Studies in Childhood and Youth

Series Editors Afua Twum-Danso Imoh University of Sheffield Sheffield, UK

Nigel Thomas University of Central Lancashire Preston, UK

Spyros Spyrou European University Cyprus Nicosia, Cyprus

Penny Curtis University of Sheffield Sheffield, UK This well-established series embraces global and multi-disciplinary schol- arship on childhood and youth as social, historical, cultural and material phenomena. With the rapid expansion of childhood and youth studies in recent decades, the series encourages diverse and emerging theoretical and methodological approaches. We welcome proposals which explore the diversities and complexities of children’s and young people’s lives and which address gaps in the current literature relating to childhoods and youth in space, place and time. Studies in Childhood and Youth will be of interest to students and scholars in a range of areas, including Childhood Studies, Youth Studies, Sociology, Anthropology, Geography, Politics, Psychology, Education, Health, Social Work and Social Policy.

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14474 Sadia Habib • Michael R. M. Ward Editors Identities, Youth and Belonging International Perspectives Editors Sadia Habib Michael R. M. Ward Independent Scholar Swansea University Manchester, UK Swansea, UK

Studies in Childhood and Youth ISBN 978-3-319-96112-5 ISBN 978-3-319-96113-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96113-2

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018954839

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and trans- mission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Cover illustration: © Brain light / Alamy Stock Photo

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Foreword

In the intellectual frameworks that guide academic and social policy understandings about young people, it is taken for granted that youth is fundamentally about time. Indeed, in many ways, the historical develop- ment of the notion of youth mirrors shifts in the imagining of time in a social and historical context. For example, as Nancy Lesko (2001) has shown, early modern discourses of youth and adolescence constructed the development of children and young people as rehearsals of evolution- ary history and aligned youth with colonial depictions of racialised Others as developmentally delayed. Contemporary developmental psy- chology constructs adolescence as a period of linear development marked by physical and cognitive milestones (such as the capacity for rational self-governance) that themselves reflect normative assumptions about the nature of contemporary youth and adulthood. Finally, the concept of youth ‘transitions’—perhaps the dominant concept currently shaping social policy interventions into youth—understands youth in terms of the timing of movements into work, family formation, and other norma- tive signifiers of adulthood (Wyn & White, 1997). The development of youth is then assessed in terms of normative milestones—either of indi- vidual development or social transition—and compared to a develop- mental end point that is idealised by those who put these frameworks to work in understanding and shaping the world.

v vi Foreword

As youth has become intertwined with notions of developmental time, young people have become critical targets for institutional interventions into the social, economic and political fabric of a changing world— changes that are themselves conceived in terms of development. ‘Developing’ counties are encouraged to develop their young people in order that they may support their home country’s position in a competi- tive global economy. A global institutional framework of citizenship edu- cation aligns the social and cognitive development of young people with the political sensibilities suited towards navigating a post-national politi- cal landscape. This post-national citizenship discourse encourages young people to relinquish ties to particular localities, and understands this as the logical end point of healthy political development. In both instances, successful development is understood as the accumulation of capitals and dispositions that are suited to the needs of the contemporary economy, and to the national and supra-national institutions that act within this global scene. It is in this way that young people become critical to the governmentality of globalisation. Moreover, it is in this way that a devel- opmental temporality is installed as a way of governing the changing and increasingly complex spaces of the contemporary world (Farrugia, 2018). This book is published amidst global social changes that are unravelling this taken for granted temporality, and that are raising the problem of place in youth studies. Comaroff and Comaroff (2012) have suggested that youth labour markets in the global North increasingly resemble those to be found in ‘developing’ countries, dissolving any clear developmental distinction between the two and installing elevated levels of youth unemployment as a structural feature of contemporary global capitalism. Amidst incitements to ‘global citizenship’, young people’s day to day practices of citizenship are positioned at the forefront of what Anita Harris (2014) has described as conviviality amidst difference, or new strategies for negotiating belonging within the complex social relations of the hyper-diverse local. Finally, youth cultures encompass unpredictable trans-local flows of cultural symbols that are articulated in unique local practices that produce strong attachments to the specificity of a local scene or place (Condry, 2006). Place—and the mutable spatiality of the contemporary global scene—is being reasserted both in young people’s practices, posing a challenge to the intellectual frameworks currently deployed to understand their lives. Foreword vii

Identities, Youth and Belonging: International Perspectives is therefore an important and timely resource for those aiming to understand the mean- ing of youth in a changing world, and to challenge the intellectual ortho- doxies currently shaping youth studies. Through a focus on practices of belonging, this book shows how young people are producing and repro- ducing the places that make up the daily fabric of their lives. In this, the editors and authors demonstrate the critical political significance that place occupies for young people and for theoretical development in this field of research. The relationship between belonging and place provides a new insight into how youth identities are imbricated within educa- tional institutions, religious communities, virtual networks, music scenes, and trans-national mobilities including experiences of migration and dis- placement. Through a focus on place and belonging, the multiple contri- butions of this volume amount suggest new, interdisciplinary frameworks for understanding youth. In this way, this book suggests a new epistemol- ogy of youth that visible forms of situated relational practice that have remained marginal to theoretical development in the field thus far. The book therefore offers a new insight into the creation of youth subjectivi- ties and to the position of young people within the contemporary politics of place.

University of Newcastle David Farrugia Callaghan, NSW, Australia

References

Comaroff, J., & Comaroff, J. (2012). Theory from the South: Or, how Euro- America is evolving toward Africa. Milton Park and New York: Routledge. Condry, I. (2006). Hip-Hop Japan: Rap and the paths of cultural globalization. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Farrugia, D. (2018). Spaces of youth: Work, citizenship and culture in a global context. Abington and New York: Routledge. Harris, A. (2014). Young people and everyday multiculturalism. New York: Routledge. Lesko, N. (2001). Act your age! A cultural construction of adolescence. New York and London: Routledge Falmer. Wyn, J., & White, R. (1997). Rethinking youth. St Leonards: Allen and Unwin.

Contents

1 Youth Negotiating Belonging in a Global World 1 Sadia Habib and Michael R. M. Ward

2 Growing Up in ‘The Ends’: Identity, Place and Belonging in an Urban East London Neighbourhood 17 Joy White

3 Young Indonesian Musicians, Upward Career Mobility and Feeling at Home 35 Oki Rahadianto Sutopo

4 Religion and (Re)negotiation of Belonging among Zimbabwean Migrant Youth in South Africa 51 Charles Dube

5 Everyday Experiences of a Turkish University Campus: A Spatial Approach to Belonging 69 Baris Isci Pembeci

ix x Contents

6 Transit and Transition: Student Identity and the Contested Landscape of Higher Education 87 Vicki Trowler

7 Using Bourdieu to Understand the Pathways to Belonging That Are Forged by Young Students of Refugee Experience in an Australian Mainstream School 105 Fiona Picton and Grant Banfield

8 Virtual Communities as Safe Spaces Created by Young Feminists: Identity, Mobility and Sense of Belonging 123 Raquel Miño-Puigcercós, Pablo Rivera-Vargas, and Cristóbal Cobo Romaní

9 Exploring the Potential for Community Where Diverse Individuals Belong 141 Kate J. Cassidy

10 (Un)Belonging in Higher Education: Negotiating Working-Class Masculinities Within and Beyond the University Campus 159 Michael R. M. Ward

11 Portraits of Place: Critical Pedagogy in the Classroom 177 Sadia Habib

12 Conclusion: Young People Negotiating Belonging in Changing Times 195 Sadia Habib and Michael R. M. Ward

Index 213 Notes on Contributors

Grant Banfield works as a Lecturer in Education at Flinders University (Australia). He writes and researches in the area of educational sociology and political economy. His particular intellectual interests lie in the application of Bhaskarian critical realism to social science research and education for human emancipation. Kate J. Cassidy is a practitioner and researcher with an interest in human behaviour and development in social contexts. Her research includes the influ- ence of globalization on education and the workplace; the meaning of ‘belong- ing’ in various social contexts; holistic education practices; and generic skills development. Cristóbal Cobo Romaní holds a PhD in Communication Sciences from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (Spain). He is the Director of the Center for Research at the Ceibal Foundation in Uruguay. He is an Associate Researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford (UK). Charles Dube has a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Stellenbosch (South Africa). He has research interests in diverse areas including migration and Pentecostalism, food security and urban security. Charles has published on migration and its impact on masculinities and decision-making in Zimbabwe and South Africa. Sadia Habib is a freelance researcher who completed her BA (Hons) English and Postgraduate Certificate in Education (PGCE) at University of Leicester

xi xii Notes on Contributors

(UK), and her MA in Education and PhD in Education at Goldsmiths, University of London (UK). She has a decade of teaching experience in UK schools and colleges. Her research focuses on young people’s identities and belongings, critical multiculturalism, critical pedagogy and anti-racist educa- tion. She is the author of Learning and Teaching British Values: Policies and Perspectives on British Identities (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). Baris Isci Pembeci holds a PhD in Cultural Anthropology from Washington University in St. Louis (USA) and works as an Assistant Professor at Mugla University (Turkey). Baris’ current research interests include group boundaries, ethno-racial dynamics in Central Asia and Turkey, cultural geography, stigmati- zation and discrimination, and social resilience. Raquel Miño-Puigcercós holds a PhD in Education and Society from the University of Barcelona (Spain), where she is a Teaching Associate in the Department of Didactics and Educational Organization. Fiona Picton teaches in the School of Education at Flinders University (Australia). Fiona has more than twenty years of experience teaching in Australian public schools. Her research interests are in social justice issues in education with a focus on equity, inclusion, identity, belonging and student wellbeing. Pablo Rivera-Vargas has a PhD in Education and Society from the University of Barcelona (Spain), where he is a teacher and researcher in the Department of Teaching and Educational Organization. Pablo’s research interests include digi- tal culture, decolonial research, and youth cultures. Oki Rahadianto Sutopo is a lecturer in the Department of Sociology and an executive director at the Youth Studies Centre (YouSure), Faculty of Social and Political Sciences, Universitas Gadjah Mada (Indonesia). His recent work focuses on youth studies, cultural sociology and sociology of knowledge. Vicki Trowler is a freelance researcher with more than twenty years of experi- ence working in Higher Education in South Africa and the UK. Vicki holds a PhD from the University of Edinburgh (UK). Her current research interests include higher education and social justice, student engagement, and social media. Michael R. M. Ward is a Lecturer in Social Sciences at Swansea University (UK). His work centres on the performance of working-class masculinities within and beyond educational institutions and he is the author of the award Notes on Contributors xiii winning 2015 book From Labouring to Learning, Working-class Masculinities, Education and De-industrialization (Palgrave Macmillan). Joy White is a Visiting Lecturer at the University of Roehampton (UK). In 2015–16, she held the Independent Scholar Fellow award from the Independent Social Research Foundation (ISRF). She is the author of Urban Music and Entrepreneurship: Beats, Rhymes and Young People’s Enterprise (Routledge, 2017). Joy’s research interests include social mobility, urban marginality, youth violence, mental health/wellbeing and the performance geographies of black music.

1

Youth Negotiating Belonging in a Global World

Sadia Habib and Michael R. M. Ward

Introduction

In the field of youth studies we have seen a growing emphasis on how young people respond to social changes associated with modernity and globalization, which, to varying degrees, contribute to both social cohesion and fragmentation. Theories of social change such as those of Beck (1992) and Giddens (1991) have long had a significant impact on the sociology of youth (Woodman, 2009). For both Giddens and Beck, “reflexivity is central to contemporary theorizing about ‘reflexive modernity’”, even if both define the term itself differently (Threadgold & Nilan, 2009, p. 47). There has been also been a theoretical revival of Mannheim’s (1952) theories on belonging to ‘generation’ which have

S. Habib (*) Manchester, UK M. R. M. Ward Swansea University, Swansea, UK

© The Author(s) 2019 1 S. Habib and M. R. M. Ward (eds.), Identities, Youth and Belonging, Studies in Childhood and Youth, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96113-2_1 2 S. Habib and M. R. M. Ward been applied to analyses of young people’s identities in an era of global social changes (France & Roberts, 2015). This theorisation of ‘genera- tion’ requires critical analysis at a time when young people are often disparagingly dismissed as ‘Generation Y’ or as ‘millennials’.1 Yet at the same time, social generational theory might be critiqued as theoreti- cally limited when exploring young people’s identities and belongings (France & Roberts, 2015). Of particular salience in more recent studies of belonging is the lived experience of youth responding to change in everyday multicultural soci- eties in an increasingly globalised world (Butcher & Harris, 2010; Hamid, 2017; Habib & Ward, 2019). Young people2 today negotiate multiple and often contradictory discourses concerning the varied roles they are compelled to play in society, as they come to terms with the ‘politics of belonging’ where entitlement and status arguably play more of a role (Yuval-Davis, 2006). On the one hand, young people are depicted by political and media discourses as enabling “multicultural nation-building and social cohesion”, whilst on the other, they are paradoxically repre- sented as “those most inclined towards regressive nationalism, fundamen- talism and racism” (Butcher & Harris, 2010, p. 449). Furthermore, young people are often represented in the adult world as neglectful and dismissive of societal values, of the need for education, and of the impor- tance of family (Livingstone & Sefton-Green, 2016). However, within these aforementioned depictions of youth, the relationship between place and a feeling of belonging seems to receive little attention.3 In this book we address this notable absence by assembling empirical research from established and emerging scholars to foster an international focus ­regarding how young people construct their identities as they negotiate a sense of belonging. This collection draws upon interdisciplinary perspectives of space and place in order to investigate young people’s sense of identities and belong- ings in diverse international contexts. The book aims to enhance our understanding of how theories of belonging are employed in the study of youth identity as these global young people that the authors write about here come to belong at a local, national, global, and even virtual level. We have previously written about young people’s belonging “as a process of sense-making regarding discourses around place”, and about belonging as Youth Negotiating Belonging in a Global World 3

“multidimensional, an amalgamation of many different contributing fac- tors” (Stahl & Habib, 2017, p. 15). Similarly, the authors in the collec- tion illustrate how young people construct meaningful identities for themselves through their conceptions of belonging, and through their investment in peer cultures. Furthermore, we see how this process is heavily influenced by relationships with ‘territories’ and places. Social scientists, like Giddens, have long written about ‘reflexive modernity’, explaining how previously fixed ideas about institutions like religion, the family, gender, and education have become increas- ingly unstable and fragmented in contemporary societies (Threadgold & Nilan, 2009). Through presenting empirical case studies, this col- lection considers the diversity of youth identities and experiences as they seek stability and belonging while the society that they inhabit continues to evolve at a fast pace. We come to understand belonging as the manner in which the practices, discourses and ethos of particu- lar locales, spaces and institutions contribute to shaping the ‘ways of being’ for young people (Stahl & Habib, 2017). When considering ‘reflexivity’, it is crucial to note the significance of class, for “being reflexive, and successfully negotiating future risks, both real and per- ceived, constitutes privileged cultural capital” (Threadgold & Nilan, 2009, p. 48). In theorizing the variety of ways in how young people belong, we see youth adapting and positioning themselves in frag- mented and rapidly changing societies (cf. Clayton, 2011; Hopkins, 2010; Sanderson & Thomas, 2014). The content, scope, and organ- isation of Identities, Youth and Belonging: International Perspectives showcases recent research where the contributors evaluate approaches to how youth are theorized and what this means for our understand- ing of how they come to belong in diverse international contexts. Importantly, we are keen to share these authors’ contributions because of their emphasis on young people’s agency and young people’s voice. We follow the line of inquiry set forth by Coffey and Farrugia (2014, p. 461) that there is a need for research with young people to “facili- tate or give voice to young people’s agency”; as they explain, this should be a key principle of youth research ethics, and moreover it is seen as “fundamental to any sociological explanation of young peo- ple’s lives” (ibid., p. 466). 4 S. Habib and M. R. M. Ward

Broadly, our collection draws on research in the urban, showcasing key sites and communities that play a role in young people’s lives as they negotiate their sense of agency and sense of identity within the contexts of the locale. In order to explore how belonging works, the authors pres- ent research from educational institutions, places of worship; virtual environments; the street and spaces of consumption. Educational institu- tions, for example, it is has been long established can have a significant impact upon how young people form their identities, not just with regards to “socialization and intellectual development”, but importantly also “as places that create a sense of community and belongingness” (Smyth & McInerney, 2007, p. 59). With regards to young people and their relationship to religion, we find that youth studies can contribute to providing an understanding of the role of religion in the lives of newer generations globally.4 Virtual online communities are spaces where young people have gravitated, spaces where they not only develop skills in rap- idly developing social media technologies, but also interestingly these spaces become potent sites of identity making (Livingstone & Sefton-­ Green, 2016; Perkins & Thorns, 2012; Saeed, 2017; Storer-Church, 2017). The significance of spaces for young people to belong in educa- tional institutions is a common theme highlighted in many of the chap- ters in this book. The chapters concerned with school and university spaces raise questions about the subjectivities of young people in places where they might seek belonging, but sometimes struggle to belong. These educational institutions can be seen as microcosms for wider soci- ety where young people also negotiate the conflicts associated with (un) belonging to communities (Ward, this volume). Some scholars in this edited collection theorise the nexus of youth identities and belongings as closely connected to artistic or religious spaces while others illustrate what it means for young people’s sense of belonging in reference to their experiences with transitions, displacements and mobilities. It is our hope that the readership of this edited collection will find themselves undertaking a journey alongside these young people. The young people and the diversity of the places they inhabit reveal the ways in which identity construction is closely tied to their connections to place, conventional expectations, traditions, and even stereotypes that sometimes stifle the ways they might desire to experience being and Youth Negotiating Belonging in a Global World 5 belonging. We contend that the young people presented are astute in the diverse ways in which they resist and challenge assumptions and obstacles to champion their energy, creativity and sense of social justice. The eight contributions (that come after this introductory chapter) are arranged in pairs which complement one another in bringing to light the commonali- ties and differences of young people’s negotiated belongings. We begin this introductory chapter by outlining this current emerging field of young people’s belonging and then go on to describe the chapters that comprise this collection.

Young People’s Belongings and Identities

By advocating the importance of space and place in the formation of identity, recent research into the lives of the young has sought “to disrupt the taken-for-granted temporal frameworks” through which youth is often depicted (Farrugia & Wood, 2017, p. 211). According to Cuervo and Wyn (2017, p. 2), “the concept of belonging is often implicit but under-theorized in discussions of place, space and young people”. Following contemporary trends, this collection draws on various theories which conceptualize young people’s sense of belonging as part of the con- tinuing identity-work tied closely to their sense of locale (Fraser, Batchelor, Ngai Ling, & Whittaker, 2017; Ravn & Demant, 2017; Habib, 2017; Stahl & Habib, 2017; Habib & Ward, 2019). However, the schol- ars do not treat belonging as a straight-forward concept but rather, in some cases, belonging is considered a problematic to respond to with nuance and complexity. Whilst belonging generally refers to emotions and everyday life, the ‘politics of belonging’ more specifically concerns participation, entitlement and status (Yuval-Davis, 2006, 2010, 2011). The authors in this book are aware of the nature of belonging and the politics of belonging as impacting upon young people’s everyday lives. Young people draw upon the dual process of identification and classifica- tion where, through their social interaction, they may place others within ­certain social categories and—in turn—position themselves. Scholarly work which interrogates belonging might draw upon contradictory bina- ries (superiority/inferiority, normality/abnormality and judgement/ 6 S. Habib and M. R. M. Ward shame) which contribute to the formation of ‘shared’ understandings of contextual codes and social practices of inclusion and exclusion (Jenkins, 1996). Working with belonging, as a conceptual tool, the authors in this book seek to capture how young people negotiate their reflexive under- standing of their locale. The authors achieve this by theorising belonging as “multidimensional, (and often) continually negotiated in relation to respectability and authenticity” (Stahl & Habib, 2017, p. 271). Identity construction takes place in and through the making of places, defined by Relph (1976, p. 141) as “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.” However, as Farrugia argues: “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” (2013, p. 300). Therefore, a significant thread that runs through the book and brings these chapters together is that youth, belonging and place are ‘socially constructed categories’ (Hopkins, 2010). In their empirical and theoretical research, the authors in this book find that young people can and do construct status and meaningful identities for themselves through their conceptions of belonging, and that often this is heavily influenced by their relationships with ‘territories’ and places. Thrift (1997, p. 160) explains that “location and place” differ for “places have meanings for us which cannot be reduced to their location”, and similarly, Massey (1994, p. 67) sees places as “articulated moments in networks of social relations and understandings”. The contributions in this book again engage with the notion of place in this spirit, recognizing that young people’s sense of place is tied closely to social relations. Clearly, researching young people’s experiences and explanations of identities and belongings matters as young people, as change-makers, are necessary in implementing a socially just future (Habib, 2017; Hamid, 2017; Leistyna, 2009; Smyth & McInerney, 2007). Fraser et al. (2017, p. 238), in their study on young people’s leisure and social change in urban places, highlight how “despite claims to an apparently ‘globalized’ youth culture, the role of place remains central to young people’s choices, habits and behaviours”. Similarly, we see the contributors in our collec- tion also documenting how young people’s sense of identities are closely Youth Negotiating Belonging in a Global World 7 tied to their belonging to place. Butler and Muir (2017, p. 327), research- ing young people’s relationships to education and family, emphasize that we need to better understand “the resources, capacities and supports that youth can and want to access in ways which contribute to sustaining their lives in the present and which make sense to their current socio-cultural identities” and sense of belonging. Skelton (2008, p. 30) argues that it is ethically and methodologically important that young people are “valued and recognised as social actors, competent decision makers and key par- ticipants” in research studies about young people. In the spirit of learning more about young people’s identities as decision makers and active citi- zens, the chapters in this edited collection also seek to describe the ways that young people are marking out notions of belonging and identity. The young people speak confidently about the resources and support they need to realise their hopes, ambitions and dreams. In an increasingly globalised world, one could argue that youth identi- ties, a sense of belonging, as well as space and place are converging themes. This remains an interesting provocation. A recent special issue in the journal Young entitled Spatialising Youth Identities: Interdisciplinary Engagements focused on how youth studies have struggled to keep up with the changing spatial dimensions of youth which has arguably led to the dominance of homogeneous and placeless narratives of youth. In an effort to rectify this discrepancy Cuervo and Wyn (2017, p. 2), exploring youth transitions in rural Australia, position a relational framework of belonging—to both place as well as to people, as they seek to create a richer account of young people’s trajectories “by filling in the gaps in the traditional transitions approach which emphasizes set points of transition but tends to be blind to the processes in between these steps”. In the aforementioned Young special issue, Farrugia and Wood (2017, p. 211) explain that “spatiality is re-emerging as critical to the social landscapes of young lives in different parts of the world, and that a focus on space offers new opportunities to rethink the nature of youth itself”. Young people are frequently negotiating their relationships with peo- ple and place, often in relation to the emotions involved in belonging. Stahl and Habib (2017, p. 280), for example, have sought to theorize belonging in urban multicultural London as part of an “ongoing negotia- tion, constantly structured and restructured in a reflexive negotiation 8 S. Habib and M. R. M. Ward around conceptions of respectability, authenticity and value”. Ravn and Demant’s research with Danish youth examines the ways in which young people construct, what they refer to as, ‘hierarchical spatial relations’ whereby “Individual and spatial identities are co-constructed, not just alongside each other (relationally) but also hierarchically, that is, with reference to differential (classed) positions in social as well as geographi- cal space, producing feelings of superiority and inferiority, respectively” (2017, p. 264). These scholars, among others, highlight the diversity of approaches to theorizing belonging in reference to place, for place is sig- nificant to the identities of young people. Following Farrugia and Wood (2017, p. 211), we hope that this collection will contribute to youth studies regarding spatiality in a way that “constitutes both a new onto- logical and epistemological approach to youth, as well as opening up the possibility of new agendas for theoretical development and empirical research”. We now outline the eight complementing contributions which have been purposely assembled to emphasize certain commonalities and differences of young people’s experiences with belonging.

