Räthzel / Hahn / Hoerder Finding the Way Home

Young People’s Stories of Gender, Ethnicity, Class, and Places in Hamburg and London. E-BOOK
1. Auflage 2007
ISBN: 978-3-86234-053-8
Verlag: V&R unipress
Format: PDF
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, Band Band 007, 320 Seiten, Format (B × H): 158 mm x 240 mm

Reihe: Transkulturelle Perspektiven

These two parallel studies in Hamburg and London aim to provide an insight into the different ways in which young people with and without a migrant background live their everyday lives together. The book demonstrates how friendships, tensions, and sometimes adversities are negotiated. It shows how young people construct landscapes of risk and safety and how relations of ethnicity, class, and gender are lived differently in different socio-spatial contexts. In some situations young people develop enjoyable ways of living with differences, in others they live with tensions and conflicts. These may be experienced through notions of ethnicity, but sometimes through feelings of belonging to places and/or specific youth cultures which transcend ethnic differences more often than class differences.

Dr. Nora Räthzel is Professor of sociology at the University of Umeå, Sweden. She investigates forms of resistance and subordination through class, ethnic, and gender relations in cities, and among workers in transnational corporations.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Räthzel, Nora

Hahn, Sylvia

Hoerder, Dirk

Weitere Mitwirkende

Hahn, Sylvia

Hoerder, Dirk

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Ethnologie | Volkskunde Volkskunde Kultureller Wandel, Kulturkontakt, Akkulturation
• Sozialwissenschaften Ethnologie | Volkskunde Volkskunde Minderheiten, Interkulturelle & Multikulturelle Fragen
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Altersgruppen Kinder- und Jugendsoziologie
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziale Gruppen/Soziale Themen Soziale Gruppen & Klassen
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziale Gruppen/Soziale Themen Gender Studies, Geschlechtersoziologie
• Sozialwissenschaften Ethnologie | Volkskunde Ethnologie Sozialethnologie: Familie, Gender, Soziale Gruppen

Inhaltsverzeichnis

1;Contents;9
2;Acknowledgements;11
3;Illustrations;13
4;1. Introduction: Aims, Methods, and Sample;15
5;Part I: The Hamburg Case Study;31
5.1;2. Theoretical Approaches;33
5.2;3. The Local Space of Normality: Creating Spaces of Safety and Spaces of Danger – Introducing Altona and Bergedorf;43
5.3;4. Gender Relations and the Politics of Time and Space;75
5.4;5. Exclusionary Practices and Class Relations;109
5.5;6. The Other of the Other;157
5.6;7. Fashion, Brands, and Money: Cultural Styles and Social Positions;185
6;Part II: The London Case Study;197
6.1;8. Between Home and Belonging: Critical Ethnographies of Race, Place, and Identity;199
6.2;9. Strange Encounters: Adolescent Geographies of Risk and the Urban Uncanny;227
6.3;10. Making Safe: Young People, Community Safety, and Racial Danger;257
6.4;11. Concluding Remarks;281
7;Postscript;297
8;Appendixes;299
9;Bibliography;309
10;Biographical Information;321

Leseproben

" (p. 279-280)

The Importance of Local Space

Emerging from both studies is the importance that space plays for the ways in which young people live their everyday lives. First there is the “identity of places” in the public imaginary of the city, created through narratives about neighbourhoods as places of “racial harmony,” or “racial conflict”, as sites of criminality but also of multicultural lifestyles, or of right extremist activities. Then there are the more localized stories about safe and dangerous places within each neighbourhood. Finally, we see that the same micro-locality can be coded as safe or dangerous depending on who is talking about them and who is using them.

Some of the rules defining the relationships between places and people are the same in London and Hamburg. Young people of migrant background in Hamburg and black and Asian young people in London can enjoy safe havens in areas where they manage to appropriate public spaces. In both cities these young people enjoy the safety of these places as enclaves within a largely dangerous “world outside” where right extremist youth might attack them.

For native young people the feeling can be reversed: they might feel threatened or excluded by young migrants in their immediate surrounding, while experiencing that the “world outside” and society at large is their world, where they don’t have to fear the dangerous Other. In both cities the neighbourhoods with more mixed populations are seen as places of relative “racial harmony” in the public imaginary and in the stories of young people living there, while the two neighbourhoods with a small migrant (black and Asian) population are represented as places of “racial conflict.” This goes against the grain of much research on “racial/ethnic conflict” where the numbers of a migrant population have often been shown to correlate with the degree of rejection by the local native population.

A more sophisticated study by Heitmeyer/Anhut (2000) has challenged this view. In their quantitative study they found neighbourhoods where the size of the migrant population correlated with a “conflict potential” within the native population, and other neighbourhoods where such a correlation did not exist. This led the authors to introduce micro-indicators looking at the individual situation of neighbourhood inhabitants in terms of their socio-economic position, their attitude towards politics (did they feel neglected or well cared for), and their attitude towards their neighbourhood (did they feel safe or were they afraid of criminality and violence).

Introducing these variables they found out that they had a combined effect on the rejection/acceptance of people with Turkish background. These results may be artefacts of the investigation’s design, because the feeling of being neglected by politicians and fears of criminality and violence may already be racialized. What is not explained even by this multi-level analysis is why in some neighbourhoods with a mixed population, where we find higher levels of unemployment and social precarious conditions, people feel safe and do not show high levels of rejection towards migrants, while in others with the same parameters they do."

Über Autor(innen)

Hoerder, Dirk
Dr. Dirk Hoerder teaches North-American social history and migration history at Bremen University, and has directed several internationally cooperative and comparative research projects on migration and acculturation.

Räthzel, Nora
Dr. Nora Räthzel is Professor of sociology at the University of Umeå, Sweden. She investigates forms of resistance and subordination through class, ethnic, and gender relations in cities, and among workers in transnational corporations.

Sylvia Hahn ist Professorin im Fachbereich Geschichte der Universität Salzburg. Ihre Forschungsschwerpunkte sind Migrations-, Stadt- und Umweltgeschichte, Geschichte der Arbeit und Geschlechtergeschichte.

Dr. Nora Räthzel is Professor of sociology at the University of Umeå, Sweden. She investigates forms of resistance and subordination through class, ethnic, and gender relations in cities, and among workers in transnational corporations.

Dr. Dirk Hoerder teaches North-American social history and migration history at Bremen University, and has directed several internationally cooperative and comparative research projects on migration and acculturation.