shadow capital’ (p. 334), a form of cultural capital that resembles dominant cultural capital but fails to yield the same kind of exchange value when put to use. While they may possess certain capitals, they may not know how to operationalise them to their advantage as, after all, they do not possess the dominant class habitus. Alternatively, the men’s failure to fully realise their dreams may also be attributed to their mode of capital accrual. Repetitive cycles of regurgitating and imitating – the culture of copying – may allow them to pass their exams, but they would appear to significantly limit hostel dwellers’ ability to claim to belong to a higher class. As a result, they do

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not ‘receive their intended return on their investment’ (Cipollone & Stich 2017, p. 334), which significantly influences their feelings of self-identification and identification by others (Yuval-Davis 2006) or, in other words, their belonging. Has the community of practice failed to create feelings of belonging for these men? Lave and Wenger’s (1991) model does not seem to account for the form of peripheral belonging engendered by my fellow hostel dwellers. Though these young men intended to disturb the boundaries created by institutional structures, through the ‘community of practice’ they became young men who spoke, read and wrote English, just not in the way demanded by the Federal Public Service Commission. Lave and Wenger’s (1991) framework provides a perspective into how young men learn what it means to be ‘competent’ and acquire the knowledge and skills to attain competence. However, this framework does not adequately account for how this endeavour to belong is challenged. Developing competency in the community of practice is not as frictionless as Lave and Wenger (1991) theorise. The case of the community of practice in the men’s hostel raises questions about the politics of belonging and about the evaluation of what it means to be competent.

References Baak, M., Summers, R., Masocha, S., Tedmanson, D., Gale, P., Pieters, J. & Kuac, A. 2019, ‘Surveillance, belonging and community spaces for young people from refugee backgrounds in Australia’, in S. Habib & M.R.M. Ward (eds.), Youth, place and theories of belonging, Routledge, Oxford, pp. 25–38. Bertaux, D. & Thompson, P. 1997, Pathways to social class: A qualitative approach to social mobility, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Bourdieu, P. 1984, Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. Butler, J. 2004, Undoing gender, Routledge, New York. Chopra, R. 2005, ‘Sisters and brother: Schooling, family, and migration’, in R. Chopra & P. Jeffery (eds.), Educational regimes in contemporary India, Sage, New Delhi. Cipollone, K. & Stich, A. 2017, ‘Shadow capital: The democratization of college preparatory education’, American Sociological Association, vol. 90, no. 4, pp. 333–354. Friedman, S., Laurison, D. & Miles, A. 2015, ‘Breaking the “class” ceiling? Social mobility into Britain’s elite occupations’, Sociological Review, vol. 63, no. 2, pp. 259–289. Froerer, P. & Portisch, A. 2012, ‘Introduction to the special issue: Learning, livelihoods, and social mobility’, Anthropology and Education Quarterly, vol. 43, no. 4, pp. 332–343. Hall, S. 2000, ‘Introduction: Who needs “identity”?’, in S. Hall & P. Du Gay (eds.), Questions of cultural identity, Sage, London, pp. 1–17. Hall, S. 1995, ‘Fantasy, identity, and politics’, in E. Carter, J. Donald & J. Squires (eds.), Cultural remix: Theories of politics and the popular, Lawrence and Wishart, London, pp. 63–69. Hewamanne, S. 2011, Stitching identities in a free trade zone: Gender and politics in Sri Lanka, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, PN. Jeffrey, C. 2010, Timepass: Youth, class, and the politics of waiting, Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA.

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Lave, J. & Wenger, E. 1991, Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Levinson, B. & Holland, D.C. 1996, ‘The cultural production of the educated person: An introduction’, in B. Levinson, D.E. Foley & D.C. Holland (eds.), The cultural production of the educated person: Critical ethnographies of schooling and local practice, State University of New York Press, Albany, NY, pp. 1–56. Liechty, M. 2003, Suitably modern: Making middle-class culture in a new consumer society, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ. Marx, K. 1990, Capital, Volume 1, Penguin Classics, London. McEwan, K. 2019, ‘Precarious class positions in Spam City: Youth, place and class in the “missing middle”’, in S. Habib & M.R.M. Ward (eds.), Youth, place and theories of belonging, Routledge, Oxford, pp. 122–132. Osella, F. & Osella, C. 2000, Social mobility in Kerala: Modernity and identity in conflict, Pluto Press, London. Rahman, T. 2010, ‘The education system in Pakistan with respect to inequality’, in S. Lyon & I. Edgar (eds.), Shaping a nation: An examination of education in Pakistan, Oxford University Press, Karachi, pp. 231–261. Rahman, T. 2005, ‘Passports to privilege: The English-medium schools in Pakistan’, Peace and Democracy in South Asia, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 24–44. Rao, N. & Hossain, M.I. 2012, ‘“I want to be respected”: Migration, mobility, and the construction of alternate educational discourses in rural Bangladesh’, Anthropology and Education Quarterly, vol. 43, no. 4, pp. 415–428. Weber, M. 1978, Economy and society, University of California Press, Berkeley, CA. Wignall, R. 2019, ‘Belonging without believing? Making space for marginal masculinities at the Young Men’s Christian Association in the UK and the Gambia’, in S. Habib & M.R.M. Ward (eds.), Youth, place and theories of belonging, Routledge, Oxford. pp. 109–122. Willis, P. 1981, ‘Cultural production is different from cultural reproduction is different from social reproduction is different from reproduction’, Interchange, vol. 12, no. 2–3, pp. 48–67. Yuval-Davis, N. 2006, ‘Belonging and the politics of belonging’, Patterns of Prejudice, vol. 40, no. 3, pp. 197–214.