Outline of the Book

In investigating the relationship between youth identity and belonging, the first pair of chapters focus on how young people’s sense of place-­ making is constructed through musical expression. As Sand (2017, p. 302) argues “a central aspect of young people’s place-making is being able to improvise involving materiality, sociality, cultural norms and musical expression”. To explore how young people improvise as artists, Chap. 2, by Joy White, centres upon the Grime music scene in the UK and in particular the young musicians growing up in ‘the Ends’ of Newham, in urban multicultural East London. For these young people, the craft of Grime music and their lives as musicians are interwoven with their identities. In Growing up in ‘the ends’: identity, place and belonging in an urban east London neighbourhood, White reflects upon how these young Londoners living in high poverty may experience Grime music as a creative and cultural opportunity. In the backdrop of producing Grime, Youth Negotiating Belonging in a Global World 9

White emphasises how they are witnessing and living a socio-political landscape of austerity measures and increasing inequalities in their home of Newham, a place where they feel a sense of belonging, and where they connect their belonging to their craft of music-making. Chapter 3 continues the theme of musical expression by presenting empirical research of young musicians who make active choices to remain in their hometown of Yogyakarta in Indonesia, a place that is, Oki Rahadianto Sutopo explains, well known for its music culture. In terms of belonging, these young musicians are compelled to consider their sense of belonging by making decisions in terms of career mobility where some choose not to move to Jakarta or Bali which is often expected of those desiring to pursue a musical career. In Young Indonesian Musicians, Upward Career Mobility and Feeling at Home, we see how Sutopo draws on the young Indonesian musicians’ own words to show how they negoti- ate the potential and possibilities of belonging to the local with becoming successful in their careers. The narratives of the young musicians empha- sise the significance of belonging to family and local community when making significant life decisions about musical careers. The next set of chapters convey what it might mean for young people to belong to a minority group as they negotiate the socio-educational and socio-religious milieux of the nations they inhabit. Chapter 4, Religion and (re)negotiation of belonging among Zimbabwean migrant youths in South Africa by Charles Dube, focuses upon a Pentecostal church in South Africa that shapes the everyday experiences of identities and belongings of young Zimbabwean church-goers. Dube’s ethnographic study reveals the ways that Zimbabwean youth negotiate and renegotiate the doctrine they learn in church with their experiences of everyday social life in South Africa. Chapter 5 also considers the experiences of young people who belong to a minority group, in this case young people in an educational setting; in the chapter entitled Strategies of Belonging on Campus: Experience of Being Kurdish at a Turkish College, Baris İsci Pembeci shows how Kurdish young people learn ways of belonging in spaces where institutional prejudice and discrimination operates against them, and impacts upon their identities. Pembeci’s research draws upon methods of participant observation and interviews with thirty Kurdish 10 S. Habib and M. R. M. Ward students to provide narratives of how Kurdish students in the Turkish college must often negotiate the politics of belonging and the politics of place. In order to produce new knowledge about identities and belongings in educational spaces, critical reflections and valuing of young people’s voices and experiences is highlighted (Habib, 2017). Continuing with the theme of identity construction in educational spaces, Chaps. 6 and 7 further elaborate upon the ways in which diverse young people are expe- riencing and practising ways of belonging, and crucially engaging with new awareness of place identities. In Chap. 6, Transit and Transition: stu- dent identity and the contested landscape of higher education, Vicki Trowler critically assesses transition, engagement and retention as impacting upon university undergraduate students’ sense of belonging in Scotland. The chapter also explores how the university can become a contested site when it comes to identity expression. Trowler shows student identities are tied up with notions of belonging in a Higher Education context, where students must navigate significant transitions in contested landscapes. Chapter 7, Using Bourdieu to Understand the Pathways to Belonging that are Forged by Young Students of Refugee Experience in an Australian Mainstream School by Fiona Picton and Grant Banfield, describes the lived experiences of young refugee students negotiating their identities within mainstream schooling. Their chapter draws upon ethnographic research which examined the lives of young research participants of refu- gee status who were studying at a primary school in a disadvantaged area of Adelaide, South Australia. Picton and Banfield employ a Bourdieusian approach to social theory to highlight the lived experience of young refugee students where theory serves to illuminate how these young people’s identities are influenced by structural conditions. The authors describe belonging as is as “an essential need, an active process of form- ing connections, vital to the full participation and inclusion of all young people and crucial to those with experience as refugees” (this volume, Chap. 7). The later chapters in the book expand upon fields of community belonging, and how young people are able to engage in ways of thinking about belonging to community. Chapter 8, Identity, Mobility and Sense of Belonging: Understanding the power relationships in a feminist virtual Youth Negotiating Belonging in a Global World 11 community, by Raquel Miño-Puigcercós, Pablo Rivera-Vargas and Cristóbal Cobo Romaní recount recent digital ethnographic research on young people’s experiences with virtual spaces where they move beyond local communities to make social connections in online social spaces. Drawing upon a case study of Feminismes, a Facebook group with high participation of Spanish youth, the chapter presents ideas about identi- ties and belongings constructed in the virtual space as forms of disrup- tion and resistance. The authors argue that some young people might perceive online social spaces as offering a safe haven in a persistently changing world that they inhabit; thus, belonging is seen as connected with security, mobility and inclusion. Chapter 9, Exploring the potential for community where diverse indi- viduals belong by Kate Cassidy, focuses upon the notions of community and belonging in the context of a Canadian middle school. Using an innovative methodology, Cassidy explores how students reflect upon what it means to belong to a community. The students’ reflections on community relationships were gathered in an essay and poster contest where they imagined a class where students experienced belonging and acceptance. Ideas about individuality and difference are explored in ref- erence to residing and going to school in a culturally diverse place in Southern Ontario, Canada. The young people demonstrate their values concerning belonging by showing how communities might function through safety, respect, care, dialogue, support, and also through ‘healthy conflict’; they significantly describe community as including difference. The final two chapters, like some of the chapters that come before, examine young people’s identities and (un)belongings in educational settings and beyond. (Un)Belonging in Higher Education: Negotiating working-­class masculinities within and beyond the university campus by Michael Ward, explores the intersections between place-connected identities, gender performances and (un)belonging. Ward describes how young working-class men in British Columbia Canada negotiate masculinities within and beyond a university setting. Their experi- ences of higher education show that some young men fail to feel like they belong to their communities. The research participants’ narra- tives also highlight the need to question definitions of success and 12 S. Habib and M. R. M. Ward achievement, and the impact these narrow definitions of success have upon young people’s identities and belongings. Portraits of Place: Critical pedagogy in the classroom by Sadia Habib, shows that opening up spaces to tackle prejudice, stereotypes and racism through school- ing is necessary. Habib presents young people, residing in South London, engaging with place-based discourses critically and collab- oratively. The young people’s reflections and discussions about the nature of identity and belonging reveal what young people perceive as the pathologisation of their locales and (imagined) communities by wider public, media and political discourses.

Conclusion

Subjectivity and identity are “best understood as the personal enactment of communal methods of self-accounting, vocabularies of motive, cultur- ally recognizable emotional performances and available stories for mak- ing sense” (Wetherell & Edley, 1999, p. 337). The scholars that compose this collection demonstrate how youth ‘make sense’ of place and how they come to belong; as well, how they enact ‘communal methods of self-­ accounting’, how they engage with ‘vocabularies of motive’ and ‘emo- tional performances’, and how they relay narratives in their quest for sense-making. Together these chapters form a range of studies providing readers insight into young people’s ideas and experiences of belonging— through a focus on youth’s sense of place, identity construction and their relationship to community. The chapters recognise that it is frequently the case that young people reflecting upon the significance of identities reveals “processes, relationalities and intersections” (Hopkins, 2010, p. 10). The scholars in this edited collection shed light on the emerging landscape of youth belonging, a picture that is complex and diverse, but shows how young people often look for similar things across the globe and enter into similar negotiations regarding their aspirations, sense of privacy, and artistry. In what follows, the researchers emphasize the importance of the local, the national, and the transnational and how it might influence youth identity practices whether it be the Kurdish ­students in a Turkish college; the university students in Scotland; the Youth Negotiating Belonging in a Global World 13 students from refugee backgrounds in Australia; or, the Canadian school students reflecting upon their sense of community. The chapters, which overlap thematically, highlight how young people experience identities and belongings in local, national and international context.

Notes

1. Born between 1982 and 2002 ‘Millennials’, also known as Generation Y, are “unlike any other youth generation in living memory. They are more numerous, more affluent, better educated, and more ethnically diverse” (Howe & Strauss, 2000, p. 4). 2. The empirical studies in this book refer to the category of youth in a broad sense. On how to define young people, see Furlong, A. (2013). Youth stud- ies: An introduction. Abingdon: Routledge. Also see Hopkins, P. E. (2010). Young people, place and identity. Abingdon: Routledge. 3. Mondal (2017, p. 20) argues that “a proper understanding of our social relations” necessitates “painstaking qualitative analysis of what people actually think, feel and believe—and the ways in which they express themselves”. 4. Morris (2017) describes how young British Muslims are finding a voice to reflect upon their socio-­political experiences, religiosity and sense of belonging through music. When it comes to worship, again young British Muslims have been shown to assert their sense of agency by merging their sense of Islam with their political activism (Mustafa, 2017).

References

Butcher, M., & Harris, A. (2010). Pedestrian crossings: Young people and every- day multiculturalism. Journal of Intercultural Studies, 31(5), 449–453. Butler, R., & Muir, K. (2017). Young people’s education biographies: Family relationships, social capital and belonging. Journal of Youth Studies, 20(3), 316–331. Clayton, J. (2011). Living the multicultural city: Acceptance, belonging, and young identities in the city of Leicester, England. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 35(9), 1673–1693. Coffey, J., & Farrugia, D. (2014). Unpacking the black box: The problem of agency in the sociology of youth. Journal of Youth Studies, 17(4), 461–474. 14 S. Habib and M. R. M. Ward

Cuervo, H., & Wyn, J. (2017). A longitudinal analysis of belonging: Temporal, performative and relational practices by young people in rural Australia. Young, 25(3), 219–234. Farrugia, D. (2013). Towards a spatialised youth sociology: The rural and the urban in times of change. Journal of Youth Studies, 17(3), 293–307. Farrugia, D., & Wood, B. E. (2017). Editorial. Young, 25(3), 209–218. France, A., & Roberts, S. (2015). The problem of social generations: A critique of the new emerging orthodoxy in youth studies. Journal of Youth Studies, 18(2), 215–223. Fraser, A., Batchelor, S., Ngai Ling, L. L., & Whittaker, L. (2017). City as lens: (Re) imagining youth in Glasgow and Hong Kong. Young, 25(3), 235–251. Furlong, A. (2013). Youth studies: An introduction. Abingdon: Routledge. Habib, S. (2017). Learning and teaching British values: Policies and perspectives on British identities. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Habib, S., & Ward, M. R. M. (Eds.). (2019). Youth place and theories of belong- ing. Oxon and New York: Routledge. Hamid, S. (2017). Young British Muslims: Between rhetoric and realities. London and New York: Routledge. Hopkins, P. (2010). Young people, place, and identity. Abingdon: Routledge. Howe, N., & Strauss, W. (2000). Millennials rising: The next great generation. New York: Vintage Books. Jenkins, R. (1996). Social identity. London: Routledge. Leistyna, P. (2009). Preparing for public life: Education, critical theory, and social justice. In W. Ayers, T. M. Quinn, & D. Stovall (Eds.), Handbook of social justice in education. New York: Routledge. Livingstone, S., & Sefton-Green, J. (2016). The class: Living and learning in the digital age. New York: New York University Press. Mannheim, K. (1952). The problem of generation. In K. Mannheim (Ed.), Essays on the sociology of knowledge. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Massey, D. (1994). Double articulation: A place in the world. In A. Bammer (Ed.), Displacements: Cultural identities in question. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Mondal, A. A. (2017). Researching young Muslim lives in contemporary Britain. In S. Hamid (Ed.), Young British Muslims: Between rhetoric and reali- ties. London and New York: Routledge. Morris, C. (2017). Finding a voice: Young Muslims, music and religious change in Britain. In S. Hamid (Ed.), Young British Muslims: Between rhetoric and realities. London and New York: Routledge. Youth Negotiating Belonging in a Global World 15

Mustafa, A. (2017). Religious values and political motivation among young British Muslims. In S. Hamid (Ed.), Young British Muslims: Between rhetoric and realities. London and New York: Routledge. Perkins, H., & Thorns, D. C. (2012). Place, identity and everyday life in a global- izing world. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Ravn, S., & Demant, J. (2017). Figures in space, figuring space: Towards a spatial-­symbolic framework for understanding youth cultures and identities. Young, 25(3), 252–267. Relph, E. (1976). Place and placelessness. London: Pion. Saeed, A. (2017). Digital orientalism: Muslim youth, Islamophobia and online racism. In S. Hamid (Ed.), Young British Muslims: Between rhetoric and reali- ties. London and New York: Routledge. Sand, A.-L. (2017). Jamming with urban rhythms: Improvisatorial place-­ making among Danish youth. Young, 25(3), 286–304. Sanderson, P., & Thomas, P. (2014). Troubling identities: Race, place, and posi- tionality among young people in two towns in Northern England. Journal of Youth Studies, 17(9), 1–19. Skelton, T. (2008). Research with children and young people: Exploring the tensions between ethics, competence and participation. Children’s Geographies, 6(1), 21–36. Smyth, J., & McInerney, P. (2007). Teachers in the middle: Reclaiming the Wasteland of the adolescent years of schooling. New York: Peter Lang. Stahl, G., & Habib, S. (2017). Moving beyond the confines of the local. Young, 25(3), 268–285. Storer-Church, B. (2017). Virtual youth: Facebook Groups as identity plat- forms. In S. Hamid (Ed.), Young British Muslims: Between rhetoric and reali- ties. London and New York: Routledge. Threadgold, S., & Nilan, P. (2009). Reflexivity of contemporary youth, risk and cultural capital. Current Sociology, 57(1), 47–68. Thrift, N. (1997). “Us” and “them”: Re-imagining places, re-imagining identities. In H. Mackay (Ed.), Consumption and everyday life. London: Sage Publications. Wetherell, M., & Edley, N. (1999). Negotiating hegemonic masculinity: Imaginary positions and psycho-discursive practices. Feminism & Psychology, 9(3), 335–356. Yuval-Davis, N. (2006). Belonging and the politics of belonging. Patterns of Prejudice, 40(3), 197–214. Yuval-Davis, N. (2010). Theorizing identity beyond the “us” and “them” dichot- omy. Patterns of Prejudice, 44(3), 261–279. Yuval-Davis, N. (2011). The politics of belonging: Intersectional contestations. London: Sage Publications.

2

Growing Up in ‘The Ends’: Identity, Place and Belonging in an Urban East London Neighbourhood

Joy White

Introduction

In the UK, ‘the ends’ is a colloquial term used by young people in urban settings to denote their local neighbourhoods (Reynolds, 2013; White, 2016b). Often, the ‘ends’ are locales that have little in the way of material resources and may offer limited routes for young people to transition into independent adult lives. In many ways, ‘the ends’ operates in a similar way to ‘the hood’ in that it is an urban, marginal and often disenfranchised space (Sköld & Rehn, 2007). These are marginal areas that have experi- enced, and continue to endure pervasive joblessness, social exclusion and relatively high crime rates (Aldridge, Barry Born, Tinson, & MacInnes, 2015; Aston Mansfield, 2011; London Borough of Newham, 2017). Poverty, and the effects of poverty, of course, is an intrinsic compo- nent of growing up in marginal areas such as east London (Aldridge et al., 2015; Shildrick, Macdonald, Webster, & Garthwaite, 2010). While it is evident that the east end of London has changed, with gen- trification, and the arrival of a more wealthy demographic (Burns, 2016;

J. White (*) University of Roehampton, London, UK

© The Author(s) 2019 17 S. Habib and M. R. M. Ward (eds.), Identities, Youth and Belonging, Studies in Childhood and Youth, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96113-2_2 18 J. White

Hanna & Bosetti, 2015; White, 2017), entrenched hardship remains a reality for many. The east London area contains the highest proportions of young people living in impoverished circumstances (Hanna & Bosetti, 2015). For example, the east London borough of Newham, where this study took place, contains areas that could be defined as ‘the ends’, is ranked 8th in the UK on the Index of Multiple Deprivation (London Borough of Newham, 2017). While Loic Wacquant (2007) locates the debate regarding poverty, inequality and marginality in the move away from post Fordist-Keynesian economics to a neoliberalist agenda, in the UK, it is the lack of social mobility that is the focus of policy makers concern (Adams, 2016; Cabinet Office, 2011; Deputy Prime Minister’s Office, 2013; Sutton Trust, 2016). In this chapter, I look at key socio-economic changes that have occurred over the last three decades during the shift from welfare to individual responsibility, or from the post Fordist to the neoliberal era. In this climate, for many young people, the journey to adulthood is frag- mented, it has been disrupted by a changing employment sector and mass youth unemployment (Boffey, 2015; Dar, 2015; Hughes, 2015; Weber, 2012). Given this challenging context, I explore what it means, to grow up in ‘the ends’. I draw upon my experiences and observations, as well as interviews with young people, many of whom were involved, in some way, in the production and dissemination of Grime music. Drawing on my observational data, I discuss the ways in which these young people in this are positioned and position themselves within the wider processes of social change. Studying the production and dissemination of the Grime musical genre in an east London neighbourhood, I consider how music contributes both to a sense of place and a sense of belonging. I conclude by suggesting that young people use music to construct identi- ties, and that despite chronic social issues, these identities may be a source of validation, comfort and recognition.

The United Kingdom’s Austerity Agenda

Poverty and widening inequalities in the UK were already persistent issues prior to the 2008 global financial crisis. The gravity of the situation was signalled when, in an unprecedented move, the UK government Growing Up in ‘The Ends’: Identity, Place and Belonging… 19 bailed out the banks in 2008. Bailout actions included nationalisation and in some cases direct loans to insolvent financial institutions (National Audit Office, 2017; Pollock, 2016). Subsequent austerity measures intro- duced by the Coalition government from 2010 consisted of stringent spending cuts in the public sector, including youth services (Oxfam, 2013). Youth unemployment rose, and at its peak there were almost one million unemployed 18–24 year olds (Lee & Wright, 2011). Some ethnic minority communities were hit particularly hard by the increase in youth unemployment. In 2013, 45% of black youth were unemployed com- pared with 18 per cent of the white population (Hughes, 2015). As a result of the global financial crisis, there were substantial policy changes to welfare benefits, housing, and public services. For example, housing benefit was removed from young people under 21, the benefit cap was introduced and University tuition fees tripled adding to an already bleak picture for young people in the UK, particularly those from poor communities (Bainbridge & Browne, 2010; Lee & Wright, 2011; MacDonald, 2011; Shildrick et al., 2010). In Newham, the existing youth provision was decimated by the austerity agenda with an 81% cut in the budget for services (Berry, 2017). Furthermore, cuts to Connexions—a state funded advice and guidance service (Institute of Career Guidance (ICG), 2011), and the scrapping of the Educational Maintenance Allowance (EMA) (GOV.UK, 2011) left young people without the rele- vant careers advice and for those from poor areas, no access to financial support to continue their education.

An Introduction to Grime as a Musical Practice

Grime music emerged from inner city east London in the early part of the twenty-first century. It draws its sonic influences from Hip Hop, Reggae (particularly the Dancehall genre) and UK Garage. Using a dis- tinctive flow and regional accents, MCs will rap over a sparse 140BPM beat (Mason, 2008; Hancox, Lea, & Beatnick, 2013; White, 2016b). With Grime, creative practice and commerce come together and enable the sale of black creative expression in a national and global market place. Live performance and the production and dissemination of music 20 J. White videos are key to this sector (White, 2016b). In many inner-city areas in the UK, Grime is the everyday soundscape. As a black Atlantic creative expression (Gilroy, 1996) the provenance of which is firmly rooted in east London (Campion, 2004; Hampson, 2009; Hancox, 2013), it is produced through the convivial endeavours of young people of Caribbean, African and English heritage (White, 2016b). Grime is a musical genre that originates in England. What started out as a niche practice that articulated the lived experiences of young black men from a particular place, is now an endeavour that attracts a national and inter- national audience. A diaspora cultural form, Grime has been nourished by its black Atlantic connections to the Caribbean, Africa and North America. Over the last decade, Grime has benefited from advances in technology. Social media and accessible platforms such as YouTube brought Grime to new audiences in the London suburbs, then across the UK to Europe and North America,1 disseminating participants’ activi- ties in locations that were far removed from its London core. Some well- known exponents of the Grime music scene are Dizzee Rascal, Wiley and Stormzy.

Newham: An East London Neighbourhood

Newham is predominantly young, the median age is 30.8 and as 65% of the population is from a black or ethnic minority background, it is very multicultural (London Borough of Newham Newham’s Local Plan, 2012; NOMIS, 2017).2 The borough of Newham was created in 1965, formed from the existing boroughs of East Ham and West Ham. The Royal Docks had been built in the 1850s, and at that time, were one of the largest docks in the world (Bird, 2002; Tames, 2006). Newham is close to the UK’s major financial districts; the City of London and Canary Wharf and therefore it is where extreme wealth and enduring poverty sit side by side. After a long period of economic decline from the late 70s, Newham is now undergoing a further cycle of transfor- mation. London City Airport was built in 1987 in a move to reconstruct the area. Newham was one of the host boroughs for the London 2012 Olympic Games. In a further effort to regenerate the area, Newham was Growing Up in ‘The Ends’: Identity, Place and Belonging… 21 subsequently branded as a Growth Borough.3 In Growth Boroughs peo- ple tend to ‘die younger, earn less and are more likely to be unemployed’ (Newham Council Communications, 2014, p. 4). Like other poor areas, Newham, post the Fordist–Keynsian economic era, lost many local jobs. The old manufacturing base has been replaced by jobs in the Retail, Education and Health/Care sector (NOMIS, 2017). In Newham, as in many urban marginal areas, young people are more vulnerable to the vagaries and fluctuations of the labour market. The occupational sectors where they are likely to find work are fragmented and insecure with high levels of casualisation, low pay and zero hours contracts (Dar, 2015; Furlong & Cartmel, 2006; Murray & Gayle, 2012).

Growing Up in ‘The Ends’

Despite policymakers focus on what is lacking in ‘the ends’ in terms of material goods and socio-economic privations (Cabinet Office, 2011), I suggest that these locations actually provide comfort zones where those that reside within them may acquire social and cultural capital. Throughout my research it was clear ‘the ends’ provided validation, rec- ognition, stability and safety as well as the more commonly posited repressive geographies (Reynolds, 2013; White, 2016b). Farrugia (2016) notes that a neoliberal agenda has meant that young people in the Western world have experienced more than three decades of increased insecurity and inequality. This social change is underpinned by individualisation and in this way, the individual, as a responsible, rational agent, is the predominant factor in the opportunity for success- ful life chances and positive outcomes. Individual relationships provide the focus for structural conditions such as unemployment, offending or homelessness. As young people approach their lives as an individual biographical project (Bauman, 2007; Farrugia, 2016), some, due to differing levels of social, economic and cultural capital, are able to produce more successful biographies that others. Crul and Schneider (2010) outlined three key factors affecting participation and belonging for young people from migrant backgrounds; the political (how stereotypes, hierarchies and 22 J. White citizenship operate), the social (the ability and opportunity to develop relationships) and the media (how people are portrayed and represented) (Crul & Schneider, 2010).

Methods

Between 2007 and 2012, I interviewed 40 people aged between 18 and 40 many of whom were involved, in some way, in the production and dissemination of Grime music. The majority of the respondents in my study had grown up in ‘the ends’. All of the respondents had links to east London either through residence or as a performance space. During the interviews I asked the respondents to describe the area in which they had spent their formative years. An analysis of the responses indicated that these were areas that were ‘humble’ or ‘didn’t have much’. My focus in this chapter is on the east London borough of Newham as it is a signifi- cant location in the emergence of the Grime music scene (Campion, 2004; J. White, 2016b). I draw on interviews, observation, and music videos with a link to the Newham area. The respondents in my study articulated a sense of belonging in ‘the ends’ that was tempered by a real- istic understanding of the constraints of being from a particular place.

Findings and Discussion: The Place of Music and the Music of Place?

One way that young people create a sense of identity, place and belonging is through music. In my research, the contemporary genre of Grime offers a way for young people to construct a notion of belonging that draws on social locations as well as emotional attachments to musical communities (Yuval-Davis, 2006). To understand the relationship between place and belonging, this section explores the convivial nature of a musical scene that is simultaneously hyperlocal and international. As previously mentioned, young people involved in the Grime scene are from predominantly Caribbean and African backgrounds, however due to its convivial aspects, it is a cultural intermezzo where being English Growing Up in ‘The Ends’: Identity, Place and Belonging… 23

(white and black) is an intrinsic component (Back, 1996, p. 4). Due to advances in technology, Grime is a highly accessible DIY musical genre.4 Young people, with very few resources can step in to any number of per- forming identities for example as MCs (who rap or ‘spit’ over a beat), DJs, or music producers (White, 2016b). As Nira Yuval-Davis asserts, belonging is always dynamic and contin- gent (Yuval-Davis, 2006, p. 199). For the young people in my study, a sense of belonging was constructed from an identification as someone who was from ‘the ends’ but not defined by it. Some moved away because they did not want to live in an area that according to one respondent ‘dragged people down’, while still having an emotional attachment to that place. My respondents recognised that their east London was seen by outsiders in a negative light, and therefore by definition, the people that lived in that area were marginal and outcasts (Wacquant, 2007). Creating Grime music was, for these young people, a way out of the confines of being from a high poverty area with limited resources and opportunities. Even if they did not physically move away their creative practice allowed for a transcendence of everyday borders. Music also enabled a way to step into a new identity, one that was no longer, as one 18-year-old respon- dent called himself associated with ‘the troubled kid’, as well as a method to articulate narratives of lived experiences. As a music genre that draws on a black Atlantic cultural aesthetic (Gilroy, 1996), Grime has a sonic genealogy that emanates from the east London Boroughs of Newham and Tower Hamlets influenced by Hip Hop, Jungle, UK Garage and Dancehall. In the context of a poor urban neighbourhood, space and place is not merely about where the music is made or where it is disseminated to, rather it reflects the different spatiali- ties of how the music sounds and is formed (Leyshon, Matless, & Revill, 1998). Like US Rap, Grime demonstrates a categorical engagement with place identities (Hancox, 2015; Mason, 2008; White, 2016b). In its early canon, Grime artists would ‘spit bars’, or rap about the places that they came from and identified with. An initially hyper-local creative expres- sion, by the mid 2000s it was propelled into a wider audience.5 Grime offered an opportunity to ‘rep your ends’ or talk about where you were from. Crazy Titch’s roughly shot video for I can C U, is typical of this 24 J. White time in that it lyrically references and visually features locations of his local neighbourhood—Stratford and Plaistow (conpapi, 2004). SBTV’s series Better Place offers a more complex and nuanced response to the question of how to ‘rep your ends’.6 Two of these tracks relate to Newham areas, (Plaistow and Forest Gate) and both of these local artists; Lil Nasty (SBTV: Music, 2016) and Baseman (SBTV: Music, 2017) respectively deal with the subject of place, identity and belonging. Musician Lil Nasty pays an emotional homage to his younger brother who had recently passed away, while reflecting on his life and the challenges of growing up in Plaistow. On his Better Place song, Baseman talks about moving to Forest Gate and finding a new place to call home—a home where although some might not want to see you succeed, you can live up to your potential. Both accounts offer a harsh, uncompromising narrative about what it means to grow up poor with limited choices. In his track Home, east London Grime MC Myers takes an unequivocal stance, firmly locating himself within a few streets in the Plaistow area—Chadd Green (mayowahd, 2017) to lament the fate of those who are either ‘locked up or in a casket’. For Myers, brotherhood and loyalty are key themes and images of loss feature strongly. In these moving pictures, it is possible to see the role that Grime per- forms in the production of local identities (Leyshon et al., 1998). In many ways, this street expressivity acts as art, literature and ethnography, offering a way to narrate difficult stories (Barron, 2013). It is evident that these humble areas give young people a sense of place, particularly as they became immersed in Grime as a musical practice. According to Jonathan Ilan (2012), Grime is a musical practice that allows artistes to transcend boundaries. These expressive practices offer modes of self-realisation as well as an opportunity for young people to critically reflect on their emo- tional state and sense of identity, it allows them to negotiate a sense of belonging to, and within, a particular place. As Edward, an 18-year-old Grime MC told me: ‘I was brought up around music. I could say music was in my backbone’. Grime afforded an expression that, at its inception, was specific to multicultural inner city London. It is evident that a strong link exists between music, place and identity, as Hudson (2006) argues ‘music has the ability to conjure up powerful images of place, and feelings of deep attachment to place’ and Growing Up in ‘The Ends’: Identity, Place and Belonging… 25 this is demonstrated in the lyrics and visuals in the aforementioned vid- eos by artists Lil Nasty, Baseman and Myers that feature Newham. In east London, my research explored how young people use music to work collaboratively and develop a sense of belonging, thus accumulating sub-cultural capital (Thornton, 1995). Nevertheless, the veneration of quick cash and consumerism is also in evidence. Paul Gilroy suggests neoliberal themes have entered the everyday lexicon, and there is popular enthusiasm, particularly among the young, for capitalist commerce, and business (Gilroy, 2013). In considering the data, it would appear that for young people living in ‘the ends’ the identity of being strivers who are making it against the odds is appealing. Young people’s individual identi- ties are often disseminated on social media, pushing forward a ‘biopoliti- cal dynamics’ that is shaping these new versions of selfhood, especially for the young (Gilroy, 2013, p. 25). All of my respondents had a significant presence on social media where they promoted their work as musicians and entrepreneurs in the Grime scene. For the regulating authorities the production and dissemination of Grime continues to be seen as an anti-social activity linked to possible gang membership (White, 2016a). Nevertheless, for young people liv- ing in Newham, Grime music is an empowering domain, a place where it is possible to achieve financial success, emotional well-being and a feeling of belonging. Through Grime, the young people I studied have created an expressive realm where convivial, multicultural identities can be given a materiality through performance in a public space, online or in real life.

Identity, Place and Belonging in ‘The Ends’

The UK’s austerity agenda is underpinned by a market approach regard- ing policies aimed at reducing inequality. As a juncture where class, eth- nicity and poverty intersect, ‘the ends’ are often sites of advanced marginality (Wacquant, 2007). Austerity measures implemented by the Coalition in 2010 are still pursued by the current Conservative ­government. Ongoing cuts to public services have resulted in the decima- tion of youth provision and this means that youth centres and places to 26 J. White gather in the community are a thing of the past. A report by Green party London Assembly member Sian Berry (2017) found that the majority of London councils had made serious cuts to youth services between 2012 and 2016. In this landscape, young people, particularly the urban poor, are rendered out of time and out of place. A decade of austerity has fur- ther limited the mechanisms to mobilise out of these environments. In poor areas, like Newham, the urban music economy allows young people to form new identities as storytellers, poets, musicians and entre- preneurs (White, 2016b). Grime music embodies a cultural intermezzo where young people of Caribbean, African and English heritage work together to produce music that has an international reach (Back, 1996, p. 4). Creating Grime music allows young people, many of whom are young black men, to cross borders between genres, roles, locations and identities. Music has a deep significance within black creative expression (Gilroy, 1993, p. 5). According to Ricardo Vieira, individuals have a desire to seek other shores, and identity is constructed and reconstructed as we transit from one bank to another (Vieira, 2014). In reconstructing identities, a complex process is at work, social groups and lived experi- ences are an intrinsic part. Participating in the urban music economy enabled the majority of my respondents to seek and find other shores, leaving their everyday environment for a more far-reaching experience of life in the UK and beyond. Young people, especially those from poor areas or stigmatised com- munities, are often associated with crime and deviance (Kelly, 2012). In considering youth’s conceptions of belonging, the use of public space is a site where young people can easily come up against the criminal justice system (White, 2016a). Due to austerity measures and cuts to funding, youth centres have disappeared in Newham and the street corners and housing estates have become ‘interdictory spaces’ (Bauman, 2007). In an effort from the regulating authorities to eradicate perceived gang mem- bership, it becomes problematic if more than three young people are gathered, particularly if they are wearing clothes of the same colour (Joseph, Gunter, Hallsworth, Young, & Adekunle, 2011; White, 2016a). In urban areas such as east London, young people cannot indulge in horseplay, or hang around ‘catchin’ joke’ (Gunter, 2010) because often, there are serious consequences. Drawing on my observational field notes, I provide one example: Growing Up in ‘The Ends’: Identity, Place and Belonging… 27

It is roughly 7.30 on a winter evening. In a Newham neighbourhood, two young black men talk about the result of a football match. They are on a street corner, opposite a shop, their conversation, as is often the case in sport related matters, is animated and vocal. Within minutes the first police car arrives and blocks their car in, shortly afterwards a van with another 8 police officers turns up, forming a barricade from the other direction. The two young men are now effectively contained, in the street, along with their vehicle. At least 8 officers surround the vehicle as the young men are questioned and searched on the street. The car is scrutinised, and details radioed through for checking. As the police are looking in the boot, the all clear comes through. The interaction is so loud that customers come out of the local shop and residents leave their homes to observe the spectacle. The result of the heavy-­ handed action is that the young men are angry now. One of them swears. It seems that this is the desired result of the officer’s actions. Although they are in the clear, one officer turns back and says ‘don’t swear at me, if you swear one more time, I’m going to arrest you under Section 5 of the Public Order Act’. The young men are effectively silenced. The show is over.

As a researcher living in ‘the ends’, I watched and recorded this inci- dent from my doorstep in March 2017. This scene is disrespectful to young people and an example of carefully orchestrated policing that is no doubt repeated on a daily basis in marginalised communities. The oppor- tunity to move freely, unfettered by questions and surveillance is rarely an option if you are young, black and male. In east London, these responses are amplified by the recent arrival of a ‘kinetic elite’ (Earle, 2011) that can afford to live in a newly gentrified landscape (Hanna & Bosetti, 2015; MacRury & Poynter, 2009). According to du Bois-Reymond a ‘cultural elite’ exists that has a range of life options that enables them to confidently construct a successful biography (du Bois-Reymond, 1998). In Newham, this kinetic, cultural elite exists alongside an established, but uneasy multicultural conviviality. Newham is a community that is steeped in an ‘everyday multiculturalism’ (Wise & Velayutham, 2009). It is the lived experiences in everyday encounters at school, work or on the street corner that informs how young people come together to perform identities as MCs, entrepreneurs, and musicians. While not wishing to gloss over the virulent anti-blackness­ 28 J. White on the old east end of London (Bowling, 2000), it does appear that this coming together of creative young people contributes to a sense of place.

Conclusion

In this chapter I have shown how young people’s creative practice in the Grime music scene contributes to the negotiation of a sense of belonging. As a historically poor area, Newham is an exemplar of a neighbourhood that has experienced many years of economic decline. It has endured almost a decade of the austerity measures implemented as an attempt to maintain economic stability post the global financial crisis. Subsequent cuts to youth service provision added a further burden to communities and areas that were already under pressure. In order to build independent lives, young people need access to the labour market, entry into quality education systems, and opportunities to participate fully in the social milieu. For those from poor areas, mired in structural disadvantage, they are effectively excluded from these institutions. I have shown how, in this somewhat gloomy landscape, despite frag- mented institutional structures and a challenging youth labour market, Grime music offers an opportunity for young people from poor commu- nities to narrate a cultural experience firmly located in a sense of place. In ‘the ends’ in Newham, an east London neighbourhood, young people are applying narratives to their own lifeworlds, as John, a 21 year old Grime MC, told me: “this is my ground, this is where I started out from” to explain why Newham was so important to him. In these areas, young people’s investment in Grime as a cultural form and creative practice allows for the articulation of a sense of belonging.

Notes

1. See for example, Wiley’s regular performances in Toronto (ninkyrooz, 2013), a Grime blog from Japan (Grime JP, 2014) and the annual Ayia Napa events (NSCProductions, 2009). Growing Up in ‘The Ends’: Identity, Place and Belonging… 29

2. Further details on Newham population characteristics can be found here: http://www.newham.info/factsandfigures. 3. The Growth Boroughs are: Barking and Dagenham, Greenwich, Hackney, Newham, Tower Hamlets and Waltham Forest. These boroughs hosted the 2012 Olympic Games and are deemed to have the strongest potential in the UK for economic growth. See http://www.growthboroughs.com/. 4. Grime is a specifically English musical genre. What started out as a niche genre articulating the lived experiences of young black men from a par- ticular place now attracts a national and international audience. (Bramwell, 2015; Hancox, 2013; J. White, 2016b). 5. An unintended consequence of the control and curtailment of Grime music in London was that it spread outwards first to the suburbs and smaller towns in the UK, then across Europe (J. White, 2016b). 6. The SBTV Better Place series features artists from London, Birmingham and Sheffield rapping about their area. More details can be found here. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLzVbXC_F7Oh_ZLDJ- zmZww0FOyBDsEZan.

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3

Young Indonesian Musicians, Upward Career Mobility and Feeling at Home

Oki Rahadianto Sutopo

Introduction

This chapter explores narratives of young Indonesian musicians who are working to keep a balance between a sense of belonging towards place and people (Cuervo & Wyn, 2014, 2017), while looking to achieve upward progression in a field of cultural production (Bourdieu, 1993) within the era of risk society (Beck, 1992). Young Indonesian musicians’ decisions for staying in the hometown, discussed in this chapter, illustrate the non- metrocentric pathways through which young musicians construct their own meanings of becoming ‘successful’1 musicians, maintaining­ the transi- tion to adulthood and anticipating unpredictable consequences in the future (see Beck & Beck-Gernsheim, 2002). Building upward career pro- gression by remaining in their hometowns can be a relatively safe option for some young musicians to feel ‘at home’ (Antonsich, 2010; Yuval-Davis, 2006) while simultaneously improving their music careers. Geographic mobility is often seen as central to contemporary youth tran- sitions, and necessary for young people to secure better or different life

O. R. Sutopo (*) Universitas Gadjah Mada, Yogyakarta, Indonesia

© The Author(s) 2019 35 S. Habib and M. R. M. Ward (eds.), Identities, Youth and Belonging, Studies in Childhood and Youth, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96113-2_3 36 O. R. Sutopo outcomes (see Robertson, Harris, & Baldassar, 2018).2 However, the young musicians in this study consider their hometown as the place where they belong. Home is explained not only in terms of a physical space, but also as a source of personal meaning and a territory of comfort. The participants in the study are reflexively aware of precariousness, insecurity and uncertainty (see Beck, Bonns, & Lau, 2003) in the music business and, as a result, they decide not to move to Jakarta or Bali permanently. This chapter shows that for young musicians living in Indonesia, the ultimate meaning of ‘home’ is a space where they can make sense of what happens in everyday life, make sense of their career, and also predict a relatively clear vision of the future. Yogyakarta (Java Island, Indonesia), the hometown of the young musi- cians in this study, is famous for its very active and inclusive music com- munities. Music communities in Yogyakarta facilitate young musicians to accumulate various forms of cultural, social and symbolic capital (see Bourdieu, 1986; Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992) relevant as a stock of capi- tal to enhance their pathways to a professional career in the music industry. Due to the lack of good wages and a less-established local music industry, many young musicians in Indonesia decide to move to Jakarta or Bali to gain national popularity and accomplish what they perceive to be a success- ful transition to adulthood (Sutopo, Nilan, & Threadgold, 2017). In the era of late and liquid modernity (Bauman, 2000; Beck, 1992), there exists a normative expectation for young people to be more individualized, mobile and flexible; however, relevant and valuable forms of capital are not distributed equally to all young musicians. The young people in my study consider Yogyakarta as an important place to build their careers as profes- sional musicians, and therefore they choose to stay in Yogyakarta in order to guard against the unpredictable risks of the future. Young people’s rela- tionships to place and people become a source of well-being and security, particularly in times of uncertainty (Cuervo & Wyn, 2014, p. 913).

Research Methodology

This research applies qualitative methods in order to learn about the individuals and the place(s) they inhabit, and to be more involved with the experiences of the participants (Creswell, 2003). This chapter draws Young Indonesian Musicians, Upward Career Mobility… 37 on fieldwork conducted for four months during 2013/2014 in Yogyakarta (Java Island, Indonesia), a small city where education, cul- ture and activism are important.3 As a ‘critical insider’ (see Hodkinson, 2005; MacRae, 2007), and as a musician, I have been participating on and off in the Yogyakarta music scene since 2004. Thus it is important to continually taking mental steps back so as to observe, compare, con- trast and question, as well as to experience aspects of the field (Hodkinson, 2002, p. 6). In order to understand young musicians’ everyday lives, and also their struggles in the hierarchical and heteronomous field of cul- tural production (see Bourdieu, 1993), embedded participant observa- tion took place within the music community, at gig venues and musicians’ homes. As a researcher, I recruited 16 young musicians (mostly male) using purposive and snowball sampling. The in-depth interviews with young musicians were conducted in the Javanese or Indonesian languages for 1–2 hours depending on the consent of infor- mants. The interviews were carefully transcribed and then translated into English in order to faithfully reflect the original meaning conveyed by the informants. For the purpose of this chapter, narratives from six young musicians from middle- and lower-­middle class backgrounds will be discussed. In terms of my role as a researcher, I aimed to build a rela- tionship of trust with my informants so they felt that they could share their thoughts freely, resulting in the voices of young musicians as being central to this chapter.

Family Is Everything

In research on transitions from school to work, the connection between young people and family is often neglected (Wyn, Lantz, & Harris, 2012). The data discussed in this chapter shows that family remains an important representation of a sense of local belonging among young musicians. For example, Hernan’s4 story exemplifies how connections to people—particu- larly nuclear family members—are highly valued. Hernan is a jazz fusion and indie guitarist from Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Since his teenage years, Hernan’s hobby of playing music has been fully supported by his parents, who work as a civil servant and as an entrepreneur. However, his parents 38 O. R. Sutopo did not agree for him to choose music as a full time career; his father was afraid that Hernan could not survive as a musician in his transition to adulthood. After two years of studying psychology at university, a subject that he was not passionate about, Hernan enrolled at the Yogyakarta Music Institute. It took two weeks for his father to endorse Hernan’s decision, with the requirement that he had to be responsible for his own choice; an indication to create his own Do It Yourself (DIY) biography (Beck & Beck- Gernsheim, 2002). In contrast to his father, Hernan’s mother was fully supportive with his decision to be a professional musician from the begin- ning. Her continual support is an indication of meaningful and important connections, and of the trust and emotional attachment between Hernan and his mother. Furthermore, the continual support became more impor- tant for Hernan because it happened during a critical time (see Henderson, Holland, McGrellis, Sharpe, & Thomson, 2007) which had crucial conse- quences to navigate his pathways in the future. Being a music student developed not only Hernan’s musical and per- formance skills, but also expanded his stock of social capital (see Bourdieu, 1986) with regards to the jazz and indie music communities in Yogyakarta. Through these music communities, Hernan joined several bands. He not only played cover songs regularly in the restaurants and five star hotels but was also able to release two Do It Yourself (DIY) music albums with his original band in 2011 and 2012. During the process of building a music career, his mother gave him financial support for every- day expenses and also funded Hernan to produce his indie album. This is another meaningful and important act that strengthens the relation- ship between Hernan and his mother. Theoretically, his mother con- stantly gives support to Hernan’s ontological security during transition to adulthood. It allows Hernan to have a secure sense and agency as a young musician without suffering from crushing doubts about being, self-determination or place in the world; he has a basic trust in others and in a world as it seems (Jamieson & Simpson, 2013, p. 90). In contrast to his fellow young musicians who moved to bigger cities in Indonesia, after finishing formal music education, Hernan decided not to move permanently to Jakarta because his connections with family members—especially with his mother—remained strong. During an interview in his mother’s house, Hernan explained: Young Indonesian Musicians, Upward Career Mobility… 39

I used to have a plan to move to Jakarta after graduating from Music Institute. But there was a tension with my family. I tried to explain to my mother what I wanted. She understood me. But she did not give me per- mission to move to Jakarta permanently. So my mother was the main fac- tor in my decision. My mother does not want me to live far from her. (Interview Hernan, 2013)

Hernan realized that the music business is risky and precarious so he could not rely on it for everyday income. After his father passed away, he decided to move into his mother’s house, helping run a food stall business and taking care of his mother as well as his own nuclear family. Now Hernan is a married man with one little daughter. The decision to move into his mother’s house can be interpreted as a reflexive strategy to antici- pate unpredictable future risk and shows how family remains a paramount organizational principle of Indonesian society (Nilan, 2011; Parker & Nilan, 2013, p. 6). Occasionally, Hernan still plays at the music festival with his indie band and planning to release a new single in 2017. As a result of negotiation with the familial constraints, for Hernan, being a successful musician is not a matter of becoming a famous musician at the national level but instead being able to take care of his mother and family, as well as continuing to play music. Producing an original album in the local scene, alongside supporting family, has become Hernan’s new defi- nition of success. His future dream is now simplified; Hernan hopes that his little daughter will be able to listen to his original album when she grows up. In summary, for Hernan place and people matter not only as a source of belonging (Cuervo & Wyn, 2014) but also as a source of valu- able capital (Bourdieu, 1986) to prevent future risk (Beck, 1992).

Community as a Source of Social and Cultural Capital

This research with young musicians in Yogyakarta also highlights the important role of the music community not only as a space which pro- vides a sense of belonging, but also as a space for young musicians to create their sense of belonging. As a provider, the music community gives 40 O. R. Sutopo supports to young musicians in the form of cultural and social capital (see Bourdieu, 1986) relevant to build and sustain their music career at the present and in the future. Furthermore, a sense of belonging is based on everyday habits (May, 2011, p. 369) where local music communities offer relatively non-hierarchical relationship opportunities, especially in the form of friendships and informal support links. These can help in the accumulation of embodied cultural capital that can lead to various career directions in the future; Hida, a multi-talented drummer explained:

What I got was musical skill for sure. In the community, we study together informally with other musicians, senior musicians often give new refer- ences too. Every day we always talk about music, so we exchange ideas and information among members. This is how I got my musical skills, also attitudes and performances. It is through regular jam sessions that I obtained the skills for performing in front of audiences, dealing with the stage and interacting musically. (Interview Hida, 2013)

Furthermore, the friendship and informal support that Hida acknowl- edges also motivated young jazz saxophonist Joy to improve his musical skills; Joy felt he was more equal in the informal learning process when compared to formal music education. In other words, non-hierarchical relationships generate a sense of belonging in a music community, this equal relationship itself is long lasting, positive, stable and significant (Antonsich, 2010, p. 647). As Joy explained:

I feel more comfortable to learn in the music community, although there is no formal instructor. I feel blessed that I can find music partners so I don’t have to learn by myself. (Interview Joy, 2014)

Similar to Joy, Yogi, a multi-talented bass player, felt the same about informal support from fellow jazz musicians. He also valued the non-­ hierarchical relationships and the informal approach to the learning pro- cess in the local music community:

In the music field, the obvious thing is someone to play with. After I joined the community, I never learnt by myself. I feel uncomfortable if I do not Young Indonesian Musicians, Upward Career Mobility… 41

have someone to play music with. Another benefit that I got is that I can share with friends by guiding them. When I help friends to solve a music problem, indirectly I also learn how to solve it. And I can get input about what I didn’t learn before. Furthermore, I meet friends who have different perspectives from me, it makes me happy because I can do brainstorming and exchange ideas. We can exchange ideas philosophically. (Interview Yogi, 2014)

It can be argued then that community, as a space, becomes an entry point for young musicians to make sense of belonging to their immediate local- ities. Moreover, people who participate in the music community and advocate the shared non-hierarchichal form of relationships become important in enhancing young musicians’ sense of belonging. Thus, meaningful, trusted ties and interactions with family, close friends, neigh- bours and other members of a community have the capacity to generate a sense of belonging for individuals (Cuervo & Wyn, 2014, p. 907). Community and friends can also serve as a source of sharing important social and cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1986; see also Sutopo, Threadgold, & Nilan, 2017) relevant for young musicians’ future careers and for guarding against unpredictable risks in the future (Beck, 1992).

Place as a Reproduction of Respectability and Authenticity Value

The dominant-subordinated position between place especially between Yogyakarta vis a vis Jakarta/Bali in the Indonesian context contributes to the sense-making of belonging and the construction of respectability and authenticity value (see Stahl & Habib, 2017) among young musicians. Riri, a female singer from Yogyakarta, also resisted moving to Jakarta and Bali, instead building her music career by travelling to cities for the pur- pose of gigs. This impacts upon her sense of belonging. Having experi- enced many different music fields and also witnessed the inequality between local and national musicians, Riri decided to base herself in Yogyakarta, as she explained in an interview at Djendela café in North Yogyakarta: 42 O. R. Sutopo

Why does everyone think that the centre of music is Jakarta and Bali? Why don’t they think that the centre is Yogyakarta? If Jakarta people want to invite me, it is OK, but my home is here (Yogyakarta) so they have to pay my transport and accommodation. If everyone (young musicians) moves permanently to Bali and Jakarta, who’s gonna stay in Yogyakarta then? I was born in Yogyakarta, I love Yogyakarta, and I am developing my career in the Yogyakarta music scene. So why don’t we contribute to the develop- ment of the Yogyakarta music scene? Why don’t they create a situation like ‘oh there is a cool band from Yogyakarta’ rather than ‘oh there is a cool band from Jakarta?’ Nothing special about it! (Interview Riri, 2014)

The interview reveals Riri’s awareness of spatial inequalities between Yogyakarta vis a vis Jakarta/Bali and her passion and willingness to con- tribute to the development of the Yogyakarta music scene. It signifies her active effort to establish a sense of local belonging. Furthermore, Riri reflected on the negative effects of a permanent move to Bali or Jakarta:

People (young musicians) often change dramatically after they move to Bali and Jakarta. The forces are different and also different responsibilities. They also have different life rhythms and they try to blend, try to survive and it creates an impact on their character. I’m afraid that I will change into a nasty person, selfish and become an un-cool person. Yogyakarta is just so comfort- able so I don’t think I want to move permanently. (Interview Riri, 2014).

Riri’s construction of a binary position between Yogyakarta as respect- able/authentic and Jakarta/Bali as non-respectable/non-authentic above exemplifies the respectability and authenticity value (Skeggs, 2004; Stahl & Habib, 2017) as a form of local sense of belonging. For Riri, who was born in Yogyakarta and has been building her music career in Yogyakarta, it is a form of responsibility to engage and contribute to the development of Yogyakarta’s music scene at the national level. As a regional city, Yogyakarta is often being recognized as a “second” city thus the struggle to achieve the dominant position in the field of cultural production is a must. For her, this act of active participation is also a manifestation of respect to Yogyakarta itself as a space that supports her personal music career, and as a local who was born and grew up in this city. Riri also views Jakarta/Bali as a “bad place” out there that will make her change. Young Indonesian Musicians, Upward Career Mobility… 43

Furthermore, industry oriented Jakarta/Bali music scenes can be a threat for her musical idealism, integrity and creativity as a professional singer. In other words, Yogyakarta is considered as authentic in contrast to Jakarta/Bali. In this case, Riri’s act of resistance to move to Jakarta/Bali can be considered as preventive action to anticipate future risk (Beck, 1992) of changing into a “bad” person and give up her musical idealism. From the perspective of belonging, theoretically, it can be argued that belonging is also about the ways “place” and “people” are valued and judged (Yuval-Davis, 2006, p. 203). Moreover, having experienced inequalities typical to local and national musicians in the past, Riri felt that her sense of local belonging as a singer from Yogyakarta was threat- ened by someone/something outside Yogyakarta; in other words, hierar- chies of belonging exist and not everyone is allowed to belong (May, 2011, p. 369). Thus this experience created a sense of political struggle for Riri to define the boundaries based on respectability and authenticity.