Chapter 14

Conclusion: youth and belonging Agency, place and negotiation Sadia Habib and Michael R. M. Ward

Introduction In composing this collection, we have held that the very essence of belonging is connection, membership, attachment and a sense of security. Through the scholarship, we have seen that belonging is personal, relational and interwoven with a place, as well as infused with a sense of history and nostalgia. Belonging remains discursive, complex and continual in young people’s lives. Furthermore, whether scholars approach belonging as a theory, a conceptual lens or an analytical framework, it is clear it has the capacity to open up exciting spaces to increase our understanding of youth and identity formation. In presenting empirical research on youth, place and belonging, the collection demonstrates the importance of belonging in young people’s lives – however, as theorists in this collection have noted, when theorising belonging and operationalising theories of belonging, scholars often have to negotiate inconsistencies and contradictions. In this concluding chapter, we identify three main overlapping themes related to the study of belonging and identity (agency, place and negotiation), and we attempt to synthesise some commonalities and different approaches currently shaping theorisations of belonging.

Belonging as an agentic identity practice Butler and Muir (2017), amongst others, emphasise the role of agency in theorising belonging and how it has the potential to ‘prioritise the efforts made by young people to remain connected to people, places and issues that matter to them as they carve out a place in which they belong in the modern economy’ (p. 320). We know this process of connection can often be fragmented, discursive and precarious (See Back et al. 2008). Previously, drawing on Bourdieu (1984), Stahl and Habib (2017, pp. 269–270) have called attention to how theorising belonging can involve a critical eye on the social constructions of status, tied to ‘conceptions of respect, authenticity and value’. At the forefront of Youth, place and theories of belonging, therefore, is attention to youth desiring to construct themselves as authentic individuals and actively working toward this realisation.

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For example, in Chapter 3, Baak et al. draw on postcolonial and migration studies to show how, despite increased surveillance by law enforcement agencies and local government authorities, young people from South Sudanese heritage in Australia still actively pursue a connection to a specific place. Their continual efforts raise contestations over ‘who really belongs in and to Darley’, demonstrating how, in terms of the pursuit of authenticity and legitimacy, ‘boundaries of belonging are not fixed, but discursively constructed, making belonging malleable’. Therefore, belonging has to be worked at, in continual negotiation with stakeholders, mentors and shifts toward gentrification. With a critical eye towards the nexus of masculinities, aspiration and belonging, Wignall, in Chapter 9, explores the ways in which Gambian men construct a sense of self and the ways in which they feel legitimate and perform their masculinity (Connell & Messerschmidt 2005). However, in this active pursuit of authenticity, Wignall notes that their imaginaries and aspirations are often contradictory, ‘resulting in sometimes conflicting feelings of ambivalence and alienation’. Chapter 6 reports on a very different study examining belonging as an agentic identity practice. Loewenthal and Broughton, who conducted research in New York, focus on young people’s travel imaginaries and highlight how global inequalities impact young people’s mobilities (Cresswell 2006). They emphasise how heritage, ethnicity, and an interest in other places as well as future aspirations to travel inform how young people construct their identities in the present. Their approach to theorising belonging as agentic highlights that belonging has epistemological and not merely ontological dimensions and that it is possible to aspire to global citizenship through accepting, to varying degrees, one’s own difference within the world. In keeping with the role of pedagogy in exploring how young people come to belong, in Chapter 8 Cominos, Caldwell and Gloede explore the identity practices of Aboriginal young men, demonstrating alternative ways of being and belonging which avoid facile Western–traditional binary classifications. Using positive discourse analysis and language mapping, Cominos et al. concentrate on the on-field language in Australian rules football. Belonging for these young Aboriginal men is centred on a cohesive team, a shared experience of identity construction, evidenced in the ‘consistent use of specific interpersonal tokens of solidarity and leadership’. As these young men pursue what Cominos et al. call a ‘legitimated voice’, they demonstrate how belonging in the classroom gives value, agency and prominence in an otherwise exclusive/non-Aboriginal space. They suggest that this pedagogy is both enabling and empowering for Aboriginal students and allows them to participate in discourses which they were excluded from. In another dimension of belonging and agency, we see how belonging is often formed in reference to the self, Others/Otherness and pathologisation. Drawing on the work of Hall (1997) and based on their study of minority students attending a multicultural school in Oslo, Norway, Thomas, Seehawer and Fylkesnes contend that issues of identity and belonging are ‘growing in importance in a country which until recently was ethnically homogenous, but has witnessed a steep rise