Idealism and Activism Is Important

Yogyakarta as a city of idealism and activism is important as a source for creating a sense of belonging among idealistic young musicians in this research and vice versa. For idealistic musicians in Yogyakarta, making music is not only about money. Producing high quality of music is important, but also, they want to keep the balance between idealism and reality as important components of constructing a local sense of belonging and maintaining transition to adulthood. Joy explained his own position as a musician and how he had been influenced by Yogyakarta as a city of idealism and activism as follows:

Simple, for me, actually I want to be a musician who can contribute to different forms in the music field. I want to do that because a musician should study the academic aspect of his own work. So I hope I can contrib- ute something like positive education and discourse to society. I want them to know that music is not just a form of entertainment but music itself is a form of education. (Interview Joy, 2014) 44 O. R. Sutopo

Similarly, Sarita, an indie female singer, explained her version of idealism and activism and how this influenced her approach to her career as a musician:

I can say I am a singer/song-writer. My responsibility as a musician is that I have to make a music product. I have to create a music product continuously. That’s my consciousness about being a musician. It maybe sounds like just talk to you. But music is the only space that I can be honest about myself and to myself. This is my space, very personal. (Interview Sarita, 2014)

Both Joy and Sarita’s stories represent alternative point of views on how young musicians define their idealism and activism during the process of transition to adulthood and as musicians who actively con- struct a sense of belonging with Yogyakarta as a local place. For Joy and Sarita, elements of idealism and activism are parts of their respon- sibility to societies where they belong. To create a musical product— whether it reflects the life experiences of the musician or not—is seen as a form of cultural production that cannot be valued in terms of money per se; the value for public benefit is also considered as an important aspect that contributes to a sense of belonging. In other words, idealism and activism is important for how they make sense as musicians of Yogyakarta as a place where they belong. Given this posi- tion, it is understandable that maintaining a professional career does not have to involve moving to a different location or to practise what they perceive as selling out their music product for profit. The partici- pants prefer to stay in Yogyakarta and use music as an important instrument to help create social change in society, expressing their own self-realization and trying to make sense of local belonging. The cases of Joy and Sarita above represent different pathways that young musicians take to create expressive meanings during the transition to adulthood as they engage in an active effort to continuously repro- duce their sense of belonging to Yogyakarta as an important place. In other words, we can assume that young people’s meaningful relation- ship to their place is a constitutive dimension (see Farrugia, 2014, p. 303; Farrugia & Wood, 2017) of their sense of belongingness to their immediate locale. Young Indonesian Musicians, Upward Career Mobility… 45

Discussion

This chapter has explored the important roles of place and people as sources of belonging among young musicians in Yogyakarta. The sense of belonging towards place and people became one of the reasons why young musicians in this study decide to stay in Yogyakarta and build a music career rather than move permanently to Jakarta or Bali. The decision to stay does not necessarily mean that the young people are left behind in terms of music career progression. In contrast, the social relationships to people and place is important in sustaining hope for a better future and strategies for building a meaningful life (Wyn & White, 2015, p. 32). Based on the doxa (Bourdieu, 1977) of the music scene in Indonesia, mobility to metropolitan city especially Jakarta and Bali is often considered as an obligatory move to achieve upward career progression for young musicians. Furthermore, the Indonesian music scene itself can be argued as representing the hierarchical and heteronomous fields of cultural production (Sutopo, Nilan, et al., 2017). Objectively, in Indonesia, inequality of capital distributions in the music scene does exist. However, for young musicians in this study, success is not only a matter of recognition, fame and financial gain; place and people attachments are also very important aspects that define success and a sense of belonging. For these young people, upward career mobility and successful transition to adulthood is not a matter of becoming a highly competitive “entrepreneurial self” (Kelly, 2006) and individualized human being as an ideal type of the late modernity era (Beck et al., 2003). In contrast, embeddedness and feel- ings of attachment to place and people (Cuervo & Wyn, 2014), as well as being able to make a positive contribution where they belong, are also signs of upward career mobility and successful transition to adulthood. This finding contributes to the different narratives of success among young Indonesian musicians (see Sutopo, Nilan, et al. 2017). The young musicians’ sense of belonging is manifested in the avail- ability of social, cultural and economic capital relevant to building upward career progression, and to anticipating unpredictable conse- quences in the future. The findings in this study resonate with previous research on the importance of place and people for creating sense of 46 O. R. Sutopo belonging in the forms of well-being and security among young people in rural areas in Australia (Cuervo & Wyn, 2014). Riri’s words on the importance of local place to the creation of values of respectability and authenticity resonates with the findings from Stahl and Habib’s (2017) work about young people from a high-poverty area in London, England. Implicitly, in the case of Riri, class inequalities and the hierarchy of place between Yogyakarta and Jakarta/Bali became the source of how she makes sense of her belongingness and constructs the dichotomy between the recent place as “good/authentic” and Jakarta/Bali as a “bad/non-authen- tic”. Furthermore, developing the Yogyakarta music scene’s reputation at national level is considered as a respectable action compared to ‘selling the soul’ for the sake of capital accumulation for the music industry in big cities. The narratives of young musicians above especially in the case of Riri, Joy and Sarita show that belonging can also be perceived as politi- cal, especially in the face of structural inequalities. In this context, the socio-­historical aspects of space, with Yogyakarta as a city of idealism and activism, also become important factors when defining belonging. In other words, an individual’s sense of belonging and the society mutu- ally influence each other (May, 2011) and this continuously contrib- utes to a process of construction/re-construction both in the present and in the future. The political aspect of belonging is manifested in the forms of the informants’ desire to make a contribution in creating a better life in Yogyakarta through music production. For the informants, it seems like making sense of belonging is not only a matter of what soci- ety has given to them but also what young musicians will give to create a better society as well.

Conclusion

In this chapter I have argued that there are other narratives of success for young musicians in Indonesia. Keeping the balance between upward career mobility and a sense of local belonging is also considered as a suc- cessful choice not only in terms of music careers but also for successful transition to adulthood. Based on the data gathered, both place and Young Indonesian Musicians, Upward Career Mobility… 47 people are important as sources of belonging for young musicians in this study. Place and people are manifested through spaces of support for the creation of valuable social, cultural as well as economic capital relevant for music career progression, and to anticipate unpredictable risk in the future. The cases of young musicians in this study also show that sense of belonging is also interrelated with class and place inequalities in the Indonesian context. Thus, a sense of belonging becomes political; it creates and develops young musicians’ sense of identity through their class and place attachments, as well as by constructing their political agency as sources of empowerment for self and also for society.

Notes

1. Based on my previous research on young Indonesian musicians, being successful is manifested on how they keep the balance between domain of transition and culture. In the transition domain, being successful is still heavily defined in conventional ways such as being able to earn regular income, to get married and to own a house. On the other hand, in the domain of culture, being succesfull musicians is a matter of achieving recognition, fame, and financial gain. See Sutopo, Nilan, et al. (2017). 2. For examples of geographic mobility in Europe (see Cairns, 2014), Latin America (see Crivello, 2011) and Asia (see Du, 2018). 3. Originally, this research was part of my PhD fieldwork that took place in three different cities in Indonesia: Yogyakarta, Jakarta and Bali. However, for the purpose of this article and based on the empirical data gathered, Yogyakarta was selected because it represents the complex relationship between youth, upward career mobility and feeling at home. 4. The research participants in my research have been given pseudonyms.

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4

Religion and (Re)negotiation of Belonging among Zimbabwean Migrant Youth in South Africa

Charles Dube

Introduction

Studies of Pentecostalism and social life have focused more on churches themselves than the daily associational and moral lives of church mem- bers beyond the immediate influence of the church. This ethnographic study explores the extent to which Zimbabwean migrant churches in South Africa may shape the daily social lives of young church members aged 17–23 outside the associational and formal context of the church. Focusing on Forward in Faith Ministries International (FIFMI), a Pentecostal church spread across more than one hundred countries glob- ally, I seek to extend the study of Pentecostalism, everyday religious soci- ality and young people’s identities beyond a focus on Christianity as a set of ideas and practices that occur in church. One main aim of the research is to understand the influence of FIFMI’s beliefs and practices on young church members’ identity construction through sociality with diverse social and (non-) religious groups. What

C. Dube (*) Great Zimbabwe University, Masvingo, Zimbabwe

© The Author(s) 2019 51 S. Habib and M. R. M. Ward (eds.), Identities, Youth and Belonging, Studies in Childhood and Youth, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96113-2_4 52 C. Dube happens when a church’s doctrine is ‘tested’ by migration and high lev- els of ethno-racial diversity? The study is significant for understanding the different social and personal situations and space-based contexts that frame young people’s choices about both long-term and fleeting sociality vis-à-vis church ideologies regarding these. As Ramey (2007) points out, it is important not to isolate religion from other aspects of human experience, such as economic concerns, and social forces that impact how congregants define religion and experience social relations beyond the boundaries of religious institutions, as these factors may overshadow the value attached to religion by individual congregants in everyday life. Although the exact number of documented or undocumented Zimbabwean migrants in South Africa is unknown, estimates by the International Organisation for Migration (ILO) (cited in Dube, 2017) put recent numbers at anything between 1.5 and 3 million. The migra- tion of Zimbabweans to South Africa can be traced back to the colonial period in the early twentieth century. Economic reasons accounted for young men moving to work in South Africa’s mines and farms (Crush, 2011). However, Zimbabwe’s political independence in 1980 witnessed a reduction in the numbers of young men moving to South Africa. White people fled Zimbabwe in the 1970s due to the war of independence and in the 1980s as silent protest to black majority rule (Crush, 2011). However, state-sanctioned violence in the predominantly Ndebele-­ speaking provinces of Zimbabwe in the 1980s resulted in many young Zimbabweans seeking refuge in South Africa (Pigou, 2004). With the post-2000 crisis1 in Zimbabwe, migration to South Africa has spiked, with millions seeking both economic and political refuge in South Africa and other countries (Muzondidya, 2008). In the following section of this chapter, I discuss the importance of Pentecostalism in understanding young people’s sociality, belonging and everyday life. I then proceed to situate the study within literature on social diversity in Cape Town where I conducted this ethnographic study on young people’s experiences. Following this, I will present and analyse young members of FIFMI’s experiences of sociality and belonging. Religion and (Re)negotiation of Belonging… 53

Belonging, Sociality and Everyday Life

Research on Pentecostalism tends to focus on notions of conviction and zeal more than the daily struggles of young people as they develop in faith and carve out new social spaces of identity formation in spontaneous ways (Cazarin & Cossa, 2017; Jeannerat, 2009; Landau, 2009). Pentecostalism is defined as a form of Christianity characterised by imme- diate experiences with the Holy Spirit through practices such as proph- ecy, healing and glossolalia (Dayton, 1987, cited in Haynes, 2012). Maxwell’s (2005) study of FIFMI, which is also known as the Zimbabwe Assemblies of God Africa (ZAOGA), reveals that apart from listening to sermons in church and other church-related gatherings, Pentecostals are expected to devote their own time to studying the Bible. Devotees mem- orise verses and live a prayerful life ‘at all times’ (Maxwell, 2005, p. 20 my own emphasis) to equip themselves against the Devil. Pentecostals’ social life becomes “‘re-storied’ in a manner that engenders positive change and meaning” (Maxwell, 2005, p. 21). These practices, Maxwell (2005) argues, are the same kinds of Christian ritualisms (Robbins, 2009) they try to replicate outside the church as they engage in various church activi- ties with the ‘believing community’. The Christian ritualism could be the church members’ social relations. Similar ethnographic studies reveal attempts, albeit with limited success, by Pentecostal Churches to act as “new forms of communality, which may act as a surrogate family” (Meyer, 2012, p. 163). The surrogacy takes place in the context of the congre- gants’ suspicion of the extended family and “the witches in the village” (Meyer, 2012, p. 163). With regards to the interface between Pentecostalism, migration and practices of identity, research in the US (Stepick, 2005), Canada (Machoko, 2013), and Ghana (Daswani, 2010) has demonstrated that more than emphasising ethnic, racial and nationality boundaries, some transnational Pentecostal movements value religious affiliation and reli- gious identity. As they increasingly come into contact with local groups— and as more local groups join these churches—members may separate religion from culture and accord less value to ‘ethnic baggage’ that detracts them from focusing on the primary goals of religion (Yang & Ebaugh, 54 C. Dube

2001). However, while some evidence of ‘bridging’ exists, Stevens’ (2004) study of Ghanaian churches in the US reveal that both younger and older generations use local languages in order to evangelise to host groups. In Cape Town, Ganiel (2010) and Hay (2014) found that Pentecostal churches significantly worked to promote multi-ethnic congregations through paying attention to ethnic reconciliation, and using the charisma of church leaders to bring people together. Ethnic reconciliation entails previously dominant white groups, Ganiel notes, acknowledging the wrongs committed during colonial rule and providing practical assistance to previously disadvantaged ethnic groups. While I acknowledge these debates on Pentecostalism and identity construction, I argue that the everyday social relations of young church members outside the church remain less explored. In his study of church-­ based notions of abstinence and fidelity in Cape Town, Burchardt (2011) argues that church discourse seems to be based on strong assumptions that religion is central to people’s daily experience, and that church com- munities are effective in controlling members’ social lives (see also Cazarin & Cossa, 2017). These assumptions seem to be abstracted from the con- tradictions, spontaneities and routines of the discourses of belonging and multi-layered boundary crossings characteristic of the wider communi- ties in which young people’s ideals and practices of sociality and modes of social encounter are embedded (Baumann, 1996). Alexander et al. (2007) invite us to conceive of migration-initiated practices of belonging as per- formances ‘from below’. To ‘belong from below’ refers to everyday prac- tices and often fractured, contingent and haphazard personal networks that traverse and transcend abstract and imagined understandings of reli- gious and cultural communities. In their discussion of migration and minority ethnic ‘communities’ in the United Kingdom, Alexander et al. (2007, p. 783) demonstrate the “complex contours through which indi- vidual, familial, local and collective identities are lived.” In analysing the realities of everyday sociality, youth and belonging studies have consid- ered the role played by ethnic, racial and national diversities (Daswani, 2010; Ganiel, 2006; Chaps. 5 and 7 this volume). In the following ­section, I discuss the extent of diversity in Cape Town where the study was conducted in order to consider how belonging worked for young people. Religion and (Re)negotiation of Belonging… 55

Social Diversity in Cape Town

Despite South Africa’s history of segregation, Cape Town has some of the most ethno-religiously diverse neighbourhoods where migrants and refu- gees have co-resided for decades (Hay, 2014). In Bellville, a medium-­ density neighbourhood in Cape Town, Ingrid (2014) describes the friendliness that punctuates co-residence in this neighbourhood where hundreds of thousands of second and third generation migrants from Zimbabwe live. There are also reports of Zimbabwean migrants making an effort to actively ‘integrate’ into the local political and social fabric of the city of Cape Town through engagement in community organisations with community leaders and local people (Scott, 2013). According to Scott (2013, p. 521), negotiated denizenship is when migrants “purposefully engage with South African members of the township community” as an “attempt to gain access to a limited set of rights within their locale”. Without romanticising migrants’ ‘integration’ efforts, negotiated deni- zenship suggests that when migrants actively engage in community organisations with various actors such as community leaders and local people where they live, they develop a sense of solidarity in, for example, crime prevention campaigns, that transcends national identities (Scott, 2013). Similar efforts to study urban social life in South Africa highlight that:

Everyday life in multinational urban contexts is such that the co-presences of people of diverse nationalities are routine. Coming with these routine, co-presences are ‘accidental dialogues’ in which people necessarily have to speak to each other in everyday socio-economic transactions, irrespective of their social differences. (Katsaura & Abe, 2016, p. 10)

South Africa’s diversity has multiple faces vis-à-vis social existence whereby its urban residents “have developed a kind of agility and ability to live simultaneously in many different spheres” (Hansen, 2009, cited in Wilhelm-Solomon et al., 2016, p. 14). The same country embraces migrants while also generating anti-immigrant sentiments, as the 2008 spate of xenophobia across many cities indicates (Misago, 2017). 56 C. Dube

While migration to Cape Town entails new social encounters for young Pentecostals from Zimbabwe, a welcome opportunity if viewed from the perspective of church expansion, it is also a challenge to the religious and moral foundations of the church (Biri, 2014). The allure of secular entertainment is also high in South Africa given its advanced cin- ema and music industry relative to Zimbabwe (Hansen, 2006). South Africa sets musical trends and is also known for various soap operas screened throughout Africa. Initially embraced by the black youth of South Africa, the music form of kwaito is now being Christianised and performed in church.

Forward in Faith Ministries International (FIFMI)

Forward in Faith Ministries International (FIFMI), also known as Zimbabwe Assemblies of God, Africa (ZAOGA), was founded by Ezekiel Guti2 in the early 1960s. Migration and concomitant networks promoted ZAOGA into a transnational Pentecostal movement through expansion into cities and towns in Zimbabwe and into other African countries (see Biri, 2014). Currently, the church has branches in more than 100 coun- tries and an estimated 2,000,000 members globally (Biri, 2014). Associational life is an important part of ZAOGA (Muyambo & Machingura, 2014), and many structures are established to promote church-based social networks. Transnational church connections were developed as soon as a new church was established. This happened through various ‘ministries’ for women, men and the youth (Maxwell, 2002). These associations helped to develop multiple cross-cutting bonds of fellowship beyond ethnic and regional connections, thereby reinforc- ing the movement’s cohesion (Maxwell, 2002). Ethnographic data for this study was gathered over a period of eigh- teen months, during 2015 and 2016, in Cape Town, South Africa, as part of my doctoral studies. I conducted forty unstructured interviews, observed youth church members’ social lives both inside and outside church-based social spaces, participated in various church social and Religion and (Re)negotiation of Belonging… 57 formal­ activities, took field notes and recorded and listened to church sermons. In order to gain insights into young people’s social life, I visited young people at their places of residence. I then analysed the data the- matically. Members of the FIFMI Salt River assembly in Cape Town, where I conducted the study, came from over thirty small to medium residential neighbourhoods. Most of the church members, who are more than one thousand, shared living apartments with people from diverse racial, ethnic, religious and national backgrounds. This assortment of liv- ing arrangement informed my research focus on how identities are nego- tiated in the context of diversity. In the following section, I present ethnographic findings on how aca- demic institutions and housing apartments influence notions of belong- ing among Zimbabwean youth migrants who attend FIFMI in Cape Town. I also discuss the link between migration and chance encounters with non-Christians, what I also call happenstances, in shaping sponta- neous experiences of identity and belonging.

FIFMI and Happenstances

While FIFMI does not have an explicit position regarding happenstances, there is an implicit reference to such experiences in the church’s canon- ised history. However, the data from this study indicates young people’s embrace of happenstances was not limited to fellow church members. FIFMI members’ testimonies often brought out the idea that when one falls on hard times one could unexpectedly receive assistance even from a stranger. One day Godwin,3 a young man in his mid-20s, was giving a testimony about how he found R100 (equivalent to US$7.07 as of 07 November 2017) just lying on the floor of the train he had boarded. That day, Godwin was so broke that he did not know what he would eat. What convinced him this money was sent to him from God was the fact that of all the passengers on the train, he was the first to see the money. Godwin did not perceive this as a coincidence that this happened when he was in such a desperate need of money. The mere fact of this experience may not seem to be self-evident of a miraculous nature. However, church beliefs may have fostered young 58 C. Dube people to be receptive to unexpected encounters or expectant of happen- stances. Within the Pentecostal faith, there is a belief that God sends angels in the form of physical human beings to assist Christians when they are in need. The young people I interviewed believed the Holy Spirit operates in unpredictable ways in the lives of the believers. This under- standing of the Holy Spirit is based on the belief that Jesus can be any- where. So if one is on a plane, Jesus could be sitting next to you. So, when one meets a stranger on the road, one has to be friendly to them because it might be Jesus visiting one’s house. It is this belief that influenced young FIFMI members to embrace strangers, both South African and fellow migrants who were not members of FIFMI. Within FIFMI, a believer has to work for spontaneous encounters through various acts of giving material possessions. Thus, I observed pastors encouraging members to be faithful in offerings and tithing, that is, paying ten per cent of income to the church, but also in sharing food and clothes with both fellow church members and non-church members. These acts of giving were some of the qualities that the founder of the church strongly emphasised as ways to escape poverty. While Pentecostalism does not encourage sociality with the world, these charitable acts facilitated the building of banal social relations between young Zimbabwean church members and South Africans who were not members of FIFMI. The young people I spoke with pointed out that their FIFMI identity paradoxically created a sense of belonging to both church-­ ­based communities and this-worldly communities. Since young people often used their individual discretions regarding when and who to give, they also had a role to play in determining whom to associate with. While churches, as institutions, can provide a sense of community, belonging, as Amit (2010) argues, is often a per- sonal experience. This personal experience of belonging is also demon- strated through young people’s stories of meeting strangers in unexpected ways and, as I indicate below, establishing various forms of social rela- tions with them. Happenstances have an element of a system in that they always come because a believer has invested in it long before they experienced a prob- lem. Investment can be in the form of being honest in doing acts of kind- Religion and (Re)negotiation of Belonging… 59 ness to other believers, being a committed worker in one or many church ministries (investing in serving God), and paying tithe and giving offer- ings. God is constructed as a ‘good clerk’ who hardly forgets the gifts people offer him (Maxwell, 1998). When young migrants, especially committed Christians, are faced with a problem, God remembers their investments and comes to their assistance in unexpected ways. For this reason, even a journey can be structured in unexpected ways. Thus, Kuda, who had served for many years in church as an usher, narrated a miracu- lous trip he had when he was invited for a job interview in a city he had never been to before. The unexpectedness of his experience was less in the invitation than in the manner of the journey itself, especially the assis- tance he got from a stranger. Although Kuda had applied for the job a couple of months before, he was only called for an interview the morning of the day before the inter- view. He had to travel a journey of about 400 kilometres from Johannesburg to Bloemfontein. However, he had no idea how he would get to the final destination. Little did he know that “in the same car I was in, there was a Good Samaritan who had been sent by God to help me,” he recalled. He and the ‘Good Samaritan’ had boarded the car together from Kroonstad, a town almost halfway between Johannesburg and Bloemfontein, and they were going to the same city. Although Kuda accepted the offer to drive him to where he was going, he was nervous about the man’s benevolence. Reflecting on this journey, Kuda attributed this encounter with the Good Samaritan to his dedicated service in church. What is absent in Kuda’s story is the religious affiliation of the Good Samaritan. The discussion between the two centres on the relevant issue at hand, that is, the assistance Kuda is seeking. The discussion between Kuda and the Good Samaritan demonstrates that people from different ethnic and religious backgrounds can interact without necessarily cross- ing the line that provokes serious ethnic or religious feuds. As long as there is an agreement between people regarding these prescriptions, notes Fredrik Barth (1998, p. 16), “their agreement on codes and values need not extend beyond that which is relevant to the social situations in which they interact.” 60 C. Dube

Contexts of Social Encounter

While FIFMI’s doctrine is applicable to all young people who attend the church, migration experiences and everyday social meetings in apart- ments where young people live with non-church members and in socially diverse academic institutions differ from one church member to another. This diversity provides an opportunity for FIFMI members to define their faith and experiences of belonging based on their specific experi- ences (see Daswani, 2010). Some Pentecostals even define Pentecostalism as “not so much about a complete belief system [they] agreed with or accepted, but rather concerns the specific relationships and experiences with both Christians and non-Christians that have had a powerful effect on [their lives]” (Daswani, 2010, p. 448). These experiences sometimes motivate individual church members to subjectively interpret the church’s doctrine regarding fleeting and long-term sociality in both private and public spaces. The experiences also point to the various ways in which young Zimbabwean Pentecostals invest in peer culture as they carve out new social relations and new notions of identities. In the context of migration, young FIFMI members often belong to multiple and, at times competing, groups and academic and religious institutions which tran- scend church-based social relations in mundane ways. Thus Bernard, in his early 20s, described his tangled relationship with a tenant he once shared an apartment with. Although Bernard noted that Francis, his co-­ tenant, was a ‘scammer, a thief’, and ‘untidy’, he was very knowledgeable in the word of God. Despite Francis’ shortcomings, Bernard believed “a thief cannot be chased away just because he is a thief”. Yet, and unlike Bernard’s co-tenants, his Nigerian landlord was, as Bernard put it, ‘unprecedentedly nice’. In another example, Melody, a 21-year old FIFMI member who was a university student, related the academic-social bond she developed with some of her classmates who were not members of her church. While she valued church friendship, Melody believed that, for academic purposes, it was equally important to socialise and identify with students who were studying the same programme as hers, regardless of their religious affiliation. It is one of these class mates with whom she shared her off-campus accommodation. Religion and (Re)negotiation of Belonging… 61

As with many other FIFMI members, housing apartments and aca- demic institutions constitute spaces where they carve out new social relations and definitions of belonging with doctrinally diverse people. Part of this co-existence consists in focusing on common interests more than divergent doctrines, be they religious or otherwise. I find Glick Schiller and Çağlar’s (2015) notion of domains of commonality appli- cable to the approach used by FIFMI members to bridge social bound- aries with their co-tenants. Glick Schiller and Çağlar argue that social relations are built through focusing on areas of mutual interest. In this regard, they observe, “differences are not constituting factors for the development of urban sociabilities” (Glick Schiller & Çağlar, 2015, p. 1). Such an approach does not entail negating religious, gendered or cultural differences. Rather, it is about seeing social actors as having the potential to build relationships and identities of “experiential common- alities” “within particular spaces, moments and networks of connec- tions” despite differences (Glick Schiller, Darieva, & Gruner-Domic, 2011, p. 401). In the next section I discuss the multi-layered compromises young FIFMI members make as they negotiate belonging in everyday life.

Belonging and Multiple Commitments

Young FIFMI church members were not always certain that strangers were brought into their lives by God. On the one hand, participants were pushed to be generous and to embrace God through good deeds. On the other hand, the Pentecostal faith argues that the devil is also around to tempt believers from the path of righteousness. Young church members who were not yet strong in Christ were at risk of falling into the wrong hands. An example of the FIFMI belief in the devil occurred with Tanya’s meeting with a group of coloured (as people of mixed race are commonly called in South Africa) young men preparing for a party gives insights into this situation. Tanya, who had recently converted to FIFMI, strug- gled with the thoughts of visiting strangers she had only met once. As Tanya reflected, the allure of merry-making overcame her fear of the risk 62 C. Dube she was taking by attending the party of strangers and many more social functions they later organised. She also brought forward the notion of Zimbabwean migrants’ stereotypical perception of coloured people as violent. A host of issues coalesced to inform Tanya’s definition of whether or not to attend the party. These, as Tanya points out, include her extro- verted personality, prior socialisation about local South African groups, and her desire to rebrand her morality to suite her nascent religious appe- tite. This reflects the fractal nature of social relations. According to Stewart and Shaw (1994), religious practices and beliefs do not simply fuse with other ideologies and traditions. Rather, how they are articulated and developed comes from lived realities with a multiplicity of expecta- tions, possibilities and ideas. So for Tanya, church-based practices of belonging interweave with other everyday individual ideologies and val- ues to constitute a complex sense of identity vis-à-vis sociality. Studying multiple practices of belonging based on migration and reli- gion reveals the multi-layered negotiations and compromises that frame their constitution (Werbner, 2013). Debates on religion and everyday life have highlighted that organised religion is not an all-or-nothing category confined to the physical and institutional boundaries in which its mem- bers practice it. Rather, religious practice is imbricated with other perme- able social boundaries that social actors navigate in multi-layered everyday realities (Ammerman, 2014; Ramey, 2007). Individuals sometimes ‘live’ religion vis-à-vis social relations by adjusting how they negotiate religious practices as they adapt to certain space and place contexts. This may entail compromising their religious doctrine at particular moments. These prac- tice-based realities that members of particular religious groups encounter in given settings mediate the development of “lived religious practices” (Ramey, 2007, p. 7), defined by Ammerman (2014, p. 189) as “the embodied and enacted forms of spirituality that occur in everyday life”. While the role of Pentecostal churches in fostering a sense of tight-knit ‘communities’ has been researched in Zimbabwe (Maxwell, 1998), Ghana (Hackett, 2003), and Nigeria (Ayuk, 2002), some still question notions of mechanical solidarity. Van Binsbergen (1997, in van Wyk, 2014) cri- tiques anthropologists for reverting to the prototype of the village in their conceptualisations of Pentecostal Charismatic Churches (PCCs) and descriptions of them in terms of convergence and consensus. Ideology Religion and (Re)negotiation of Belonging… 63 and everyday practices do not always converge. In principle, churches, as institutions, may define rules of association, conduct, and dress. However, in reality social situations often impact on ideology in unanticipated ways, resulting in a mismatch between ideology and everyday reality.

Conclusion

In this chapter I have suggested that to understand young people’s prac- tices of belonging means considering the varying and often contradicting significance attached to religious affiliation by individual congregants in the situations they find themselves in. In everyday life, some situations are experienced as if the Zimbabwean youth migrants do not even attend church, while in others church doctrines stringently shaped social inter- actions. Most of the experiences of the young Pentecostals from Zimbabwe indicate that, in both public and private spaces, there is always a high chance of meeting people of diverse religious backgrounds. Therefore, a conscious awareness of the presence of religion in public spaces has adverse implications for the creation of social life. Being of different reli- gious and national backgrounds does not always impinge on the building of convivial relations. Despite probable areas of difference, young Pentecostal migrants from Zimbabwe and non-Christians often discuss topics that focus on their surface commonalities. Chance encounters in public spaces sometimes become both sustained and productive in the sense of yielding material resources and affection. Again, studying such relations has implications for the kinds of representations of public and parochial spaces vis-à-vis Zimbabwean youth migrants and other ethno-­ religious groups.

Notes

1. In 1997, the government of Zimbabwe compensated soldiers Z$50,000.00 (then equivalent to US$2000) each who had fought in the 1970s to dis- lodge colonial rule. Following the unbudgeted gratuities, the Zimbabwe dollar lost its value by 70 percent in one day (see Kriger, 2003). Another 64 C. Dube

cause was the fast-track land redistribution programme of the 2000s whose aim was to redistribute land from white farmers to black people (Moyo, 2011). 2. Ezekiel Guti was born in 1923 and grew up in Mutemangaone, a rural area in Chipinge District, Zimbabwe. He later moved to Salisbury (now Harare, the capital city of Zimbabwe) where he worked as a carpenter (Guti, 2011). 3. I use pseudonyms for all research participants.

References

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5

Everyday Experiences of a Turkish University Campus: A Spatial Approach to Belonging

Baris Isci Pembeci

Introduction

Diversity, academic freedom, and equality are celebrated ideals for many Western higher education institutions.1 Turkish universities, however, even rhetorically, have never had any such claim. Rather, university cam- puses in Turkey have been engineered as state instruments which, a few exceptions aside, have been involved in many forms of segregation, injus- tice and restrictions on academic freedom (Laçiner, 2001; Tekin, 2001; Timur, 2000; Vassaf, 2001). Scholars have argued that many university administrators act like state officials who serve a political purpose of main- taining the archaic state traditions (Atabek, 2001; Laçiner, 2001; Tekin, 2001; Vassaf, 2001), and the student movements against state policies and practices continue to be crushed (Benlisoy & Ünüvar, 1997; Bora, 2012). Therefore, it is no surprise that the state’s policy on the Kurdish issue, which has stirred a persistent tension and conflict in the country through- out the last three decades, has found its way into the university campuses. The inconsistent position of various successive governments on the issue,

B. Isci Pembeci (*) Mugla University, Mugla, Turkey

© The Author(s) 2019 69 S. Habib and M. R. M. Ward (eds.), Identities, Youth and Belonging, Studies in Childhood and Youth, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96113-2_5 70 B. Isci Pembeci fluctuating from harsh military assault to the promise of a peaceful solu- tion, led university administrators to exhibit incoherent actions and dis- courses on campus across Turkey. Kurdish university students have been directly affected by this wavering climate, and yet there have been no studies into how they experience university campuses in either empower- ing or exclusionary ways. This chapter draws on an ethnographic study conducted with thirty Kurdish and Turkish students over two years, which explored the ways in which Kurdish students simultaneously face discrim- ination and affirm their belonging in a university campus that is directly affected by institutional and national discourses and practices. In this chapter, I prioritize space in theorizing belonging because I contend that it provides a powerful tool for uncovering both blatant and subtle forms of exclusion, injustice, biases and inequality that permeate the university campus (Low, 2009). By focusing on Kurdish students’ experiences of campus space, I show that discourses and practices on the national level (state, society, media) are integrated into the spaces of everyday campus life and become part of the everyday practices, emo- tions, meanings and contestations of Kurdish students. In this analysis, space is not just a context where various forms of processes and discourses through which forms of injustice and exclusion take place. In Lefebvre’s (2014) words, space is never empty, it always embodies a meaning. Space is never passive, neutral, stable nor indifferent with regard to its contents. I argue that space has power relations embedded within it which actively factor in everyday confirmation and contestation of exclusion and belong- ing in a discriminatory campus. This chapter demonstrates that boundar- ies of belonging—who belongs and who does not—are enforced and policed through spatial practice of the privileged actors on a university campus (also see Chap. 6 this volume).

Theoretical Framework

Theory of space brings into light the underlying processes and dynamics that permeate matters of belonging. Without prioritizing the role of space, analyses of belonging fail to uncover systems of exclusion that are hidden and subtle and hence rendered invisible to the latter approach. Everyday Experiences of a Turkish University Campus… 71

In order to conceptualize space and belonging, I draw upon Lefebvre’s foundational work on the social production of space. According to Lefebvre (2014), every society creates its own spaces in accordance with its specific histories and institutions. Spaces we inhabit are produced throughout material and phenomenological processes. For Lefebvre (2014), space is an important setting of contestation where space is dia- lectically perceived, conceived and lived and any analysis of space that is devoid of consideration of these is deficient. Lefebvre offers a three component-­scheme: spatial practices, representations of space and repre- sentational spaces. An analysis of space that covers these three compo- nents deconstructs the illusion that space is transparent and shows that it is a “social product that masks the contradictions of its own production” (Low, 2009, p. 22). Spatial practice, according to Lefebvre (2014), embod- ies and unites the discrepancies of everyday life within the perceived space. Spatial practice both hides as well as deciphers the social space. Representations of space is the space that is conceived, and refers to the design constructed by social actors who hold the power (scientists, city planners, politicians, etc.), and is always relative and fluid because it is a combination of the understanding and ideologies of the powerful. Representational spaces, however, are the active centers of the everyday life and allude to the spaces of desire, agency, imaginings, and memories and lived experiences. Representational space is the space of the inhabitants, who experience as well as constitute space. The dialectical relations between spatial practices, representations of space and representational spaces make the space a social product that is produced out of “the simul- taneous coexistence of social interrelations and interactions at all spatial scales, from the most local level to the most global” (Massey, 1993, p. 80). Lefebvre’s conceptualization of space in these terms points out the need of researchers to identify “historical genealogies” and “ideologies” of ­discriminative spaces (Lipsitz, 2007, p. 12). However, a critical focus on space should not deal with “just physical arrangements of things”, but with “spatial patterns of social action and embodied routine” (Shields, 2004, p. 212). Based on Lefebvre’s conceptualization of space, I define a university campus as a space that is the social product of the society it is situated within. Space is socially produced by diverse political, economic, and 72 B. Isci Pembeci social forces and takes on symbolic meanings from the historical and political periods of its production (Low, 2009). The meanings of the campus are socially constructed differently by university administrators, students, professors, personnel, etc. Contradictory discourses come into dialogue within one another through the space of the campus and the people who inhabit it. Most importantly, this chapter argues that, beneath the inclusive discourse, several forms of inequality are imposed through the spatial relations of the campus, and the way to uncover hidden injus- tice and discrimination is to critically examine the spatial experiences of the inhabitants. Employing such a spatial approach makes it possible to critically exam- ine the spatial practices involved in establishing the bounds of belonging in the university campus. Following Yuval-Davis (2006, p. 199), I under- stand belonging as always a dynamic process and as ‘a naturalized con- struction of a particular hegemonic form of power relations.’ Exclusionary discourse and practices of the campus space impose the rules of belong- ing process by which distinction is made between those who are regarded as belonging, and those who are not. Treating the university campus as a social space allows examining the specific, place-based, everyday processes and discourses through which dynamics of belonging are confirmed, per- formed or contested. Through my study, I was witness to university stu- dents negotiating belonging from the position of feeling powerless in the discursive and material construction of the campus space. However, they constitute the campus space through their negotiations and making meaning of their social relationships. When discussing an anthropological approach to space, Low (2009) points out a limitation in the theory of space, which fails to scrutinize the individual’s bodily experience of the space while mostly concentrating on the larger issues of political/economic formation of the space. Lefebvre’s concept of representational space allows for uncovering the daily spatial experiences and understandings of the inhabitants of the campus. But, it still fails to consider the intra-individual level where the politics of campus space intervene and emotional dimension is involved. This study follows Yuval-Davis’s (2006) and Anthias’s (2006) arguments to take emotions into account in conceptualizations of belonging. I focus in this chapter on how the embedded national/local power relations that construct Everyday Experiences of a Turkish University Campus… 73 the bounds of belonging in campus space are enacted through students’ feelings of distress, desire, disappointment and empowerment.

Context and Methods

Researchers have been investigating and documenting college students’ sense of belonging for many decades (Hoffman, Richmond, Morrow, & Salomone, 2002). Particularly, educational research has demonstrated that a hostile and discriminative campus climate influences students’ sense of belonging negatively (Hurtado & Carter, 1997; Hurtado, Griffin, Arellano, & Cuellar, 2008). Findings also demonstrate that stu- dents from different racial and ethnic backgrounds experience discrimi- nation differently depending on their positionality and power on campus (Ancis, Sedlacek, & Mohr, 2000; Cabrera & Nora, 1994; Suarez-Balcazar, Orellana-Damacela, Portillo, Rowan, & Andrews- Guillen, 2003; Whitmire, 2004). Even though campus climate studies provide valuable knowledge on the differential experiences of discrimi- nation and the ensuing inequality on the campus, they do not consider the spatial relations as the crucial dynamic, and these scholars may often treat college space as if “it were an empty vessel within which action took place, or as an effect of social, political and economic relations” (Gulson & Symes, 2007, p. 100). The omission of consideration of space in education studies in the universities is particularly curious since a handful of critical educational researchers have strongly pointed out the importance of space. These researchers have examined the ways in which space is used to produce and reproduce unequal forms of rela- tionships in schools (McGregor, 2004), the interplay of space, place, race and education policy (Gulson, 2006), the fluidity of education spaces (Gulson & Symes, 2007; Nespor, 2013), and relatedness of school dynamics to the economic, cultural and political relations (Nespor, 2013). One of the aims of this chapter is to connect the spatial perspective used in critical educational studies with the campus climate research on dynamics of belonging. I particularly situate this work in line with Samura’s research that uses a spatial approach in her examina- tion of processes of racialization in universities in the United States 74 B. Isci Pembeci

(Samura, 2016a) and the ways in which students’ interactions with campus space reveal issues of power and inequality (Samura, 2016b). In order to investigate these issues further, this study employed ethno- graphic methodology, which mostly consisted of participant observation, note writing, one-on-one interviews, and a focus group. Data collection took place during the spring semesters of 2015–2016 and 2016–2017 academic years at Northern University, a medium public high institution in Turkey. Fifteen one-on-one, semi structured interviews were con- ducted with students who self-identified as “Kurdish” and six students who self-identified as “Turkish,” enabling them to share their experiences and perceptions of belonging in campus space. I conducted one focus group interview with nine other Kurdish students. Through observing the interaction among group members, the focus group interview pro- vided me with an in-depth understanding of Kurdish students’ challenges to construct valued identities in a campus space which creates, maintains and perpetuates negative attitudes and behaviors against them. Due to the political sensitivity of the Kurdish issue, I could not make a public announcement of the research. Also, in order not to put the participants at risk, I conducted the interviews and the focus group meeting outside the campus. Participants were recruited using ‘snowball sampling’, begin- ning with personal contacts and then expanding to recruit further inter- viewees. I believe that the Kurdish participants’ eagerness to share their stories despite the fragile political situation was partly due to the fact that they knew me as one of the more than 2000 academics who had been prosecuted and purged for signing a peace petition calling for an end to violence in the Kurdish region and condemning the state violence against the Kurds.2 All the names of participants and the name of institution referred in the chapter are fictional.

Social Production of Universities in Turkey

Beginning from 1933 when the University reform was initiated by Atatürk (the founder of the Republic of Turkey), the Turkish higher edu- cation system has gone through several reforms initiations (Balyer, 2011). Universities in Turkey are currently supervised by The Council of Higher Everyday Experiences of a Turkish University Campus… 75

Education (YÖK), in a capacity defined by the Higher Education Law, which was implemented after the military takeover of the country in 1981. Under this law, the YÖK was established to plan and coordinate studies at universities. The 4th article of the Higher Education Law states the aim of the higher education is to educate students who “(1) are dedi- cated to Atatürk nationalism based on Atatürk’s principles (2) support Turkish nation’s national, moral, humanistic, spiritual and cultural values and appreciate the honor and happiness of being a Turk” (YÖK, 1981, p. 5347). The (b) section of the 5th article defines the principles over which university education is planned and organized: “our national cul- ture should be developed within a universal culture but by preserving those features and characteristics that are unique to us, and students should be given the strength of spirit and willpower that strengthens national unity and solidarity” (ibid.). These statements demonstrate that the law administering the universities in Turkey put students in a passive position. In addition, it could be argued that this Higher Education Law aims to create passive citizens who fit the state’s ideology. University stu- dents, who have already been socialized with state ideology through pri- mary and middle education, are passed through a similar process in higher education, which propagates Turkishness, the glory of Turkishness, and the superiority of being a Turk, which also means the inferiority of other identifications (Bora, 2004; Ergin, 2008). It is in such a structural and ideological context that the Kurdish stu- dents study in universities today in Turkey. Their universities are admin- istered under a law which construes the universities as spaces of creating ideal Turks and as a space of Turkish privilege. Kurdish students’ culture, language and other identifications are not acknowledged and any demand for a democratic and inclusive university has been severely crushed (Atabek, 2001; Tekin, 2001; Timur, 2000). Although they make up the majority in the mountainous area encom- passing Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria, the Kurds remain a minority within the existing states that they inhabit (Gunter, 2004). The Kurds are a largely Sunni Muslim, Indo-European-speaking people but they are not a homogenous group, and differ linguistically, geographically, politically and religiously (ibid.). In Turkey, the Kurds live mostly in the southeast- ern cities, but also in three largest cities of the country. The Kurdish issue 76 B. Isci Pembeci is a serious problem in the Turkish Republic’s almost nine decades of his- tory. Besides economic, social, political and international dimensions, the ethnic dimensions of the conflict is that many Kurds identify them- selves differently from the majority of the population and feel discrimi- nated against on the basis of their ethnic identity (Cornell, 2001). Since the 1970s, an increasing number of Kurds have demanded cultural, lin- guistic and political rights, the demands which have been suppressed by the Turkish state (Gunter, 2004). The repression of moderate Kurdish movements allowed the armed group of PKK to emerge as the sole chal- lenger to the state. The PKK launched an armed insurgency in 1984 and since then, the war between the PKK and the Turkish army resulted in more than thirty thousand deaths, the partial or complete destruction of as many as thousand villages, and the internal displacement of millions of people (Cornell, 2001). The ruling AKP’s (Justice and Development Party) policies vis a vis the Kurdish question in Turkey have fluctuated from the promise of a peace- ful solution to harsh military assault. In the first decade of the AKP power, the government constructed a political discourse centered on the historical unjust treatment of the Kurds and even questioned the dogmas of the past (Saraçoğlu, 2011). The government promised to grant cultural rights and adopted a reconciling discourse. However, after the 2011 elec- tions, it became obvious that the AKP government did not interpret Kurdishness as a political entity but as a “folkloric unit”, and thus began the process of purging the Kurdish politicians (Saraçoğlu, 2011, p. 51). Particularly, after the government did not get the support of the Kurds in the critical election in 2015, the Kurds became enemies (Bakıner, 2016). The government’s hard line policies against the Kurds from this point accelerated and Kurdish students in my study narrate their experiences during this tense period in terms of extreme anxiety, anger and fear. Having briefly identified the “historical genealogy” and “ideology” of campus space (Lipsitz, 2007, p. 12), I now turn to closely examine how discriminatory discourses and practices of the state are integrated into the spaces of everyday campus life and become part of the everyday belong- ing experiences of Kurdish students. Everyday Experiences of a Turkish University Campus… 77

Everyday Experiences of Belonging and Discrimination in Campus Space

Before explaining everyday experiences of a discriminative campus, it should be noted that Kurdish students are not a homogenous group. Even though some of them identify exclusively with being ethnically Kurdish, they construct their identifications along multiple axes of differ- ence such as gender, economic class, religion, birthplace, accent and political orientations. The question of some Kurdish students’ belonging may not be challenged by the hegemonic forces if, for example, their political identifications do not differ from those of the power holders in the university. Through my study, I observed that being a member of the upper class also empowers Kurdish students, and belonging does not become an issue or a struggle. Upper-class Kurdish students usually have lifestyle choices that fall more closely into line with those privileged as campus-insiders—Turkish students. However, upper-class or politically accepted Kurdish students like other less privileged Kurds in the campus, lack the right to claim an autonomous definition of themselves. Many feel the constant need to justify themselves whenever they find them- selves in a public space. Like other less privileged Kurdish students, they experience unwanted attention; with the difference that they possess ­cultural, economic and political resources they can count on to evade or to overcome negative experiences. Also, not all Turkish students are discriminatory by default. But, through the repeated statement and enactments of Turkishness as the norm in university campus, the privilege of being a Turk acquires a naturalized effect. In this way, Turkishness seems to be a natural reality even though it is a social construction (Ergin, 2008). In addition, there are several Turks who resist making or showing an unfair or prej- udicial distinction between themselves and the Kurds. Kurdish stu- dents, who narrated the experiences of prejudice in the campus, were always careful to make a note that they also have very good Turkish friends, professors and staff in the campus. For instance, Orhan, a graduate student in Chemistry, described his advisor as helpful and understanding. He pointed out that even though the professor is a 78 B. Isci Pembeci nationalist Turk, the Kurdish students in the department preferred to work with him because “he never used his political views against Kurdish students who studied with him”. Suzan, a Turkish student studying Economics, narrated the prejudiced views she had held before she met her Kurdish fiancé:

I used to hate the Kurds so much I would feel disgusted and leave the room if any of them entered. But, then one day, I met Ugur at one of my friends’ apartment. I kept my distance because he was a Kurd, but over time, his character, intellectuality and his being a descent person began to impress me. My thoughts about the Kurds have completely changed and I defend them every time I hear someone talking badly of them.

Spaces of Discrimination: The Classroom

Kurdish students in my study generated many of the most striking narra- tives about not belonging on campus in relation to classrooms. In their narratives, classrooms always come out as the space where they experi- ence exclusion, bias and even injustice. Classrooms are spaces structured with power relations and the privileged actors who have the power to enforce the boundaries of belonging are the professors and the Turkish students. Many Kurdish participants in my study complained about ­feeling excluded and discriminated in the classrooms. They complained that the dominant discourse in the classroom is Turkish nationalism, which frequently entails the Kurdish students as outsiders. Sema expressed her feeling of being excluded in the classroom as “I am tired of listening to ever continuing praises of the Turkish culture, language, and history. It is like the Kurds never existed in this geography”. Bedirhan, who studies economics, recalls a day when the professor had been making subtle dis- criminatory comments about the Kurds. He tried to be patient, but as the professor’s comments became harsher, he contested and other Kurdish students joined him. The tension subsided as the professor backed down, but many of his classmates stopped talking to him. In our discussions, Bedirhan expressed his conviction that the professor gave him a low grade as an act of revenge. As Massey (2005) argued, asserting the right to be Everyday Experiences of a Turkish University Campus… 79 present, confronting difference and thus re-appropriating space inevitably creates conflict; as is the case in the classroom in Turkish universities. In addition to subtle discrimination, Kurdish students also reported being psychologically hurt when they heard discriminatory comments from the people they liked. One day, Hulya asked the professor whom, she regarded highly until then, if she could leave the class early to get a package sent from Diyarbakır, a Kurdish city. The professor jokingly asked if the package was a bomb (referring to the established ‘belief’ that anyone from Diyarbakır is a terrorist). Leyla’s classmates laughed and she was deeply hurt, embarrassed and disappointed. When she recalled this incident during our conversation, she became tearful and said:

I prefer people to hurt me physically. These subtle, biting, unexpected comments hurt me much more. At least, when you are hit in the face, the bruises will cure. These psychological tortures keep haunting you forever.

Ilyas, another participant who studied physiotherapy, explained how he could not forget the moment when his professor called him a “physio-­ terrorist” before the class. Professors made use of the classroom as a space of Turkish privilege in other ways too. Demyat, who studied political science, failed in the final exam for criticizing the AKP government’s poli- cies against the Kurds in Syria in his answer to the question: “Discuss Turkish government’s policies in Syria”. He did not have to suspect why he failed, because the professor told him the reason openly: “he had criti- cized the government”. The exclusionary behaviors and discourses in the classroom can be subtle as well. Several Kurds in my study believe that the Turkish students, especially those who hold nationalist views, are given more chance, and more speaking time to express their views on any subject in the classroom. For instance, Galip mentioned a group of ultra-­nationalist students, who have been involved in attacking the Kurdish students physically and through social media. Galip was disap- pointed that professors showed them sympathy even when “they talked nonsense”. These examples demonstrate that the Kurdish students do not feel a sense of belonging in classroom, which is a space of the privileged actors (professors and the Turkish students) who enforce and police the boundaries of belonging. 80 B. Isci Pembeci

Spaces of Discrimination: The Dormitory

Apart from the classroom, the other primary space through which segre- gation is carried out is the dormitory. For some time, university manage- ment in the study categorized the students based around students’ birthplace, assigned value to this difference and placed them in certain buildings. The meaning attached to the students’ birthplace is constructed by the dominant political discourse and policies. The discriminatory dis- course produced by the state against the Kurds in terms of terrorism, chaos and threat to national unity, become a tool to engineer the space of dorms. The result is a space where difference is maintained, and inequal- ity is produced. The dorm building where the majority of residents used to be male Kurdish students is known on campus as the “separatists’ block”. The Kurds living in the dorms complained about the systematic discrimina- tion they faced every day. Their negative experiences began at the gates where students’ ID cards were checked by the security staff every time they entered the dorm building. The Kurdish students complained that while the students of other blocks passed through the gates very easily and quickly, they had to go through a long scrutiny. Even though the dorms have become more mixed in recent times due to the practical difficulty of maintaining the categorization policy, the rooms of some particular floors of the dorm buildings are still formed based on birthplaces. Students in the study also complained about the frequent security checks the administration conducts in the dorms. For instance, even though the dormitory regulations require that every individual room should be searched, the participants in this study reported that the offi- cials superficially checked the rooms where the Turks inhabited, but went through a detailed examination of the Kurdish students’ rooms. The Kurdish participants in the study also mentioned that their rooms were often attacked by the nationalist Turks from other rooms. Particularly, during the tensions at the national level, for instance when Turkish mili- tary was attacked by the Kurdish militia, the nationalist Turks entered the Kurdish students’ rooms by force and fights broke out. Examination of spatial practices in the dorms demonstrates that the space is more than an innocent setting where discrimination takes place. Everyday Experiences of a Turkish University Campus… 81

Rather, identifying how and why dorm space is constructed, how it is used and in whose interest sheds light on the ways in which boundaries of belonging are regulated through space.

Spaces of Discrimination: Outdoor Spaces

The final example of exclusionary spaces and not belonging to campus life that participants highlighted was the open outdoor spaces, which were usually for students to relax in or for the exhibition of dances, games or other activities by student clubs. Outdoor spaces analyzed in this chapter conform to Lefebvre’s (2014) definition of space as a setting of contesta- tion and assertion that space is dialectically perceived, conceived and lived. While university administration wants these spaces to be used for cultural events only, students understand and try to use them for political activities as well, a situation which creates tension between the students and the administration. However, as in other settings, university administration has the power to assert who belongs and who does not to these spaces. For instance, when Turkish nationalist students want to use the space for political purposes, they usually get permission. However, when students who oppose government’s policies ask to perform demonstrations at these spaces, they are often denied. One of these outdoor spaces became such a site of contestation that the administration changed the landscape design of the space by adding a cafeteria and an ornamental pool to make it unsuitable for gatherings of the demonstrating students. After the land- scape design was changed, the acceptable social behaviors became those of eating, chatting, relaxing, and these behaviors started dominating the space. At the end, in addition to administration, ordinary students gained the privilege to assert the boundaries of these spaces. Kurdish and other dissident students feel unwelcomed to use these places for political activi- ties and, overtime, they became excluded from these major spaces. Another open space in the campus substantiates this study’s claim that the meaning and use of space may change in accordance with the larger issues such as national politics. During the period when the government initiated a peace process with the Kurds, Kurdish students were able to get permission from the university administration to use this large space 82 B. Isci Pembeci for the highly contested festival of Nevruz.3 Kurdish students recall the year when they gathered in large numbers to celebrate a festival they asso- ciate with their national identifications. However, since 2015, an investi- gation is now conducted against any student who attempts to celebrate this festival on the campus and the outcome of those investigations is usually harsh punishments. Outdoor spaces in this study provide an example of differential space structured by national/local power relations that construct the bounds of belonging in campus space (Lipsitz, 2007).