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in immigration’. Highlighting the contradictory nature of identity, they approach belonging as a pattern of identity construction negotiating the boundaries between mainstream identity and minority identity. The authors discuss how students from Muslim backgrounds actively attempt to transcend their Muslim identity; they ‘appeared to shore up the confining and excluding boundaries drawn up by mainstream Norwegian society’ where, specifically, ‘Norwegian-ness’ was to an extent ‘jettisoned’ in favour of a Muslim religious identity. Therefore, in this chapter, we see how belonging is negotiated both by the self and conceptions of Otherness, particularly in relation to discourses of nationhood. A separate form of ‘otherness’ and agency is addressed in Chapter 4, where Marchbank and Muller Myrdahl show how LGBTQ+ people in Canada agentically come to belong through their physical presence and their queering of certain spaces, albeit temporarily. Drawing on Ahmed (2006) to explore how young people intentionally fit into their worlds, Marchbank and Muller Myrdahl illustrate the ways in which comfortability is significant and should not be discounted. Or, as Baak et al. argue (Chapter 3), conceptions of young people as ‘Other’ heavily contribute to how they construct their identities, where ‘questions of belonging centre on the question of who is “a stranger”, and who does not belong’, yet how these questions are answered remains quite context specific. In exploring theories of belonging, we are compelled by how the scholars adopt different positions, from Bourdieu to Butler and Skeggs to Hall, to emphasise young people’s agency in their pursuit of a sense of legitimacy as the young people understand how to belong and to what extent they can belong (Stahl & Habib 2017; Habib 2017). In becoming agentic, they are making a claim to a certain identity, tied to a desire for authenticity and legitimacy. Agency is also, at times, a response to pathologisation and Otherness, which highlights the continual tension between young people’s desire to act on a sense of agency and at times a severe sense of marginalisation.

Belonging and the importance of place The study of belonging has always held place, space and ‘territories’ in high regard, an integral part of the theorisation (Habib 2017; Davis, Gorashi & Smets 2018; Habib & Ward 2019; Habib 2019). Theories of place and space have their own complexities; for example, in this volume, theorisation variously focuses on immediate context (Butler; Gordon), imagined places (Loewenthal & Broughton) and aspirational places (Sattar). Furthermore, in the collection, we see how places, in reference to belonging, are collectively realised and validated (Cominos, Caldwell & Gloede) as well as infused with a sense of history (McEwan; Miranda & Arancibia). In Chapter 3, Baak et al. show how place is constructed through ‘government, private, public and individual interests’, where the current attempts to gentrify Darley (e.g. private sale of government housing) undermine young people’s sense of connection to place. However, in Baak et al.’s analysis, they note: ‘The young

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people’s sense of belonging to Darley, where they spent most of their childhood, outweighs the changes to place which have contributed to them being unwanted’. The words of their participants show how attached they are to Darley, but it is largely the Darley of their childhood, and, therefore, young people’s voices are infused with a powerful sense of place-based nostalgia where belonging is tied to shared experiences. This is powerful work emphasising the multiple meanings of place. In Chapter 5, Gordon explores nostalgia and belonging in relation to the realities of the legacy of the Conflict in Northern Ireland, where she uses belonging to explore exclusionary processes that young people negotiate. Gordon writes: ‘Children and young people describe the expectations placed upon them by adults regarding the future and stability of the “new” Northern Ireland, which they feel they were not a part of forming’. Cast as ‘the lost generation’ or ‘out of control’, Gordon explains that young people feel like they inherited a place with an overbearing history and describes what this means for their identity construction. It is a place which they often do not feel connected to similar previous generations. Focussing on the importance of place, Wignall’s ethnographic research highlights how a sense of belonging is collectively formed in a YMCA in The Gambia, an organisation which focuses ‘on producing productive young men able to act as capable citizens and to enact positive, non-disruptive modes of masculinity’. The institution, as a multinational place, is central to identity construction, actively ‘responsibilising’ young men through ‘a series of tests, challenges and obligations, with the ultimate prize being integration into the YMCA system’. Throughout the chapter, Wignall emphasises attachment to place, but this is not always straightforward where the ‘complex imaginaries and aspirations these spaces help to generate’ can often result in ‘conflicting feelings of ambivalence and alienation’. A similar process of masculinity management, place and belonging is present in Sattar’s study of middle-class men living in an all-male hostel in Lahore, Pakistan. As these young men come to the hostel for the purpose of studying to take competitive bureaucrat exams, he shows how, in terms of belonging, they are embedded in what Lave and Wenger (1991) term communities of practice which, in turn, become essential forms of social capital necessary to secure their upper-middle-class status. Both chapters highlight the importance of young men belonging to an institution, whether formal or informal, and how such experiences within them contribute to the formation of their masculine identity. Furthermore, the YMCA and the hostel are sites of aspiration maintenance, where, as young people come to belong and engage in learning practices (Lave & Wenger 1991), legitimately realising their aspirations becomes increasingly possible. McEwan, in Chapter 10, focuses on the importance of place in contributing to the structure of identity practices and a sense of belonging in a large modern housing development situated in Ingleby, in the North East of England. Following the notion that ‘people beget place as place begets people’ and discourses of meritocracy, McEwan problematises her participants’ suggestions that people ‘make it’ to Ingleby only if they are deserving. There are significant overlaps with other chapters here in terms of how people avoid being pathologised as they work to

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constitute themselves as valuable individuals. Belonging for McEwan – similar to the approaches in the scholarship by Wyn, Cuervo and Cook; Marchbank and Muller Myrdahl; and Sattar – is not only about geographical location; it is about ‘the associated struggles for authenticity or acceptance’ where individuals feel compelled to access particular places in their pursuit of value and specific localised forms of capital develop.

Belonging as negotiated In light of the research presented in this collection, it may be most appropriate to conceive of belonging as negotiated. As young people navigate certain discourses, they moderate and adjust their identity accordingly. In research on refugees and migrants, belonging has been theorised as ‘contested’ and has been explored as ‘space, practice and as biography’, often ‘imagined, enacted, constrained, negotiated and contested’ (Davis, Gorashi & Smets 2018, p. 4). Yuval-Davis (2006) argues there may be a multiplicity of belongings where ‘people can “belong” in many different ways and to many different objects of attachments’ (p. 199). Regardless of the theoretical approach, belonging always seems to be in tension. In Chapter 7, Miranda and Arancibia present research on women in Argentina, from the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Area, demonstrating how places are infused with history and subject to nostalgia. They develop the conceptual lens of the ‘grammar of youth’ to explore how women from different social backgrounds have come to belong to varying extents. The grammar of youth, which allows for exploration of multiple biographies, emphasises the relationship between the activities and approaches that contemporary societies offer to young people as well as ‘the normative frameworks that support expectations of compliance’ which are ‘built into a value and hierarchical system that tends to stigmatise young people’. Such an approach, we feel, highlights the ways in which belonging is negotiated, facilitating ‘the incorporation of generational identity, roots and affectivity as central notions for the analysis of youth transition’. Similar to Miranda and Arancibia, McEwan, in exploring the relationship between social stratification, relationships and belonging, draws our attention to how a sense of value is moderated in reference to social class status (see Skeggs 1997). According to McEwan, the ‘production, and justification, of social stratification takes effort and is negotiated through the active practice, recognisable to others, of (dis)taste’, which contributes to how people either stay in one social space or become socially mobile. Similarly, Butler’s exploration of Australia’s transforming rural communities emphasises how place informs young people’s ‘intercultural relationships within such rural places of social change’, which can often be an unpleasant picture of racism and prejudice. Capitalising on frameworks associated with multiculturalism (see Wise & Velayutham 2009), Butler documents how students ‘constantly negotiate their coexistence through routinised encounters with Others’ which occur in various places in the community. This negotiation is similar to Thomas et al.’s research in Norway which questions the empowerment of Muslim