Concluding Remarks

This study was an attempt to use a spatial perspective in examining higher education students’ belonging. Based on Lefebvre’s (2014) theory of space, campus space was framed as a socially produced space created in accordance with specific histories and institutions within the society it exists. The chapter also argued that a spatial perspective helps to bring into light the hidden and subtle processes and dynamics that permeate matters of belonging, which always include an emotional dimension. The examination of “historical genealogy” and “ideology” (Lipsitz, 2007, p. 12) of Turkish universities demonstrated that campus space is struc- tured by state policies and institutions that construct and maintain differ- ences among university students. In and through campus space, inequality is produced and a sense of belonging becomes threatened for Kurdish students who are deemed possessing undesired differences and become ‘othered’. Kurdish students’ narratives of ‘un-belonging’ unearthed vari- ous forms of exclusion, injustice, bias and inequality, as well as feelings of distress and disappointment.

Notes

1. For a critical look at the British higher education system, see Waller, Ingram and Ward’s book (2017) on social class inequalities. 2. See https://barisicinakademisyenler.net/English for more info on the Academics for Peace initiative and the treatment of dissident academics in Turkish universities. Everyday Experiences of a Turkish University Campus… 83

3. Nevruz is a traditional festival celebrated throughout Middle East and Central Asia. The festival gained its popularity in Turkey with the rise of the Kurdish political opposition since the 1970s.

References

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6

Transit and Transition: Student Identity and the Contested Landscape of Higher Education

Vicki Trowler

Introduction

With the massification of higher education (HE) and an increased focus on widening participation in many countries, the demographics of the student body have been changing, challenging the essentialised notion of “the student” so central in the policy imaginarium. Pivotal to many mod- els of student transition (e.g. Tinto, 1993), retention (e.g. Kuh & Love, 2000), engagement (e.g. Kuh, Cruce, Shoup, Kinzie, & Gonyea, 2008) and success (e.g. Thomas, 2012), the concept of “belonging” is often evoked without criticality. Such writers and others (see Waller, Ingram, & Ward, 2017; Bathmaker et al., 2016) have argued that it is important for students to develop a “student identity” to integrate socially and academi- cally into the institution, in order to persist and succeed (by which they mean graduate). Yet, as Harvey, Drew, and Smith (2006) point out, such models are based on white, middle-class, residential [undergraduate] student experi- ences, which calls into question the validity of these models as student

V. Trowler (*) Lancaster, UK

© The Author(s) 2019 87 S. Habib and M. R. M. Ward (eds.), Identities, Youth and Belonging, Studies in Childhood and Youth, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96113-2_6 88 V. Trowler demographics diversify. If the “traditional” experience is held up as the ideal to which actual students should seek to conform in order to inte- grate into the institution, then arguably assimilation is demanded as a necessary condition for student “success” (see Rose-Adams, 2013, p. 97). Scott et al. (2014, p. 96) report the assumption that the process of under- graduate studies transforms “non-traditional” students, so that by the time they graduate, “they will be reconstituted as the ‘standard’ or ‘tradi- tional’ student”. Students who do not wish to—or cannot—develop this essentialised “student identity” would thus be precluded from “belong- ing”, and from “succeeding”. Scott et al. (2014, pp. 97–98) further note

Transitions are… always tied to complex relations of power and embodied intersections of difference.

Higher Education Institutions (HEIs), like other spaces, are sites wrought with power dynamics. As described by Valentine (2007, p. 18):

Specific spaces (home, family, community) are produced and stabilised by the dominant groups who occupy them, such that they develop hegemonic cultures through which power operates to systematically define ways of being and to mark out those who are in place or out of place.

With a diversifying student body, not all students will feel equally at home in all spaces. For students who may feel different in some way to other students whom they perceive as more typical (see Reay, 2017), there may be spaces in which they feel out of place, through their per- ceived difference—both in the situations from which they have come, and in the study contexts to which they have travelled. In this chapter I consider the ways in which undergraduate students at Scottish universities engage with space and place and how this affects their sense of belonging and identity as students. In interrogating what is meant by “belonging” in a HE context, I use the construct of “imagined communities” (Anderson, 1983) to explore how the students describe themselves as (aspiring) members. The chapter draws on a study of self-­ identified “non-traditional” students studying in Scotland, and explores how these students engage with space and place, how they construct their Transit and Transition: Student Identity and the Contested… 89 identities as students and navigate transitions within this, and how they forge a sense of place and construct belonging in these contested landscapes.

Belonging and Imagined Communities

Thomas (2012, p. 12) states that “at the heart of successful retention and success is a strong sense of belonging in HE for all students” (emphasis in original). In this report synthesizing the outcomes of seven projects across 22 HEIs in the UK (Thomas, 2012), Thomas endorses Goodenow’s (1993, p. 25) definition of belonging as:

Students’ sense of being accepted, valued, included, and encouraged by others (teacher and peers) in the academic classroom setting and of feeling oneself to be an important part of the life and activity of the class. More than simple perceived liking or warmth, it also involves support and respect for personal autonomy and for the student as an individual.

This sense of belonging, Thomas (2012, p. 14) argues, is most success- fully nurtured in the academic sphere, since students were “most likely to feel like they belong to their programme, with a sense of belonging gener- ally decreasing at departmental, school and institutional levels”. Thomas’s (2012) assertion is, however, contestable in other contexts, where stu- dents may feel a primary sense of belonging to their fraternity (see Peterson & Martens, 1972, writing in the US context), their university residence (see Brown, 2016, writing in the South African context), their sports team, society or other grouping. While recognising that heterogeneity among students results in differ- ent demands and requirements structuring the experience of belonging, Thomas’s perspective fails to capture the full picture and the dynamic nature of student “belonging”. For example, it is possible for a student to feel liked, respected and supported, as well as accepted, valued, included and encouraged—but still not feel that they belong, as this chapter shows: while efforts to make classrooms spaces of acceptance and respect are laudable, they bring no guarantee of a sense of belonging. 90 V. Trowler

Belonging is, as Yuval-Davis (2006, p. 197) notes, “about emotional attachment, about feeling ‘at home’, and… about feeling ‘safe’.” Students need to feel a reciprocal emotional attachment and investment to feel that they belong, rather than merely perceiving that they are accepted and respected. The Goodenow (1993, p. 25) definition of belonging also fails to capture the dynamic aspects of belonging—conceptualised by Stahl and Habib (2017, p. 1) as “a process of sense-making tied to place and value” (emphasis added). Here, the construct of the “imagined com- munity” can provide more nuance. Drawing on Anderson’s (1983) concept of “imagined communities”, I suggest that belonging refers to “groups, constructed in their individual or collective imaginariums, of which people aspire to membership, to which they profess allegiance, and in which they might feel ‘at home’” (Trowler, 2016, p. 62). This approach to the study of belonging supports Yuval-Davis’s (2006, p. 204) assertion that “any construction of boundar- ies, of a delineated collectivity, that includes some people—concrete or not—and excludes others, involves an act of active and situated imagination.” These imagined communities may be geographic (Anderson, 1983), or virtual, comprising those one recognises as being “like oneself” (see Miño-Puigcercós, Rivera-Vargas, and Cobo this volume), or like one aspires to be (Ward, 2014). Similar to Young’s (1986) “unoppressive city” these imagined communities have a high tolerance of heterogeneity, while lacking the potentially alienating aspects of the city (such as ano- nymity, depersonalisation, vastness). More than just belonging, members of an imagined community matter to the community. Individuals thus aspire to membership of the imagined communities they construct (such as “successful expatriate African students at British universities”, or “female computer games technologists”), and attempt to align their own habitus and capitals (see Bourdieu, 1986) with those of the imagined community. To do this, I argue that these aspirant members deploy both ascribed “identity resources” which help shape their habitus, and achieved “identity resources” which contribute to their capitals (see Fig. 6.1). Importantly, these imagined communities are not static—the imag- ined community a student constructs prior to entering university may bear only passing resemblance to the imagined community that student Transit and Transition: Student Identity and the Contested… 91

habitus Imagined capitals Community

Nationality / ethnicity relationships Lifestyle

languagegender s friendships choices Age / Dis/ability Interests /

lifestage aspire hobbies experiences sexuality habitus capitals

person

Fig. 6.1 Imagined communities (adapted from Trowler, 2016, p. 63) constructs several months into their studies. These dynamic construc- tions are conceived anew over time (as students gain experiences and new capitals), and with context (as their self-definition shifts, bringing other subjectivities to the fore). This model—drawing on Bourdieu’s constructs of habitus and capital—emerged from the study outlined below.

Data, Context and Methods

The study involved undergraduate students who self-identified as “non-­ traditional” in their specific study contexts, having volunteered in response to the prompt, “when your university thinks of ‘students’, what kind of person are they likely to be thinking of? How well does that description fit you?”. Students were recruited through posters placed on noticeboards on campuses, social media postings on student-orientated groups on platforms such as Facebook and LinkedIn, and using other social media/electronic communications such as Twitter, Kik and Instagram. Only students currently enrolled in studies at universities in Scotland were selected for interview. I interviewed 23 students three times each over the course of 2014, using a SmartPen to record and 92 V. Trowler

­annotate data. Additionally, I asked permission to follow their social media accounts (where these had been the source of initial contact), for which I used dedicated, minimalistic Twitter and Facebook profiles. Ten students granted me access which varied between complete and minimal; however, use of social media among these students varied enormously, with some eschewing social media entirely and others using multiple platforms for different purposes. During the final interview, I asked the students to bring along an object or image which encapsulated their engagement experience, which I photographed. The students were all undergraduates, enrolled across seven different universities in Scotland. One student was registered for part-time study and the others were registered as full-time students, in disciplines across the social sciences, humanities, creative and performing arts, law, busi- ness and commerce, sciences, engineering and technology. They identi- fied themselves as representing 10 nationalities, and reported a range of living situations, including living with their family of origin and com- muting to their university daily; living in university accommodation on or near Campus; living in private accommodation with other stu- dents near Campus; living with a partner and/or dependent children or other family for whom they had a caring responsibility; living alone in private accommodation and commuting to their university daily. The students in this study included Scottish, EU, RUK and International students. At the time of the study, Scotland offered free higher educa- tion to Scottish and European Union (EU) students, but charged fees to students from England, Wales and Northern Ireland (classified RUK—rest of the UK), and to students from outside the EU (classified International). Given that the informants of this study self-identified as “non-­ traditional” in their study contexts, there was a strong possibility that they might have felt marginal/ised in some way. I tried to militate as far as possible against inequalities of power by working to ensure the young people felt at ease by

1. allowing the students to choose the venues for interviews, so as to maximize the likelihood that they would feel comfortable (though this did compromise quality of recordings in several cases); Transit and Transition: Student Identity and the Contested… 93

2. clarifying my own student subjectivity and stressing my gratitude to them for volunteering; 3. providing points of commonality when asked (such as explaining my “foreign” accent to informants from outside of the UK, or disclosing my having been a student parent, or being frustrated by late-running trains); 4. dressing informally myself.

I analysed interview data, as well as visual data, social media posts, and supplementary data such as policy texts, through NVivo using a process similar to that described by Maxwell (2012). This involved a “bottom- ­up” strategy of coding akin to Maxwell’s (2012) “categorising” strategy, together with “connecting” strategies at the levels of data (engaging nar- rative) and of concepts (providing a “helicopter view”). Data analysis took place alongside data collection, with emerging data being used to inform subsequent interviews. This chapter draws on data from the study concerning the respondents’ engagement with space and place, and how this affects their sense of belonging and their identity as students.

Engaging with Space and Place

The students in this study were asked to list ways in which their universi- ties attempted to engage them, whether or not they considered these suc- cessful. While they recognised their universities’ attempts to engage them through the use of space and place—such as the design of classroom spaces which they perceived as less “teacher-centric”, and the creation of social spaces in academic buildings—they did not consider these attempts altogether successful. Feelings of displacement were reflected in their observations about space and place. For Uche,1 the space around indi- viduals became viewed as “territory”:

British people have a weird sense of “personal space”. Like, “We used to own the planet, and now we still own this space around us”. Like there’s, sort of, an invisible bubble around them, that you’re not allowed into. If you sit too close, or talk too loud, you’re trespassing on what’s rightfully theirs. 94 V. Trowler

This perception of not belonging in reference to space and place was shared by others. While not quite feeling like a trespasser, Marian reported that:

As an older student, there are definitely spaces that aren’t for you. …there is a distinct sense that if you accidentally wander into the wrong place everything stops, and people turn to look at you like you’re lost and they want to help you find your way back out as fast as possible so that every- thing can go back to normal… They treat you like a spy. They won’t tell you to go, but they stop talking, and look at you, until you realise it for yourself.

Marian’s retelling of her experiences demonstrate how, in her percep- tion, she did not qualify for membership of the “imagined community” constructed by those other students, and so was perceived by them to be “lost” when entering space they deemed theirs. Gabi, a black student, reported a similar experience in this description of “white space”:

When I first arrived, I didn’t realise there were certain spaces that were for me, and other spaces that were not… When I went to [a pub frequented by students] I didn’t know it was a white space. I just heard a classmate speaking about what a great place it was, and so I went to see…No one said anything, but they all looked at me like I was lost. I didn’t stay long. Later I found [another pub nearby] and saw, this is where I’m supposed to be. Maybe it wasn’t as nice a place, but it was a place for me.

Neither Gabi nor Marian reported any overt attempt to make them feel unwelcome, yet both felt distinctly that they were regarded by others as “out of place” in those spaces. Gabi reported feeling uncomfortable as a result of looking different, preferring instead the less upmarket location nearby where she could blend in more easily. This tendency of students to cluster together with those who look like them, or resemble them in some manner central to their self-definition, has been noted elsewhere by Kessi and Cornell (2015). In a study of black (African, Coloured, Indian and Chinese, as per pre-1994 descriptors) students at the historically white University of Cape Town in South Africa, Kessi and Cornell (2015, p. 7) report one of their respondents, named “Kopano”, describing seating Transit and Transition: Student Identity and the Contested… 95 practices at lectures which mirrored the relegation of different “race” groups to different geographic areas:

First day of lectures and the class is split almost perfectly by race. All the white students sat in one section we coined “Camps Bay”.2 All the Indians sat in another, Most of the coloured and Muslim students would sit next to the Indian section or at the back of the class or “Mitchell’s Plain”. The upper middle class black students congregated in a small area and finally the rest of the black students populated the remainder of the class “Khayelitsha”. I was in shock…

The researchers ascribe this behaviour to “a historical practice of oppres- sion that signified a division between superior and inferior ‘race’ groups” rather than “benign separation” (Kessi & Cornell, 2015, p. 7). While the historical and structural contexts of the South African students’ behaviour, and that of their Scottish counterparts, clearly differ significantly, the attri- bution of a dimension of power is helpful in understanding how the stu- dents in the Scottish study—who positioned themselves as “marginal” relative to those they constructed as “traditional”—experienced and ration- alised their relationships to certain spaces, and those who laid claim to inhabit those spaces. In addition to feelings of displacement, space was something these students both inhabited and moved through. It was experienced as physi- cal and psychological, as captured by Bender (2001, p. 6):

People’s sense of place and landscape thus extends out from the local and from the present encounter and is contingent upon a larger temporal and spatial field of relationships. The explanation of what is happening moves backwards and forwards between the detail of everyday existence and these larger forces…

For the participants in this study, the spaces provided to them in which to conduct their lives as students offered both opportunity and threat. The possibility of reinvention, of escaping the constraints of “home” and of selves they felt no longer fitted, appealed; but at the same time, the strange- ness and “foreignness” of the new context amplified by their feelings of difference or marginality was experienced as challenging, unsettling or 96 V. Trowler even hostile. The conflict inherent in these opposing impulses was experi- enced at least to some degree by all of the students interviewed, and affected how (and whether) they conceived of themselves as students.

Student Identity and Transitions

Field and Morgan-Klein (2010, p. 3) describe higher education as a “lim- inal transitional space”, with studenthood having “prescribed temporal boundaries” where students are “in the midst of a passage from one status to another”. Scott et al. (2014, p. 75) describe this transition as changes in “how students navigate institutional pathways and, specifically, how these movements affect shits in identity and agency”. Traditionally, student transition has been associated with the First Year Experience (FYE). More recently, Wayne et al. (2016) have proposed a more holistic, student lifecycle view that considers not only transition into university (linked to development of a student identity), but transi- tion through (linked to development of an academic/disciplinary iden- tity) and out of university (linked to development of a professional identity) too (see also Waller et al., 2017). Contrary to Wayne et al.’s (2016) characterisation of transition having three discrete, sequential phases, the data from my study suggested that students do not necessarily first develop a student identity, and then an academic/disciplinary identity, and finally a professional identity. Rather, the reality appears to be more nuanced, with all of these identities devel- oping alongside each other in complex ways. Greg, a computer games technology student, recounted an incident which illustrates this:

I was sent for remedial—they don’t call it that, it’s called the Writing Centre or something but it’s remedial, whatever they call it. Because of my referenc- ing. Plagiarism, they said, but don’t worry, you probably just don’t know better. I just looked at them, like, where have you been these last decades? Do you not understand popular culture? Easter eggs, heard of those? Homage? I wasn’t plagiarising, I knew what I was doing, planting references to other games, movies, songs… But oh no, they want citation, MLA, stuffy referencing like we’re back at school, not creating cultural artefacts here. Transit and Transition: Student Identity and the Contested… 97

Greg felt aggrieved that his conscious choice to invoke the ethics and practices of professionals in the field (demonstrating allegiance to a pro- fessional identity) rather than conforming to student ethics and practices of citation and referencing was being cast as deficient. He struggled with the tension between being a creator—where one set of rules was valid— and being a student, where one’s work was judged by another set of rules. He felt that his insistence on being appraised against professional rather than student frameworks of acceptability was being misinterpreted, and being ascribed to his not having been appropriately socialised. Thus, his aspiring professional identity was in conflict with his student and aca- demic identities, whose norms he was flouting, enjoying precedence rather than developing out of those. Other participants experienced similar conflicts. Tristan’s assertion of a “professional” identity as a musician was in conflict with his developing a “student” identity. This conflict was addressed—though not fully resolved—over the course of the study by Tristan developing an academic / disciplinary identity, which allowed a nascent student identity to begin to emerge. For Brian, his professional identity as a dancer emerged together with his academic/disciplinary identity as a dance student, and aided his transition into his student identity. The development of a “student identity” was, for these students, something which emerged through their practices as students in their university landscapes. Yet while acknowledging the importance of space and place, they rejected simplistic linear conceptions of movement through space. Uche, an international student from Nigeria, remarked that:

To be here, you have to be here and there. Your life at home carries on, and you are still a part of that, you still make the decisions and share the lives as though you were there. But you are also here, and your life here is very different. You have to forget about life there, although you carry it with you everywhere. You have to live here and there, together but separately…

This compound, complex nature of moving through space was echoed by Kris, a transgender woman, who rejected as simplistic the metaphor of “the learning journey”: 98 V. Trowler

[My tutor] said … something about my “learning journey”—… Like you inhabit some kind of simplistic two-dimensional universe. …You’re never really just in one space. There’s where you are, like, physically—but your head is somewhere else, you want to be somewhere else, your heart and your imagination anchor you in other places, and so where you start out from isn’t one place, but many. And when you start out isn’t one time, but many. And where you end up isn’t one place, but many. …So yea, it’s really … about being several people at the same time… So when the journey starts, do you have to round up all the characters and get them into the car, or do you let the others make their own journeys in parallel, elsewhere, trusting that somewhere you’ll all end up together again, or at least the ones that really matter will make their way to the places that really matter, even if they take a different route and arrive at a very different time? Or, maybe some of them are there already, waiting for others to catch up? Dunno, it all falls down because the journey doesn’t really do it justice, as a metaphor. It’s too constrained, to linear, too stuck on a simplistic model of the pro- gression of time. I think it’s more complex.

Kris’s comment highlights the inadequacies of the metaphor of the journey, with its unproblematic notions of start, route, and destination, which they felt lost crucial elements of their experience. Notwithstanding the limitations of simplistic representations of journeys, images of move- ment and travel do convey the sense of transition, and transit, across and within different physical, cognitive and emotional spaces. I suggest that students move through physical, cognitive and emotional spaces and places, making sense of themselves and their environments, as they forge their identities and develop (or not) a sense of belonging. The discussion now turns to how students construct a sense of place.

A Sense of Place and the Politics of Belonging

As this chapter has shown, space and place are social constructions. Thus, creating “a sense of place”, and forging community, are interwoven. Berger (1984, p. 63) describes the process of creating “a sense of place” as follows: Transit and Transition: Student Identity and the Contested… 99

By turning in circles the displaced preserve their identity and improvise a shelter. Built of what? Of habits… the raw material of repetition turned into shelter… words, jokes, opinions, objects and places… photos, tro- phies, souvenirs… The roof and four walls… are invisible, intangible, and biographical.

For students who consider themselves as “non-traditional”, the habitus and capitals they bring with them into the new, unfamiliar environment of HE form the “building materials” to improvise shelter, as described above by Berger. For example, Greg described how his growing up in care had equipped him with the emotional resources to cope in an unfamiliar environment:

You make your own home. In here [taps head]—so you carry it around with you. Like a tortoise… So it’s always there, and you can just slip inside if you need it. Because you do. They [other students] carry it around on their skin—everywhere is home, to them. This is like their back yard. But we’ve also got our home, and when you’re tired of being in their home you can always go back into your own.

Engaging in student practices at the university led, over time, to stu- dents who had initially questioned, or even overtly rejected, their student identities coming to accept them. Marian, whose engagement in political activism around the Scottish Independence Referendum in 2014 had led to increased engagement with her studies, recounted her realisation of this:

[Activism and study] has needed some all-nighters, and I’ve missed out on sleep sometimes, or once or twice skipped meals because I was working, but that’s also made me feel more like a real student!… I suppose I’m fall- ing into those same stereotypes. [laughs] I meant, the way the student experience is always portrayed in the media, in popular culture, of kids living it up and then running out of time and having to stay up all night to meet a deadline. Or drinking their grant up and having to skip meals. Of course not all students are like that and of course other students are just as real, but I suppose despite living that, I’ve not really believed it myself, in some way. 100 V. Trowler

With repetition, even new practices can become familiar, helping to create a sense of belonging. Having experienced stereotypical “student” behaviours such as skipping meals and missing sleep, on several occa- sions, Marian feels “more like a real student”, and more comfortable describing herself as such. Bender (2001, pp. 5–6) captures it thus:

By moving along familiar paths, winding memories and stories around places, people create a sense of self and belonging. Sight, sound, smell and touch are all involved, mind and body inseparable…. As people go about their business, things unfold along the way, come in and out of focus, change shape and take on new meanings.

By adopting “student” practices, and including herself in an “imagined community” of students like herself, Marian comes to recognise herself as a student and begins to feel “at home” in that context. Students who consider themselves “non-traditional” in their study contexts, and who thus do not feel fully “free and able to be themselves”, will feel differently enabled and constrained by the various communities in which they find themselves in their study contexts. Their imagined communities anchor them in a space where they can feel fully “at home”, even in spaces where they are marked “out of place” (Valentine, 2007, p. 18). Yet feeling “at home”, and feeling a sense of belonging, captures only part of the picture. One can feel a sense of belonging but not be recog- nised by others as belonging. Or, one can be recognised as belonging (by virtue of inherent characteristics, such as nationality) but not feel a sense of belonging, because loyalties lie elsewhere. Yuval-Davis (2006) differen- tiates between a sense of belonging (as defined earlier) and the politics of belonging, which involves status and entitlement: it concerns not only the maintenance of the boundaries that define “us” vs “them”, but also contestations around this. Thus, it focuses on not only who is in and who is out, and who has the right to participate and be included and who does not—but also what constitutes requisites of belonging, whether ascribed characteristics (such as origin, race, etc.) or enacted ones (such as loyalty, solidarity, common values, etc.). Student transition, and the acquisition of a “student identity”, thus clearly have both “sense of belonging” and “politics of belonging” dimensions. When students construct their “imag- Transit and Transition: Student Identity and the Contested… 101 ined communities”, including themselves as aspirant or full members, these considerations shape who else they choose to include, and who to exclude as not belonging.

Conclusion

Classical theories of student transition (e.g. Tinto, 1993), engagement (e.g. Kuh et al., 2008), retention (e.g. Kuh & Love, 2000) and success (e.g. Thomas, 2012) assume an uncritical understanding of “belonging” and decontextualized notions of the development of a “student identity”, upon which “success” (i.e. graduation) is predicated. This chapter rejects the simplistic construct of “the learning journey” as a metaphor for the progressive acquisition of valued capital over the course of “student- hood”. Instead, this chapter embraces space and movement as literal and metaphoric embodiments of the multiple simultaneous, multidirectional and often contradictory dimensions of transit and transition that stu- dents author and experience as they construct and locate their identities and their “imagined communities”. Higher education can be viewed as a landscape of contestation, with claims and counter-claims including those relating to who has a “right” to be there. In this landscape, students negotiate their identities and claims of studenthood as they develop practices which, with repetition, begin to construct a sense of belonging or feeling “at home”. Paying heed to how they do this amidst the contestation, makes explicit the dynamics which constrain and enable the development of a “student identity”, as well as disciplinary and professional identities. Scott et al. (2014, p. 98) note that

Transitions are… complex processes of change, resistance, re/positioning and subjective construction… It is not only the process of naming or being named that constitutes the identity position as “student”: it is through tak- ing up of particular practices and ways of doing and being within particu- lar cultural contexts that the subject may be recognised as a student.

For students who identify as “non-traditional” within their study con- texts, then, being recognised as a student requires not only the adoption 102 V. Trowler of context-specific “ways of doing and being”, but the challenging of assumptions about who might legitimately be considered to be a student in that specific context.

Notes

1. All names have been changed. 2. These areas would be well-known to any Capetonian. Camps Bay is a wealthy, historically white coastal suburb of Cape Town; Mitchell’s Plain is a sprawling township on the outskirts of Cape Town to which people classified as “coloured” were forcibly removed under the Group Areas Act; and Khayelitsha is a sprawling township—initially an informal settle- ment- on the outskirts of Cape Town where people classified as African were required to live under the Group Areas Act.