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minorities and the extent to which inclusivity is possible. As the world ‘is constantly changing’, thus ‘our sense of home and belonging is constantly readapting and readjusting to the new realities’ (Marcu 2014, p. 327). However, in contrast to research on inclusion in communities and schools, Cominos et al. focus on the collectively realised identity of one marginalised ethnic group. Through language mapping, they demonstrate in Chapter 8 how young people ‘describe and deconstruct discourses which are typically invisible or impenetrable to certain social groups’, which allows for an exploration of feelings, judgements of behaviour and how young people evaluate things. Therefore, in Cominos et al.’s research and analysis, belonging is negotiated as part of a collective solidarity tied to a pedagogic approach and not in individualised ways or in reference to the Other. Highlighting another dimension of belonging as negotiated, many of the scholars in this book, in their investigation of youth identities and identity practices, have drawn our attention to the temporality of belonging (Marcu 2014). While belonging may be institutionally validated and realised collectively, the stability and durability of belonging is, of course, difficult to document. In Chapter 2, Wyn et al., drawing on their longitudinal research, demonstrate how belonging for young people is constructed in reference to everyday experiences that entrench them in their milieu, ‘the practices of “dealing with” proximity to others and the sense of ease and familiarity with physical surroundings’, which contribute significantly to how they come to belong. In focussing on the temporal nature of belonging, Wyn et al. emphasise the importance of nostalgia, which, in their view, ‘enables people to hold on to the ephemeral human and non-human elements that are associated with belonging’. Nostalgia, and the feeling of loss, remains highly contradictory, closely tied to memories of childhood, as their participants often felt nostalgia ‘for places that they had not actually left’. The notion of temporality and nostalgia is also relevant to how Thomas et al., Gordon and McEwan study belonging, as it contributes to how young people construct their identities, albeit in very diverse ways.

Conclusion In Youth, place and theories of belonging, we have shown that the concept is far from straightforward. Belonging often appears to be infused with individuals’ relational and collective histories, constructed through the social milieu youth experience daily. The three themes we have highlighted (agency, place and negotiation) are not mutually exclusive; rather, each chapter speaks to them in some way. In conclusion, building on ‘theories of belonging’, the scholars operationalise their own interpretations in reference to their research on youth in diverse contexts. While youth and belonging has become an important area of study, it is still exploratory and subject to experimentation. Rather than subscribing to one singular theory of belonging, we see an interdisciplinary approach, oftentimes blending different theoretical frameworks (structural, performative, postcolonial, pedagogical, as imagined places, or as communities of practice). Therefore, in

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using theory to understand the relationship between identity, power, legitimacy and place, we see how using theories of belonging can enhance our understanding of experiences of youth. In examining the commonalities and differences in the authors’ approaches to studying belonging, we hope this edited collection contributes to an emerging field of studies of belonging in youth studies.

References Ahmed, S. 2006, Queer phenomenology: Orientations, objects, others, Duke University Press, Durham, NC. Back, L., Cohen, P. & Keith, M. 2008, ‘Between home and belonging: Critical ethnographies of race, place and identity’, in N. Rathzel (ed.), Finding the way home: Young people’s stories of gender, ethnicity, class and places in Hamburg and London, V&R Unipress, Göttingen, pp. 127–224. Bourdieu, P. 1984, Distinction: A social critique of the judgment of taste, Routledge, London. Butler, R. & Muir, K. 2017, ‘Young people’s education biographies: Family relationships, social capital and belonging’, Journal of Youth Studies, vol. 20, no. 3, pp. 316–331. Connell, R. & Messerschmidt, J. 2005, ‘Hegemonic masculinity: Rethinking the concept’, Gender and Society, vol. 19, pp. 829–859. Cresswell, T. 2006, On the move: Mobility in the modern western world, Routledge, New York. Davis, K., Gorashi, H. & Smets, P. 2018, Contested belonging: Spaces, practices, biographies, Emerald Publishing, Bingley, UK. Habib, S. 2019, ‘Portraits of place: Critical pedagogy in the classroom’, in S. Habib & M.R.M. Ward (eds.), Identities, youth and belonging: International perspectives, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, UK. Habib, S. 2017, Learning and teaching British values: Policies and perspectives on British identities, Palgrave, Cham. Habib, S. & Ward, M.R.M. (eds.) 2019, Identities, youth and belonging: International perspectives, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, UK. Hall, S. 1997, ‘The local and the global: Globalization and ethnicity’, Cultural Politics, vol. 11, pp. 173–187. Lave, J. & Wenger, E. 1991, Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Marcu, S. 2014, ‘Geography of belonging: Nostalgic attachment, transnational home and global mobility among Romanian immigrants in Spain’, Journal of Cultural Geography, vol. 31, no. 3, pp. 326–345. Skeggs, B. 1997, Formations of class and gender, Sage, London. Stahl, G. & Habib, S. 2017, ‘Moving beyond the confines of the local: Working-class students’ conceptualizations of belonging and respectability’, Young, vol. 25, no. 3, pp. 265–285. Wise, A. & Velayutham, S. (eds.) 2009, Everyday multiculturalism, Palgrave Macmillan, London. Yuval-Davis, N. 2006, ‘Belonging and the politics of belonging’, Patterns of Prejudice, vol. 40, no. 3, pp. 197–214.

Index

aboriginal youth 7, 33, 92, 95–98, 100–101, 105–106 acceptance 77, 93, 96, 124, 130, 135–136, 153–154, 161, 175 affect xviii, 1, 4, 14–16, 20–22, 45–48, 80, 175 affection 87–89 affective, affectivity see affect Africa see African African 31–33, 36, 67, 69–77, 110–112, 116–117, 134, 151 African American 69–70, 73, 76 agency 2–3, 6–7, 36, 81, 93, 98, 100, 105, 112, 122, 124, 162, 171–173, 176 Ahmed, S. 5, 40, 173 alcohol 30–31, 33–34, 43–44 alienation 7, 56, 68, 118–119, 136, 172, 174 ambivalence xviii, 114, 118, 138, 141, 172, 174 Argentina 6, 80–85, 175 arrest 32, 34 aspiration 3, 7, 16, 68–69, 76–77, 113, 114–115, 117–118, 125–126, 130–131, 160, 163–167, 172–174 Australia, Australian 5, 7–8, 12, 26–28, 32–35, 71, 92–99, 147–149, 151–154, 172, 175 authenticity 2, 9, 68, 98, 123–125, 128–129, 131, 171–173, 175 authoritative 56, 57, 164 authority(ies) 26, 30, 53, 115–116, 144, 166, 172 backwardness see deficit discourses Beck, U. 2 Blackness 31–33, 71–72, 74–76 Blackpool 14

bodies 5, 25, 27, 31–33, 40, 42, 45–46, 73, 75, 110–111, 114, 116, 124–125, 142, 154–155 body see bodies border 41, 44 boundary 7–8, 14, 19, 21, 32, 39, 43, 46, 128, 140, 143 boundary maintenance see boundary boundary-making see boundary Bourdieu, P. 19, 68, 111–112, 122, 125, 160, 162, 168, 171, 173 British Columbia 5, 39, 41 Buenos Aires 6, 81, 83–84, 86, 89, 175 Canada 5, 14, 39, 41, 173 capital 8, 95, 98, 124, 129–130, 153, 161, 163, 166–168, 174–175, 172 CCTV 30, 34 child see childhood childhood 20, 43, 60 children see childhood Christian 7, 109–110, 117, 119, 142 citizen xviii, 1, 13–14, 47, 72, 77, 138, 150–152 citizenship see citizen city 12–15, 17–19, 21–22, 29, 41–43, 46, 48, 66, 69–70, 81–88, 95, 98, 110, 123–125, 128–131, 134, 144, 147–149, 153–154 classroom 7, 92–93, 95–96, 98, 100, 102, 105, 135–137, 140–141, 152, 154, 172 comfort 21–22, 40 communities of practice 8, 160–162, 167–169, 174, 176 community xvii, 5, 19, 21, 25–30, 32–36, 40, 43–44, 47–48, 52–53, 55, 57, 69, 71, 74, 80, 88, 93–97, 99, 106, 110, 112,

Index 136, 139, 141, 143, 148, 150–151, 153, 154, 160–162, 165–169, 175 cosmopolitan 14, 17 cosmopolitan ideals 6, 66, 73 counter-discourse 93, 98 counter-narrative 3 cultural capital see capital cultural diversity see diversity Darley 5, 25, 27–36, 172–174 deficit discourses 7, 21, 94–95, 98, 100, 112, 148 deservingness 7, 122, 125–126, 130–131, 174 deviance 27, 31 deviancy see deviance diaspora 4, 69–71, 74, 77, 137–138 diasporic see diaspora discrimination 25, 139, 141 disempowerment 45, 47, 141 disorientation 40 displacement iii, 70 dispositions 9, 150 diversity 8, 26–29, 41, 73, 94, 137, 147–151 economic capital see capital emplacement 21 employment 1, 12, 21–22, 80–83, 85, 87–90, 110, 114, 119, 126, 129, 134, 139, 148–149, 160, 162–164 empowerment 105, 112, 141, 172, 175 England 7, 122–124, 137, 174 entitlement 6, 8, 74, 161 ethnic see ethnicity ethnicity xviii, 6–7, 26, 66, 69, 72–74, 76–77, 112, 134–138, 140–144, 147–148, 150, 152, 154, 172, 176 ethnographic see ethnography ethnography xviii, 7–8, 14, 39–40, 45, 69, 76, 96, 99, 109, 112, 135, 149, 151, 156, 160–161, 174 everyday life iii, 8, 66, 119, 150–151 excluded see exclusion exclusion 6–7, 13, 14, 26, 34–36, 39–45, 51–52, 56, 61–62, 93, 100, 101, 104–105, 112–113, 122, 140–141, 143, 163, 165, 167, 172–174 familiar see familiarity familiarity 16–22, 35, 40, 72, 115, 166, 176