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Using Bourdieu to Understand the Pathways to Belonging That Are Forged by Young Students of Refugee Experience in an Australian Mainstream School

Fiona Picton and Grant Banfield

Introduction

Globally, the increased movement and resettlement of people has resulted in a growing number of diasporic populations (Cohen, 2008; Van Hear, 2005). For many people their journeys to, and their lives within, new countries are stories of struggles over cultural identity and belonging, or what Abdelmalek Sayad (2004) has called ‘the suffering of the immi- grant’. It is not an exaggeration to describe such journeys as processes of significant personal and cultural remaking. To be uprooted and relocated into alien systems of governance—and often alienating regimes of cul- tural practice—is a test of any person’s capacity not just for adaption but also for personal development. For young people, in particular, there are special challenges on these journeys. Most significant, perhaps, is the

F. Picton (*) • G. Banfield Flinders University, Adelaide, Australia

© The Author(s) 2019 105 S. Habib and M. R. M. Ward (eds.), Identities, Youth and Belonging, Studies in Childhood and Youth, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96113-2_7 106 F. Picton and G. Banfield negotiation of belonging to school, with its strange structures of expecta- tion and unfamiliar rules of cultural behaviour. The substantive focus of this chapter centres on a recent1 ethnographic research study entitled Pathways to Belonging: An Ethnographic Study of Students of Refugee Experience making their way in a South Australian Mainstream Primary School. This study sought to understand the struggle of young people of refugee status to belong in a mainstream school. Bourdieu’s conceptual tools—specifically the concept of habitus—were the primary explanatory frame. The metaphor of ‘pathways’ was employed to draw attention to the active process of ‘doing school’ (Roy & Roxas, 2011) or, as Bourdieu (1990) would put it, acquiring a ‘feel for the game’. Largely, through the students’ own accounts and observations of their experiences, what follows in this chapter shows these processes to repre- sent the re-forging of identity as their subjectivities rub abrasively against the gritty realities of the foreign (and often alienating) objective struc- tural and cultural conditions of learning to ‘do school’. The chapter begins with a brief description of the project and its meth- odology. It then moves to its main section which brings together Bourdieusian theory with accounts of students of refugee experience, spe- cifically ‘Daniel’ and ‘Myat’.2 In the concluding section, we provide a succinct post-project reflection on operationalising Bourdieu as well as recent challenges to Bourdieu’s concept of habitus and what this might mean for our theorising of ‘belonging’. Particular attention is given to Margaret Archer’s critique that, in his theory of habitus, Bourdieu fails to give sufficient recognition to human reflexivity. While acknowledging Archer’s insights, we contend that habitus should not be jettisoned but reconsidered as encompassing a capacity approach to understanding agency.

Pathways to Belonging: The Project

Pathways to Belonging was founded on the understanding that developing a sense of belonging and connection to ‘doing school’ was essential for all students (Libbey, 2004; Osterman, 2000; Sagor, 1996) and may be crucial for students of refugee experience (Correa-Velez, Gifford, & Barnett, 2010; Using Bourdieu to Understand the Pathways to Belonging That… 107

Kia-Keating & Ellis, 2007). Indeed, previous research had shown a lack of connections to school culture attributed to causing anxiety and diminish- ing mental health in resettled young people (Milner & Khawaja, 2010). The project set out to further understand the challenges confronting young people of refugee experience as they enter mainstream school by taking their views and experiences seriously. Pathways to Belonging was a single school, ethnographic study3 framed by the research question;

How do students of refugee experience navigate pathways to belonging within their mainstream schooling experience?

The research school, Kurlu Park Primary,4 was a mainstream primary school where students from the age of five to thirteen attended. It was situated in a disadvantaged area in metropolitan Adelaide, South Australia, amongst low-end rental accommodation (Department of Education and Children’s Services, (DECD), 2013). The school popula- tion was diverse and a growing number of students of refugee experience, from various countries, had recently enrolled at the school at the time of the study (DECD, 2013). The researcher attended the school for one to two days a week, over one school term, gathering qualitative data. The primary means of data collection was by participant observation. Field notes were taken from observations that occurred during several one and two hour blocks of time during a school day. Additional data was also collected from semi-­ structured interviews and school documents and this was triangulated with observational data. Each participant was interviewed twice, for fif- teen to twenty minutes, to provide opportunities for meaningful discus- sion. Further interviews were held with student participants who requested them. Data were analysed during and after the project’s data collection phase using a themed approach. Audio records from formal interviews were partially transcribed and field notes from participant observation and document analysis, were examined for data categorisa- tion. The researcher approached the study in a participant-as–observer role (Burgess, 1984) where the intention was to carefully blend into the school setting, enabling trusting relationships to be built with students. Through this role the researcher was able to qualify participants’ experi- 108 F. Picton and G. Banfield ences rather than objectively quantifying them. Participants were involved as essential partners in the research as a “core ethical principle of human agency” (Hugman, Pittaway & Bartolomei, 2011, p. 656). Therefore, acting ethically and being reflexive were integral to every stage of the research process (Hugman et al., 2011). The young people in the study, aged between ten and twelve years, came from a variety of cultural backgrounds and home countries. They had entered Australia on Humanitarian visas and had spent varying amounts of time in refugee camps prior to resettlement. Each student had a unique story of displacement and resettlement and their own his- tories and cultures. Their differing knowledges and understandings of the world, impacted upon their ability to be successful when forging path- ways to belonging and ‘doing school’. Class teachers of the young stu- dents of refugee experience, and other teachers who worked with them, were also included in the study and informally interviewed. An important framing of the project was the recognition that young people of refugee experience arrived in their host countries with an opti- mistic outlook and an enthusiasm for completing a previously denied or interrupted education (Gifford, Correa-Velez, & Sampson, 2009). In Australia, they may first encounter schooling at an Intensive English Language Centre (IELC) where they are offered additional support in language and cultural learning for approximately twelve months. The transition for young people of refugee status into mainstream primary school from an IELC, or straight after arrival in their new country, has been identified as a significant, problematic phase for newly arrived young people (Pugh, Every, & Hattam, 2012) and one frequently accom- panied by a decrease in feelings of belonging and safety (Gifford et al., 2009). Understanding the nature of obstacles to belonging young people con- front when entering mainstream school is vital—not just because belong- ing is a basic need of all people (Baumeister & Leary, 1995) but also that it is integral to the broad aim of a socially progressive education to develop in young people healthy personal, cultural and social identities. The study took the view that belonging was a multidimensional process, for as Yuval- Davis puts it, “people can ‘belong’ in many different ways and to many different objects of attachment” (2011, p. 12). Belonging was not regarded Using Bourdieu to Understand the Pathways to Belonging That… 109 as a fixed thing or simply a possession. Rather, it was taken as an active process of forming bonds of connection that are crucial to one’s social participation, entitlement, and status (Yuval-Davis, 2011).

Theoretical Approach

The process of belonging stretches across time and place. Like all young people, refugee young people may feel connected in some situations or instances but disconnected in other contexts or times (Schall, Wallace, & Chhuon, 2016; Holloway & Valentine, 2000). Our social and cultural lives express a continual negotiation of belonging. For many of us, this negotiation is eased with the weight of the familiar and comfortable sur- rounding us. This is not the case for people of refugee status who have been forced to flee from the familiar and who find themselves displaced in a new foreign environment. Arguably, their re-creative resources are limited. In sociological terms, this means that we can reasonably expect the structural conditions confronting the displaced to restrict their agen- tial capacity to negotiate belonging (Archer, 2000). Another way of put- ting this is to say that approaches to studying belonging, which draw on sociological theory, must ultimately balance the ongoing structure and agency debate. If any meaningful sense is to be made of the lived realities of social connectivity and belonging, then an appreciation of how we make—and how we are made by—the familiar and the unfamiliar condi- tions of our existence is essential. Perhaps, like no other conceptual tool in educational sociology, it is Pierre Bourdieu’s approach to ‘habitus’ that has attempted to balance agency and structure, in order to understand social connectivity and moments of disconnection (Reay, 2002).

Pathways to Belonging in Practice: Habitus, Structure and Agency

Central to Bourdieusian social theory is the concept of field. According to Bourdieu (2005, p. 39), “A field is a field of forces within which agents occupy positions that statistically [not structurally] determine 110 F. Picton and G. Banfield the positions they take with respect to the field”. Field, as a multi- dimensional social space, is where actors’ positions are determined by their stock of cultural, economic, social and, especially, symbolic capital (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992). Understood in this way: “Every field is the site of a more or less openly declared struggle for the definition of the legitimate principles of division of the field” (Bourdieu, 1991, p. 242). Within the institutional context of a school there may be many overlap- ping fields. These include physical sites like classrooms and playgrounds but also organisational and social groupings around, for example, cur- riculum specialties, teaching groups, year levels and peer relations. For Bourdieu, fields are dynamic, interactive and open to change. Belonging to a field, as well as negotiating identities across multiple fields (Ward, 2015), involves engagement in and with processes of inclusion and exclusion. Here, the relationship between field and habitus is impor- tant as field and habitus exist in a mutually informing, dialectical, rela- tion. For Bourdieu (2000, pp. 142–143), practice expresses the relational dynamism of field and habitus where: “The agent engaged in practice knows the world but with a knowledge which […] is not set up in the relation of externality of a knowing consciousness […]. He feels at home in the world because the world is also in him, in the form of the habitus”. Bourdieu developed the tool of habitus to work across both agency and structure, both are taken to reside within habitus. In this light, prac- tice can be understood as conditioned agency. It is, at least in part, ­unreflexive. As we will see below, having “the game under the skin” (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 81) takes on considerable importance in forging pathways to belonging. Understanding practice as messy, ten- tative and stumbling efforts of ‘learning the game’, we begin to see the opaque nature of the power relations within fields that exclude some and include others (Block, 2013). Indeed, via Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, power dynamics are shown to be essential considerations in theorising belonging. As Yuval-Davis (2011) denotes, power dynamics are respon- sible for creating boundaries, that “sometimes physically, but always sym- bolically”, separate the population into ‘them’ and ‘us’ (p. 20). Boundaries may be permeable, but will require some people, because of their position in the field, to work harder to move beyond them (Yuval-Davis, Using Bourdieu to Understand the Pathways to Belonging That… 111

Kannabiran, & Vieten, 2006). This is important when considering the case of young people with refugee backgrounds when they are confronted, for example, with peers who not only reinforce negative and racist media stereotypes but also have a fear of the unknown and lack of empathy (Murray, Davidson, & Schweitzer, 2008; Arnot & Pinson, 2005). The young people with refugee experience in the study, arrived in South Australia after making journeys which often included hardship, violence, loss and grief. The data indicates they worked hard to unlock ‘the rules of the game’ as they grappled with the structures and practices of mainstream school. Daniel arrived in Australia from an African refugee camp and Myat migrated from a refugee camp in South-East Asia. Their differing knowledges and understandings of the world, had a significant influence upon their ability to be successful when forging pathways to belonging and ‘doing school’. Daniel’s story, the first of two powerful case studies, illustrates these pressures in the next section.

Pathways to Belonging: Case Studies

In the Pathways to Belonging project, many examples of obstructionist ‘boundary building’ were observed and reported. Some young people spoke candidly of their difficulties with ‘getting to know’ other students as they worked to understand the “vernacular of the playground” (Rutter & Stanton, 2001, p. 33) and the rules for making friendships in their new countries (Riggs & Due, 2010). Young people with experience as refugees may be disadvantaged by a lack of familiarity with, and knowl- edge of, mainstream school structures and practices and this was the case for Daniel.

Daniel

Daniel was a twelve-year-old boy of African heritage who had been at Kurlu Park Primary for several years. Teachers within the school had commented that he was a loner and was unlikely to want to talk about his experiences. His initial participation in the project could be described as 112 F. Picton and G. Banfield guarded and tentative. However, as time progressed and he became trust- ing of the process, he started to relax. Daniel would chat enthusiastically with the researcher about a range of issues without prompting. He appeared to enjoy the individual attention that his participation in the study offered. More particularly, talking about his experiences provided Daniel with opportunities to unburden some of the difficulties he had experienced since entering mainstream school. Daniel explained his dis- tress at being laughed at early in his immersion at Kurlu Park Primary simply for bringing African food for lunch. Through this process of exclu- sion, he learnt that his cultural heritage was a point of ridicule and his solution had been to stop bringing lunch to school. Even more damaging to Daniel’s identity and his pathway to belong- ing, was the constant bullying he experienced by a group of older boys from another class. He explained that every time he walked past the group, or was even just in their proximity, they would laugh at him, sneer at him and mockingly call out his name. Over time, Daniel found ways to avoid the boys and he also developed strategies to avoid drawing atten- tion to himself anywhere at school where ‘flying under the radar’ became a disposition within his habitus. The older group of boys had been able to engage in covert, undetected, bullying. Their knowledge of ‘doing school’ had allowed them to go unnoticed, except by Daniel, for over a year. Daniel’s lack of ‘know how’ in the logic of the field, and his presence as an ethnic minority, had made him an obvious ‘other’ and a target for bullying. However, Daniel did understand some elements of the field, such as how prejudice and racism worked, for when Daniel was asked what was the thing he most desired to happen at school he said: “less racism”. Young people of refugee experience are at a distinct disadvantage when they enter mainstream school. They have diverse cultural knowledge and understandings and have been on incredible journeys in search of safety. Tensions arise for them when they confront problems at school, and rely upon their “internalised, embodied disposition towards the world” that has been inculcated during early childhood (Reed-Danahay, 2005, p. 46). Unconscious biases and attitudes, largely determined by young peoples’ cultural experiences, influence the choices that they make (Webb, Schirato, & Danaher, 2002). For students who have experience as refu- Using Bourdieu to Understand the Pathways to Belonging That… 113 gees, their habitus is an embodiment of their cultural knowledge and their experiences of their journeys to safety. However, stresses can arise when there is a mismatch of field expectation and habitus (Reay, 2002) which can have severe consequences as was illustrated by an incident involving Daniel. During a schoolyard altercation with a peer, Daniel had used his incul- cated understandings and knowledge of how best to solve conflict, by resorting to violence. His behaviour was in contrast to the expected norms at the school and had resulted in him being suspended from school. This example highlights the importance of young people of refu- gee experience, ‘learning the game’ so that mainstream school practices, such as school rules, can become largely “unthought” for them (Bourdieu, 2000, p. 97). Daniel, as with all the young people included in the study, was conflicted when the ‘rules of the game’ were different in mainstream school to those rules for living, already acquired when he was younger. This is also the message Myat leaves us with and to which we now turn.

Myat

Myat was an animated and energetic young ten-year-old of South-East Asian heritage who had been at the school for approximately three to four months. Small of stature yet large with personality, Myat enjoyed chat- ting about his experiences both pre and post his arrival in Australia. In the classroom Myat was observed to continually push at the bound- aries of social groups in his search for belonging, acting the ‘class clown’ as he sought attention and approval from his peers: finding ways to build his capital as a popular student. However, Myat encountered a significant problem when he tried to befriend a particular student. He, along with his companion, broke an important school rule when they went to a secluded, out of bounds area. This resulted in a consequence of two ‘time outs’ at lunchtime for both boys. Myat was visibly saddened and distressed by this incident. He was confused by what institutional rule had been broken and he did not comprehend why he was being punished. Arguably, Myat did not possess the “resource-contingent socialised skills” (Edgerton & Roberts, 2014, p. 210) required in mainstream school. His constant efforts 114 F. Picton and G. Banfield to seek belonging and re-forge his identity at school were obstructed, when he rubbed against the harsh realities of learning to ‘do school’. The new learning required for Myat to ‘do school’ effectively was sub- stantial. He had experienced enormous changes to his world and his identity. His previous existence in a small rural village had been replaced by a new life in a busy modern capital city. He explained that prior to arriving in Australia his family’s contact with modern technology had been very limited—he rarely used a computer and his mother cooked on an open fire. He, along with his family, appreciated the new opportuni- ties that living in Australia afforded such as public transport and modern appliances. The journey to resettlement for Myat, had been one of hardship, fam- ily breakdown and grief, accompanied by a constant fear for safety. He talked freely of his fear for safety when living in his home country where there had been ‘no rules’ and much fighting. Despite any difficulties he was experiencing in mainstream school, he was happy to be safe and secure with his family in Australia. Myat’s experiences growing up, and the knowledge and understand- ings that he had developed in his previous cultural setting were his habi- tus. He struggled when this habitus came against the expectations and interactions of structures and practices in mainstream school, shaped by an unknown history (Webb et al., 2002). Arguably, his unawareness of ‘the history of the game’ caused tensions for him, as noted with the inci- dent when he broke a school rule. The stories of Daniel and Myat presented in this chapter raise ques- tions about identity, belonging and how young people “from different cultural, religious, linguistic” and historical backgrounds occupy the same social space and draw upon resources (Yuval-Davis, 2011, p. 25). They represent stories of young people of refugee status and how they attempt to unlock ‘the rules of the game’ in order to belong where they are confronted by the structures of an unfamiliar and often alienating new environment—that of mainstream school. Bourdieusian concepts of habitus and field have brought meaningful understandings to these sto- ries. However, Margaret Archer’s theory of reflexivity may add further insights into the stories of young people of refugee status, by considering the capacities of human agents to make their way in the world. Using Bourdieu to Understand the Pathways to Belonging That… 115

Reflections on Using Habitus and Reflexivity to Understand Human Agency

In the Pathways to Belonging study, we argue that the Bourdieusian con- cept of habitus and its dialectical relationship to ‘field’ have brought pow- erful insights to understanding the struggles of young students of refugee experience as they develop feelings of belonging to school. In our post-­ project reflections, we have been drawn to questions of theory in ways the nature of the original project did not allow.5 This involved returning to the structure-agency problem and asking to what extent Bourdieu’s con- ception of habitus gave significant recognition to the authorial capacities of the young students. As is well-known in the field of sociology, a grow- ing number of sociologists argue that Bourdieu’s conceptualisation of habitus presents an overly structural account of social change that occludes, and even denies, reflexive action.6 Most recently, British sociologist Margaret Archer has provided an extensive critical realist7 critique of Bourdieu’s work in which she claims Bourdieu fails to adequately account for the capacities of human agents in making their ways in the world. Archer’s quarrel with Bourdieu is that his conception of habitus does not allow for meaningful reflexive action (Archer, 2010). She insists that Bourdieu cannot theorise reflexivity because he conflates subjectivity with objectivity in a way whereby agents and structures lose their relative autonomy (Archer, 2007). Making the philosophically realist point that people and their socially structured con- ditions are ontologically different kinds of things (Archer, 1995: Bhaskar, 1998), Archer claims that Bourdieu cannot fully examine their interac- tion. According to Archer (2000), it is reflexive consciousness that distin- guishes agents from structures and makes for the possibility of being human. She insists that human beings possess a pre-social, species being, capacity for conscious and ethical deliberation. If habitus is, as Bourdieu (1990, p. 55) makes clear, the ‘art of inventing’ such that “what makes it possible to produce an infinite number of practices that that are relatively unpredictable” then such creativity has its emergent possibilities grounded in what makes us human. Extending agency beyond the social to the realm of human capacities, has the potential to free habitus to do the explanatory work that, we would argue, Bourdieu intended. 116 F. Picton and G. Banfield

Further to the ontological distinction between social structures and human agents, Archer describes them as operating on different temporal scales. According to Archer, we are born into a world as it is and through- out our lives we confront already-made structures, like schooling, that await our active engagement. Archer’s point is that while we may make structures they always pre-exist us. The idea that social structures are always ready for our reproduction or transformation is the essence of her ‘morphogenetic approach’ to the structure-agency problem and to under- standing social change (Archer, 1995). To Archer, the place of ‘habit’ is significant in change and stasis: it belongs with morphostasis (Archer, 2010, p. 278). However, habit is not habitus. As we have stressed, the latter capacity implies the human capacity for reflexivity. In exploring the data captur- ing how Daniel and Myat negotiate belonging we are drawn to Elder-­ Vass’ reconciliation of Archer and Bourdieu where he argues that Bourdieu does recognise reflexivity. However, without

… a clear explanation of how dispositions produce practices and hence of how consciousness might sometimes be involved in the process, it is understand- able that there is confusion about the apparent conflict between Bourdieu’s stress on the subconscious operation of habitus and his heavily qualified acceptance of some role for conscious thought. (Elder-Vass, 2007, p. 329)

We contend that Archer’s morphogenetic approach with its emphasis on reflexivity has much to offer Bourdieu’s theory of habitus. Elder-Vass (2007) describes them as referring to different kinds of human action. Human beings operate from reflex and reflection. We contend that to theorise belonging and to understand it in practice requires recognising the complexity of structured and agential human action. Belonging is not a thing-like possession of individuals. Rather, it is an outcome of the reflexive engagement of active agents in—and with—specific structural and cultural contexts. The stories of Daniel and Myat are stories of reflex- ive engagement. While constrained in significant ways by the structures and practices of mainstream schooling they all displayed capacities of conscious deliberation and action. A human capacities approach to belonging has much to offer educators and the institutions they inhabit. Using Bourdieu to Understand the Pathways to Belonging That… 117

We contend that it teaches us all that the struggles of Daniel and Myat are the struggles of all of us. As human beings we all have the human need to belong.

Conclusion

Students who have refugee experience attend mainstream Australian school with a different set of socialised skills from the endorsed norma- tive of the school and may find it difficult to develop pathways to belong- ing. Belonging is as an essential need, an active process of forming connections, vital to the full participation and inclusion of all young people and crucial to those with experience as refugees. Bourdieu’s theo- ries of habitus and field have provided valuable understandings into the power dynamics within school cultures. They have highlighted how the knowledgeable may protect and further their interests against subordi- nate groups, building boundaries to belonging. This boundary building has implications for young people of refugee experience who may not possess the necessary ‘know how’ to overcome obstacles and negotiate relationships. Archer, by extending our understanding of agency to the realm of human capacities, offers a further explanatory lens to grasp how young people of refugee experience might successfully develop pathways to belonging in Australian mainstream schools. In doing so, young peo- ple like Daniel and Myat might just contribute to the reflexive capacities of mainstream schools (including their teachers, students and communi- ties) to forge pathways to better human futures for all.

Notes

1. The date of the research is not disclosed to protect the anonymity of the participants. 2. Daniel and Myat are pseudonyms. 3. In Brewer’s (2000) terms the research can be described as a ‘little’ ethnog- raphy where its object is to study people in their natural occurring setting and to use methods that are “unstructured, flexible and open-ended” (Brewer, 2000, p. 18). 118 F. Picton and G. Banfield

4. Kurlu Primary School is a pseudonym. 5. Pathways to Belonging was an empirical project presented by the lead author of this chapter as partial completion of an Education Doctorate (EdD) degree. In contrast to the academic expectations of PhD pro- grammes offered by Australian universities, EdD programmes are directed primarily to the advancement of professional knowledge. Theory is applied. Conceptualizing the structure-agency problematic is to ulti- mately engage in theory generation. 6. See, for example, Adams (2006) and Sayer (2010) for comprehensive commentaries on this debate in sociology. 7. Critical realism is a movement in the philosophy of science based on the work of British philosopher Roy Bhaskar (1975, 1998, 2016). It takes science (both natural and social) as a human practice rooted in the goals of human freedom and human emancipation. Margaret Archer was an early collaborator with Bhaskar developing critical realism for the field of sociology.

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8

Virtual Communities as Safe Spaces Created by Young Feminists: Identity, Mobility and Sense of Belonging

Raquel Miño-Puigcercós, Pablo Rivera-Vargas, and Cristóbal Cobo Romaní

Introduction

Since the Internet began, there have been academic discussions in many fields about how computer mediated communication (CMC) might influence the lives of individuals, interpersonal relationships between people and the social institutions that emerge from human relationships (Rheingold, 2000). A term that has been broadly used to approach online social interactions has been ‘virtual community’. However, this is a controversial term, since it has generated debate around the tensions between the promises and limitations of cyberculture, the relationship between online and ‘real’ life, and the notion of community itself (Bell, 2001).

R. Miño-Puigcercós (*) • P. Rivera-Vargas University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain C. Cobo Romaní University of Oxford, Oxford, UK Ceibal Foundation, Montevideo, Uruguay

© The Author(s) 2019 123 S. Habib and M. R. M. Ward (eds.), Identities, Youth and Belonging, Studies in Childhood and Youth, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96113-2_8 124 R. Miño-Puigcercós et al.

The term ‘virtual community’ was used by Rheingold (1993) to describe the webs of personal relationships in cyberspace. Later, it was defined as a group of individuals with shared interests (Figallo, 1998) that regularly gather together to discuss the subject of interest shared by its members through online platforms (Kilsheimer, 1997). However, spe- cialized literature does not always provide clear boundaries between the concepts of virtual communities and online social networks (Gomez, 2006). In different forms of online social networks, several of their members never meet face-to-face but they feel that they belong to a group of peo- ple with similar interests and characteristics. Likewise, that lack of physi- cal experience does not affect the possibility of sharing common interests that enable the development of social capital, such as arts, culture, activ- ism and politics. One of the collectives that make use of online social networks is young people. According to the study Digital Youth, most youngsters in their middle-school and high-school years use online net- works to extend their friendships and some use them to explore their interests and find information to which they have no access to through their local community (Ito et al., 2008). In order to differentiate virtual communities from other forms of online social networks, we use the notion of community as a social space created and maintained by people who have the necessity or the desire of a safe shared space. In theorizing community, we develop Hobsbawm’s conception of communitarianism to do with the necessity shared by people to create a safe refuge, since “men and women look for groups to which they can belong, certainly and forever, in a world in which all else is moving and shifting, in which nothing else is certain” (Hobsbawm, 1996, p. 40). Virtual communities, although not a novel concept, still refers to an online environment where some people find a place to socialize in a different way than in face-to-face interaction (Rheingold, 2000). Studies conducted in the field of computer mediated communica- tion (CMC) show that a repeated characteristic in virtual communities is the shared sense of belonging of members. The idea of belonging has been taken for granted in many studies or defined as a personal feeling to be part of certain group, place or location (Youkhana, 2014). As Virtual Communities as Safe Spaces Created by Young… 125

Antonsich (2010) states “sense of belonging” is a phrasing that remains vaguely defined and undertheorized, because researchers usually have not asked “what do you mean when you affirm that you belong here”. Nevertheless, in the last ten years, the theoretical approach to belong- ing and the politics of belonging have been explored by many academ- ics, starting an emerging field of research (Antonsich, 2010; Stahl & Habib, 2017; Youkhana, 2014; Yuval-Davis, 2011). Since youth are active users of online social networks and they feel they are part of vir- tual communities, a branch of this study would be youth belonging and politics of belonging in communities that are created and maintained online. This chapter analyzes the emergence of new forms of online social net- works as safe spaces. In order to do this we discuss this phenomena using a case study of young people from Spain who compose the virtual com- munity Feminismes. The two key questions that we explore are: (a) What sense of belongingness is evident in the construction of the identity of the young members of virtual communities and (b) What mechanisms of regulation and self-regulation used by young people in online spaces can be identified?