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family 6, 13, 16, 20–22, 31, 41, 67, 73, 75–76, 80–83, 85–89, 95, 111, 117, 128–129, 140, 142, 147, 152–154 female 70, 74, 82, 84, 88, 136, 140–142 feminine see femininity femininity 42, 81, 86, 88, 89, 117 Foucault, M. 26–27, 31–32, 36 fragmentation iii, 3, 6, 8, 48, 62, 80, 82, 136, 171 fragmented see fragmentation friends see friendship friendship 13, 20–21, 25, 30, 32–33, 43–45, 47, 69, 75, 80, 86, 95, 118, 127, 139, 153–156, 167 Gambia, The 7, 109–112, 115–119, 172, 174 gang discourses 33 gender 2, 6, 16, 27, 39, 41–43, 45–46, 74, 80–81, 83, 88, 110, 147, 150, 154–155, 163 Giddens, A. 2 globalisation 1, 84, 150, 162 habitus 16, 19, 81, 111, 118, 123, 127, 129–130, 168 higher education 12, 22, 85–86, 92, 122, 134, 160, 164 home xvii, 3–4, 35–36, 40, 43, 68, 75, 82, 87, 93, 96, 113, 123, 127–128, 141, 151, 176 homeland 69 homelessness 29, 47, 110 hostel 8, 160–169, 174 housing 28, 41, 82–83, 123, 126, 139, 173–174 imaginary 40–41, 68–69, 72–73, 75, 77, 136 imagination 66, 75–77, 94 immigrant see immigration immigration xviii, 1, 2, 4, 25–26, 33, 43, 66, 69, 124, 131, 134–135, 137, 140, 147–151, 153, 162–164, 172–173, 175 inclusion 13, 14, 47, 51, 62, 82, 93, 104, 135, 143, 152, 155, 163, 176 inequality 2, 28, 36, 51, 53, 60, 62, 66, 68, 73–74, 81–82, 84–85, 88–89, 117, 119, 123–124, 131, 147–148, 172 inequitable see inequities inequities 8, 97, 139, 150 Ingleby Barwick 7, 122–131, 174

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Index

insider/outsider 35, 105 intercultural 8, 138, 147–149, 151, 175 interculture see intercultural interdisciplinary iii, 9, 176 international 5, 9, 54–55, 58–59, 66, 110, 137–138 Islamophobia 137, 139–140, 142 job see employment label see labelling labelling 7, 44, 53, 55–57, 59, 62, 127, 130, 143 Lahore 8, 162, 164–165, 174 language 1, 7, 54, 58, 69, 92–93, 96–101, 104–105, 114, 123, 137, 154, 155, 161, 168, 172, 176; body language 31, 142 Latin America 80–82, 84, 88 lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ+) 5–6, 39–48, 173 linguistic borders 1, 5, 25 linguistic capital see capital linguistic diversity see diversity linguistic norms 8 linguistic practices 163 male 8, 33, 67, 70, 75, 110, 137–138, 141–142, 155, 160, 164, 174 marginalisation 3, 33, 35–36, 39, 43–44, 52, 54, 56, 60–62, 93, 100, 109, 112, 122, 135, 147, 155–156, 173, 176 masculinity 7, 42, 80, 109, 111–112, 116–119, 155, 172, 174 Massey, D. 4, 112, 128, 129 materiality 5, 15, 18, 21–22 media 1, 6, 8, 25, 43, 51–54, 56, 61, 96–97, 131, 137, 138, 143–144, 151–152, 154 Melbourne 16, 18, 20, 33 memory 3, 48, 58, 76 merit 165 middle class see social class migrant see immigration migration see immigration mobility 3–4, 6, 8, 66–68, 73–77, 84–86, 88, 124–125, 128, 137, 150, 162–164, 168 multicultural belonging see multiculturalism multiculturalism 7–8, 134, 138, 142–143, 147–152, 172, 175 music 29, 44, 154 Muslim 110, 116, 139–143, 173, 175

nation xviii, 1, 5, 8, 14, 25, 27, 54–55, 58–59, 61, 70, 72–73, 82, 94, 124, 135–137, 142–143, 147, 150–152, 160, 163, 164, 173 national see nation nationalist 53 nationality see nation nationhood see nation nation-state see nation neighbourhood iii, 13–14, 17, 20, 80, 83, 85–89, 113, 123, 131, 147, 149, 164 New York 6, 29, 66–69, 73, 77, 172 New York Times, The 54, 55 Northern Ireland 6, 51–62, 174 Norway 7, 134–141, 143, 172, 175 nostalgia 3–4, 16, 20–22, 76, 171, 174–176 oppression 35–36, 97, 141 Pakistan 8, 136, 160–169, 174 pathologisation 7, 35, 112, 124, 172–174 performativity 13, 127, 176 place iii, xviii, 1–9, 12–22, 25–26, 28–31, 34–36, 39– 43, 45– 48, 51, 58, 66–68, 75–77, 80–81, 83–87, 89, 93, 95–96, 100, 109, 112, 114, 118–119, 122–129, 131, 137, 147–150, 153–156, 163, 171–177 place attachment 14, 20, 35 place-belongingness 7, 35, 87, 89, 93, 95, 105 placeless 13, 21 place making 4, 14, 45, 123, 126, 128, 148 political capital see capital poverty 52, 70, 72, 110, 119, 147, 155 power 30, 32, 36, 42–43, 47, 52, 54, 56, 60, 74, 89, 95, 97, 109, 112, 117, 124, 160–165, 167–168, 177 Protestant 6, 53 racial borders 2, 25 racialisation 26, 41, 43, 72, 139–140, 153 racism 33, 72–74, 77, 139, 148–153, 156, 175 refugee 2, 5, 8, 25–28, 33, 35–36, 52, 93, 147–156, 175 religion 6, 26, 110, 114, 116, 135, 141–143, 173 respectability 9, 111, 124 rural 8, 12–13, 21, 147–156, 175 schooling 71–73, 77, 94–95, 98, 113–116, 127, 134–136, 138–144, 152, 155, 162, 172, 176

Index self 13, 26, 29, 127, 153, 172–173 self-determination 76 sexual division of labour 82, 87–88 sexuality 39, 42–43 sexual norms 41, 43 sexual violence 77 shame 7, 141 social capital see capital social change iii, 2, 12, 58, 147, 175 social class 7, 19, 52–53, 68, 81, 83, 111–113, 122, 124–125, 127, 129–131, 147, 153, 163, 175 social exclusion see exclusion social inclusion see inclusion social mobility see mobility social ties 16, 20 solidarities 8, 93, 100–101, 103–104, 139, 150, 172, 176 South Sudanese 5, 25–30, 32–35, 172 space iii, xvii, xviii, 2, 4 –7, 8–9, 13–15, 17–22, 25–36, 39– 48, 51–53, 57, 66, 68– 69, 74 –77, 80 –89, 93–101, 105, 109–113, 115, 118–119, 128, 137, 141–143, 148, 150, 152, 154 –155, 160 –165, 167, 171–175 spatial see space sport iv, 7, 29, 92–99, 101, 105–106, 110–119, 152–154 status 2, 4, 7–9, 36, 39, 70, 84, 122, 125, 127, 129–131, 141, 162–163, 165, 168, 171, 174–175 stigma 7–8, 36, 68, 80, 84, 89, 130, 138, 143, 175 stigmatisation see stigma stranger xvii, 2, 25–26, 137, 173 street 17, 33, 43–44, 47, 52, 55–57, 66, 88, 116, 128–129

181

street life see street structural inequality see inequality subjectivity 13, 36, 48, 82, 85, 100, 115, 122, 127, 160–162, 165 surveillance 43, 45, 172 symbolic capital see capital temporality 2–3, 6, 66, 76–77, 176 territory, territorial 4, 39, 44–45, 51, 53, 61, 80–81, 85–89, 173 theories of belonging see belonging transition xvii, 2, 5–6, 12–13, 21–22, 51–62, 80–85, 88–89, 126, 175 transnational 3, 7, 109, 111, 118, 143 travel 6, 44, 66–77, 95, 118, 140, 165, 172 travel imaginaries see travel uncertainty 2, 22, 71, 122, 125 unemployment 82–83 United Kingdom iv, 7, 26, 33, 52, 54, 69, 109–112, 140 United States of America 6, 26, 33, 66, 68–69, 72, 75–76 university see higher education urban see city Vancouver 5, 14–15, 40–41, 44–45 Victoria 15–16 virtual mobility 75–77 volunteering 19, 42, 44, 47, 115, 118 whiteness 26, 32–33, 41, 69, 73–76, 111, 130, 134–135, 138, 144, 148–149, 152–154 working class see social class