Youth, Feminism and Online Spaces. Historical Context, and Conceptual Approach

Nowadays, discussions on feminism are becoming mainstream in off and online settings. Despite variations in the degree of presence and accep- tance of these conversations and how this may change between historical and political contexts, feminism has been brought to the forefront by an increasing number of individuals and institutions, both in mass media and in social media (Keller, 2012). In this sense, Butler (2011) and Touraine and Rivera-Vargas (2017) argue that we are living in an era of intersubjectivity, where ideas like feminism, social participation, and democracy are more valued that in previous times. Butler (2011) even argues that in the present, the feminist debate is necessary and inevitable, and should be part of all social spaces, in a transversal way. 126 R. Miño-Puigcercós et al.

The digital media and the current interests of young people have facili- tated this transformation. Nevertheless, Loader and Mercea (2011) rec- ognize that it is necessary to avoid the utopian optimism of digital democracy. The deterministic idea that social media are inherently ­democratic and inclusive is probably dead by now. Having said that, the limitation of the digital spaces does not deny the possibilities of individu- als or communities to engage in democratic practices. Young people are more likely to become politically active through the Internet. Digital environments where youngsters can engage (if they have the interest and or the social capital) with expressions of social diversity, inequality and cultural difference as important sources that can empower or influence democratic innovation. The easy access to online environ- ments has promoted the participation of many young people in virtual communities, becoming key spaces in their lives. According to Jenkins, Ito, and Boyd (2015), social media allow young people to interact with others who are radically different than them and therefore, they can be exposed to new ideas and people. Contradictorily, Fu (2017, p. 2) sug- gests it is a way for youth to connect with “others who share similar values and enable a sense of political and spiritual belonging which can help them navigate their opportunities and clarify values”. Online feminist discussion spaces are not new and neither are indi- viduals who try to disrupt and undermine these spaces, those usually denominated “trolls” (Donath, 1999). In a case documented by Herring, Job-Scheckler, and Barab (2002, p. 373), we see how online discussion spaces on feminism “are usually a target of negative attention from indi- viduals, mostly men, who feel threatened by or otherwise uncomfortable with feminism”. Dixon (2014) draws a similar conclusion when she ana- lysed the online feminist identity, based on the study of the Twitter hashtag #Feminism. According to the author of the study, online discus- sion forums provide a new arena for the enactment of power inequalities, in this case related with gender. The historical context of Spain would explain why it has been neces- sary for women to create and share spaces to discuss gender issues. The last eighty years of historical, social and political events in Spain have been marked by a long period of both physical and ideological repression, followed by a transition marked by silence and unresolved conflicts. Virtual Communities as Safe Spaces Created by Young… 127

The ideal of women during the Franco dictatorship (1936–1975) was based on the Catholic moral; it was considered that women must not have extra-familial work, but mainly accomplish their duties with the paternal and marital authorities (Manrique, 2014). Therefore, the model of women was an obliging mother and wife adapting to patriarchal val- ues. A gender segregated educational system contributed to the indoctri- nation not only of woman but also of other excluded individuals, although education was at the same time a stronghold from which to offer resis- tance. Not surprisingly, many feminist organizations were formed to face the values and ideals projected in the patriarchal and heteronormative discourses and ethos.

Methods

Through the research project ‘Youth Virtual Communities: Making Visible their Learning and their Knowledge’ (Alonso et al., 2016), a team composed by 12 researchers conducted seven case studies in virtual com- munities with a high participation of young people aged between 15 and 29 years old (DevianArt, El Libro del Escritor, Feminismes, Cosplay España, Kabua and OpenMind). The project commenced in October 2015 and was carried out for one year. The first stage involved an intentional sampling of 24 virtual commu- nities to understand and categorize their characteristics and functions. In the second stage, 7 communities were selected to carry out the case stud- ies during a period of 6 months. Two researchers contacted the adminis- trators of each community to negotiate the conditions of the research. The anonymity of the participants was maintained, and only the title of the communities is mentioned. For six months, the researchers conducted 2–3 interviews and observa- tion sessions in each community. The interviews and observations were interconnected, since the main focus of the observations was to find evi- dence of the content of the interviews. In total, 18 interviews were con- ducted (12 with administrators and 6 with participants of the communities), and 35 screen captures were made. 128 R. Miño-Puigcercós et al.

We adopted a digital ethnography approach when studying the cases (Hine, 2005), which helped us to better understand the online interac- tions of this community. The interviews with the administrators and the conversations in the group suggested that other private and public online communication channels were used within the community, but we did not have access to that data. The thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006) led us to orient our results to better understand the themes of social relationships, communication, sense of community, ownership and privacy. In this chapter we specifically present our analysis of the experience of participants in the virtual community Feminismes. In this case study, our ethnographic work was carried out in six months, where we analysed the virtual platform on Facebook, and we carried out three interviews1: two with administrators of the community, Mary (28) and Simona (24), and one with a participant, Markus (27).

Context

Feminismes is a virtual community of 2971 members, mainly Spanish youth, which operates as a private group on Facebook. It was created in 2011 as an open group, but the members decided to become a private group on 2015 and a secret group on 2016. Therefore, Facebook users who want to be part of the community have to be invited by the mem- bers of the group and accepted by the administrators. Being accepted as a member means having access to the content of the group, being able to post messages and participate in the discussions. Feminismes is described as a group where “ideas, information and activism on feminism are shared, debated and exchanged, usually in Spanish.” In the description of the virtual community, the members specify that all people are welcome, since different approaches to feminism exist and constructive exchange of ideas is always enriching. Nevertheless, all mem- bers have to follow some rules of participation to be part of the group and they keep the right to expel a user who does not adhere to these rules. Firstly, sexist ideas and attitudes are not allowed. Secondly, every idea and Virtual Communities as Safe Spaces Created by Young… 129 every person has to be respected and insults are not accepted. Thirdly, people who do not consider themselves feminist can participate only if they express their ideas with respect and they do not question the exis- tence of feminism. Finally, heterosexual men are invited to be part of the community, only if they do not abuse of their power by constantly post- ing messages to the group. Through our research, we learned that some of these rules were not cre- ated from the beginning, but rather they emerged from specific moments and situations. The figure of the administrator was created because of situ- ations of power abuse. Several members of the community expressed the need that some administrators moderate the discussions when a member became aggressive and disrespectful, to ensure the security of the group, and four women volunteered to become administrators. A priority of the individuals who created the group Feminismes was the necessity to share experiences, complexities and frustrations related with being part of a patriarchal society. In our analysis, we could see that for the participants we interviewed and observed, belonging to the virtual community was associated with security, mobility and inclusion. We were compelled by our interest to study both social relationships between the individuals and group identities.

The Virtual Community as a Symbolic Safe Space

Belonging often refers to specific localities and territorialities (Antonsich, 2010; Ottone & Sojo, 2007; Youkhana, 2014), but in our case, we wanted to explore the meaning of belonging to a virtual space. Consequently, we conceptualize Feminismes as a symbolic space, described by its members as a space of familiarity, comfort security and emotional attachment, a feeling of being at home (Antonsich, 2010; Rivera-Vargas & Miño-Puigcercós, 2018). In researching Feminismes we were witness to articulated moments in networks of social relations and understandings (Massey, 1994) or “Virtual Togetherness” (Bulger, Bright, & Cobo, 2015). Our understanding of virtual communities is not restricted to the 130 R. Miño-Puigcercós et al. dimension of time or space. Although the members of the communities studied were located in different geographical locations, the sense of ‘vir- tual proximity’ played a key role. In other words, acknowledging that though community members did not necessarily share location, time or space, they all expressed their sense of belongness for being members of a common network of social relationships. A main theme that emerged in our analysis was the need to create a safe space and maintain it, so members of the virtual community could feel free to discuss ideas and share experiences. One member, Markus, attributed the possibility of feeling safe to the nature of virtual environ- ments, where technology mediates communication. Markus felt safer in online settings because he was able to express his ideas without feeling frightened.

Reflexivity—and of course the feminist fight—is extremely necessary now- adays, and virtual environments help a lot of people to say what they want to say. On the one hand, it is because they are safer, and on the other hand, it is because aspects such as shame or charisma of certain people, which are important in face-to-face situations, are relativized in virtual settings (Markus).

The necessity of feeling safe was mentioned repeatedly in the discus- sions in Feminismes and in the three interviews. It was clear that safety was not only an individual challenge, but also collective, which led to some of the members of the community thinking about nominating administrators. In the interview with Mary, she explained that when she became an administrator, the participants started to tag her in conversa- tions, especially when conflictive situations or discussions arose. Her atti- tude towards this practice was positive and hopeful, because she thought that it was, in her words, “the only way to control the security of the group.” If we take into account that the administrators of the group functioned as gatekeepers, effectively “controlling” the security and deciding who should and who should not have the possibility of belonging to the com- munity, we could consider that these administrators might be creating a Virtual Communities as Safe Spaces Created by Young… 131 new form of leadership to shared power. Given that fact that administra- tors take decisions on behalf of the rest of the members of the ­community, this person plays a privilege or hierarchical position of power or influ- ence. This suggests that the existence of an administrator within the vir- tual community reproduces a position of power that also can be seen in traditional hierarchical organization in today’s society (e.g. companies, government, or armies). Controlling the norms of the virtual community by deciding who was able to participate was a sociocultural practice apparently accepted by the majority of the group, to keep it as a space for discussion and identity building. We can see an example of this acceptance when one administra- tor posted the following message to the group, proposing to turn it into a secret group.

The administrators have a great concern for how the climate of security and confidence that we like to enjoy can be preserved. Here is our proposal: to turn the closed group into a secret group, in which new members can only enter by direct invitation of some member of the group. Personally, I am against the loss of freedom in favour of security, but I consider that the Internet, and Facebook, is broad enough to accommodate all kinds of ide- ologies (including patriarchy and sexism, even if it keeps attacking us) to have to fight against it also within the group. (Message posted by an admin- istrator of Feminismes).

In the second part of the administrator’s message, we identified a ten- sion in her narrative, since she was proposing to control the access rules, but she did not want to lose freedom of speech. Therefore, security in the virtual community was based on the maintenance of balance between two different sets of values and practices. On the one hand, the adminis- trators wanted to facilitate freedom of expression because a certain degree of security opened up possibilities to generate disruptive discourses and to build their identities. On the other hand, they also wanted to forbid sexist and aggressive discourses that were making it impossible to main- tain a dialogue with peace and respect. We believe that this kind of struc- ture of power, even if it generates tensions, is a driver of promoting the sense of belonging and identity in the community. 132 R. Miño-Puigcercós et al.

Tensions of Belonging to Online and Non-­ online Contexts

According to the participants of Feminismes, the creation of a safe virtual space served in contrast to their real lives, a space to discuss feminist ide- ology and construct their identities as feminists. The participants empha- sized the need to share what it feels like to be female in a patriarchal hegemonic global context “which dismiss women’s attempts at speech as ‘irrelevant’, ‘personal’, ‘subjective’ or ‘particular’” (Lewis, Sharp, Remnant, & Redpath, 2015, p. 10). Therefore, the creation and the sustainability of Feminismes can be understood firstly, as a strategy of resistance to mar- ginalization in traditionally male dominated spaces, and secondly, because they don’t feel they belong to this patriarchal world. Antonsich (2010) suggests that it might be necessary to move towards studies that look at the plurality of scales at which belonging is articu- lated. For instance, exploring not only the relation between ‘here’ and ‘there’ but also what ‘here’ means in its multiple layers. We might look at the plurality of contexts to which the individual belongs, and the differ- ent senses of belonging that are generated. Also, it may be important to explore conflicted senses of belonging, as well as conflicts that are avoided. A good example of a tension arising from belonging to diverse contexts is the desire that compelled Mary to join the community. When we inter- viewed Mary, she expressed that since she was a member of Feminismes, she started to get answers to the discomfort she felt as a woman with some attitudes and situations in her everyday life or the “disjointed- ness” she experienced. Through her interactions in Feminismes and other social networking services, such as Twitter, she began to understand that mainstream patriarchal values were behind her discomfort. Some questions that emerge from our conversations with Mary are mentioned by Antonsich (2010): Can individuals feel belongingness to different places and groups? How do they manage different senses of belonging? Do they act differently in some spaces because of the other places or groups they feel they belong to? According to Antonsich (2010), in order to belong, people should feel recognized as an integral part of the community where they live, as well as being valued and listened to. In Virtual Communities as Safe Spaces Created by Young… 133 this sense, based on the empirical data and the patriarchal configuration of the society, we consider that young oppressed women might experi- ence difficulty to feel a sense of belonging to the physical places through which they transit, such as their home, workplace, school, neighbour- hood or other online settings. Belonging to an online safe space like Feminismes, where they are able to share and discuss different forms of direct or indirect discrimination, might allow them to feel a sense of belonging. In some cases that can even influence their self-identity or behavior. At the same time, participants are possibly engaging in the dual process of refusal and reclassification, as a coping mechanism to under- stand their attachments to the other communities to which they belong (Stahl & Habib, 2017).

The Dirty Work of Feminist Boundary Maintenance

Favell (1999) defines the politics of belonging as “the dirty work of boundary maintenance” because it concerns the physical or symbolic boundaries that separate the world population into ‘us’ and ‘them’. Through our analysis of Feminismes, we see that participation in the vir- tual community cannot necessarily be translated into a fully developed sense of belonging. Primarily because members have to build and main- tain the sense of security in the group as well as develop a number of practices, rituals and ‘regimes of belonging’ (Youkhana, 2014). Through the interview, Markus reflected on the similarities and differ- ences between human interactions through online and offline settings and he expressed that “virtual life is a parallelism of real life”. On the one hand, he pointed out that virtual relationships feel more anonymous and the users feel freer “without the risk of being physically harmed if you say something controversial”. On the other hand, the diversity of people of the “face-to-face world” is also present in the virtual world, since “there are all kinds of people […] with all kind of attitudes, positions […]. People with whom you can negotiate, speak and reflect and people who have a more victimizing or taxing attitude”. 134 R. Miño-Puigcercós et al.

Negotiation was a cornerstone of belonging to the virtual community. Every ‘politics of belonging’ involves claiming for belonging as well as the power of granting it (Antonsich, 2010). A process of negotiation was always in place. Often times, this process started when some dilemma or aggressive discussion appeared in the debate and the administrators addressed the challenge by trying to “bring order”. For example, Markus was offended in several debates and he explained how the administrators ‘intervened’.

What I have seen is that the administrators intervene quite a lot when some member is rude, offensive or he generates hate. In some debates where I have been offended, an administrator proposed me if we wanted to remove him [from the group] because he was being discriminator.

As we can see, the formation of the feminist identity in the group was interrelated with the distinction the participants made between them- selves and those who they considered ‘others’. We agree with Wyn (2014) that the Internet enhances connections and facilitates multiple identifica- tions, but it also intensifies boundaries between groups. According to Keller (2012), this happens because in a group created by feminist young women it would be contradictory to position as neutral and impar- tial on the confrontation between feminist and non-feminist ideas. Previously, we have considered how spaces such as Feminismes might become active promoters of social inclusion if they emerged as bottom- ­up initiatives, that is, from community needs and interests (Miño, Rivera-­ Vargas, & Salazar, 2017; Rivera-Vargas & Miño-Puigcercós, 2018). Through our research we addressed how members of the virtual commu- nity Feminismes were promoting different mechanisms of social inclusion (Ottone & Sojo, 2007) by helping each other to rethink their identities as female, transgender or homosexual (Dixon, 2014) and through encour- aging other participants to share their feminist ideology and experiences of oppression. On the other hand, they also promoted fragmentation by not accepting the presence of individuals who were not respectful about feminism (Keller, 2012). “It is not easy for all of us to express ourselves and to participate; it is necessary to respect the other people and try not to occupy and abuse of Virtual Communities as Safe Spaces Created by Young… 135 the collective space, to make it pleasant and useful for everybody” (Group description in Facebook). This declaration indicates a desire to promote a more democratic and equitable society or, more specifically, a society without male-dominated practices, with spaces where old established identities can be questioned and more equitable politics of belonging can be created. The virtual community Feminismes would be an example of a social institution that promotes change of male dominating power relation- ships. For example, in a post to the community, one of the administrators expressed: “usually about one hundred of requests are received every month, of which almost a half are rejected”. Due to the significant amount of requests the administrators received from trolls, they created a complex system to identify them, by asking them the reason why they wanted to be part of the community and which member invited them. Every time the administrators accepted a request, they sent this message to the new member:

We have approved your request to participate in the group Feminismes. I warn you that we do not have much tolerance with the cisgender male participation -in the case that you are-. Many members of the group wanted a not-mixed space. I suggest you to sit in a corner, read a lot and write a little, and if you do, do it with respect, humility and assuming that you can be criticized. Patriarchal deconstruction is a challenge for all. You are welcome [to the group]. (Message posted in Facebook by the administrators).

With this message, the administrators clarified that not all attitudes were allowed in the group. Participants who did not respect feminist ideas and insulted other participants were not welcomed in the commu- nity. As Antonsich (2010) suggests, we should reflect on the extent to which our personal, intimate feelings of being ‘at home’ in a place may derive from the comforting realization of others’ absence. Forbidding ­sexist attitudes and practices in an online space might be understood both as creating immediate fragmentation between the different mem- bers of the community, but also as promoting social inclusion in the long term for feminist discourse in the society. 136 R. Miño-Puigcercós et al.

Final Thoughts on Politics of Belonging and Transgressive Identities

According to Foucault (in Palmer, 1998), ‘who we are’ is not an individ- ual matter, but a product of forms of external agencies. The societal modernity has made evident that individuals need to constantly learn to regulate themselves regardless of if they are interacting with others in vir- tual or face-to-face environments. However, these forms (and norms) of regulation evolve along with the adoption of novel spaces where people are transformed with and by others. In this chapter we have analysed the symbolic resources used by young people who are members of the virtual community Feminismes to create and maintain a safe space. The first question addressed in this chapter was what sense belonging plays in the construction of the identity of the young people who participate in virtual communities. Firstly, as known, the sense of belonging or community is not exclusive of the Internet Era. A comparable sense of belonging has happened previously with other technological inventions, for instance, public postal systems or telephone. Noteworthily the Internet has allowed people to extend their social net- works regardless of the geographical distance. Some authors have debated that social relationships created through interaction in virtual environ- ments are superficial (Rheingold, 2000). Nevertheless, we think that a shared sense of belonging to a community focused on a form of expres- sion in the face of oppression might make social bonds stronger. The conversations people have online can influence the way they think, work, understand the world and relate with others. The members of the com- munity who were interviewed expressed that since they were part of Feminismes they started to get answers to their discomfort about patriar- chal society, understanding better their personal situations, building a sense of sorority with other women and bringing what they have learned to other social contexts, such as their workplaces. The second question we addressed in the chapter was about which mechanisms of regulation and self-regulation were adopted to and within the community. In this sense, we have seen how the structures of power, freedom and control are very interesting drivers that could enable or Virtual Communities as Safe Spaces Created by Young… 137 inhibit feelings, a sense of belonging and identity. The members of Feminismes felt free in the community, but at the same time they inter- acted in a hidden virtual community that had explicitly stated rules, where boundaries were policed. This apparent contradiction shows the efforts of Feminismes for being both a sustainable and a safe space. Finally, we consider that the virtual community Feminismes is an example of a social institution that promotes a change to male dominat- ing power relationships. Despite the fact that a hidden community might not entail large-scale changes, we have seen that this is not an isolated case, but that the need to create and participate in feminist communities is growing in different countries, both face-to-face and virtual. Therefore, we conclude by pursuing the interest of doing more research on politics of belonging through virtual feminist communities across countries, con- texts, languages and cultural frameworks. This would inform how gender inequalities are being contested by young feminists through both face-to-­ face and online settings and how individual and collective patriarchal discourse and practices are being challenged.

Note

1. We asked for written consent to use their information, but we are using nicknames to protect anonymity.

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Exploring the Potential for Community Where Diverse Individuals Belong

Kate J. Cassidy

Introduction

Today, there is a compelling need to better understand the possibilities for, and potential attributes of, community where diverse individuals feel they belong (Shields, 2002). This chapter explores how some Canadian youth think about belonging in an ideal school community and whether their ideal community includes difference. Feminist theory is used to locate and interrogate the young people’s perspectives on community. The relational philosophy of Martin Buber, provides a lens from which to consider how the student’s ideas also point toward an overarching way of being, or ontology. The young people’s beliefs shared in this chapter were gathered in a hermeneutic phenomenological inquiry. The research data pool included 410 essays and posters from middle school youth who participated in a “Community in the Classroom” contest open to stu- dents in southern Ontario—a region with one of the most diverse popu- lations in Canada. Students’ responses pointed to five key attributes for an ideal community: Support for Others, Respect and Care, Dialogue,

K. J. Cassidy (*) Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada

© The Author(s) 2019 141 S. Habib and M. R. M. Ward (eds.), Identities, Youth and Belonging, Studies in Childhood and Youth, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96113-2_9 142 K. J. Cassidy

Healthy Conflict, and Safety. Taken together these attributes suggest an overarching ontology of relations where individuality and community are contingent. This chapter offers a perspective on community belonging that is quite different from historical constructions of community where belonging has often required assimilation, and provides significant impli- cations for theory, practice, and research.

The Ways in Which Community Is Understood

In the West, the concept of community has been used in a variety of ways in the past, from defining geographical place to describing a type of rela- tionship between people (Dunham, 1986). As geography arguably plays less of a binding role in contemporary times, the significance of theorizing community as a relational phenomenon has grown (Hillier, 2002; Pooley, Pike, Drew, & Breen, 2002). To understand the possibilities for contem- porary community as relationship, it is important to reflect upon the assumptions and histories that may be embedded—and thus invisible— within the concept. Although the notion of community resonates with ideals of unity, harmony, and safety for many people (Bess, Fisher, Sonn, & Bishop, 2002), there are some who suggest “traditional communities can be, and normally have been, oppressive” (Giddens, 1994, p. 24). Many scholars argue that community based upon similarity creates an inherent push toward conformity, agreement, and surface harmony, thus excluding those who are different (Gardner, 1991; Greene, 1993; Noddings, 1986; Peck, 1990; Selznick, 1992; Weisenfeld, 1996). The next section explores some of the characteristics embedded in the traditional understanding of community based on commonality, and then outlines alternative attributes offered by scholars pushing for a re-­conceptualization of the meaning of community to celebrate human difference.

Belonging Based on “Sameness”

In the early 1970s, Sarason (1974) claimed that experiencing a psycho- logical sense of community was so important for healthy people and societies that the phenomenon deserved study as a separate discipline. Exploring the Potential for Community Where Diverse… 143

Sense of community was defined as “the personal knowing that one has about belonging to a collectivity” (Chavis & Newbrough, 1986, p. 335). McMillan and Chavis (1986) offered a detailed conceptual framework of the phenomenon, which has become one of the most commonly cited theories of sense of community today. Among other factors, McMillan and Chavis (1986) suggested that feelings of com- munity membership come from mutual influence and alignment with shared goals, norms, and values. Common symbol systems such as lan- guage, dress, and ritual help groups create a cohesive identity and establish boundaries. Feelings of safety are derived from these boundar- ies along with shared expectations. Their description paints a picture of a largely homogeneous community where different clothing, beliefs, and ways of being are not welcomed; where individuals have freedom that is ultimately curtailed by group expectations of alignment; and where belonging is found through commonality rather than individual expression.

Belonging Based on Difference

Seeking to further understand the broad importance of social belonging, researchers Baumeister and Leary (1995) reviewed over 300 empirical investigations within social and personality psychology, sociology, and anthropology and concluded that belonging is indeed a basic human need that all people are deeply motivated to meet (p. 497). However, they found that, “evidence of material advantage or inferred similarity” is not a necessary factor for experiencing a sense of community belonging (p. 502). This finding is important as it supports those who are arguing for a re-conceptualization of community based on difference rather than sameness. Among those advocating for the inclusion of difference within com- munity are a number of scholars from feminist and critical backgrounds (for example Abowitz, 1999; Bettez, 2011, Fendler, 2006; Furman, 1998, 2002; Greene, 1993; Noddings, 2002; Shields, 2000, 2002). The scholars listed above, reflecting on the attributes necessary for the expres- sion of individual difference, have proposed that care for others rather 144 K. J. Cassidy than similarity should be at the center of community. These theorists have suggested characteristics such as flexible boundaries, full participa- tion among the members, accountability to both self and others, and an acceptance of struggle and conflict as essential attributes for community that is welcoming of diversity. Although characteristics such as those listed above have been proposed, further understanding of how to create and sustain relations that value human difference is needed (Furman- Brown, 1999). The majority of research exploring peoples’ sense of com- munity has been quantitative, and focused on the effects of experiencing the phenomenon, rather than the meanings surrounding this important concept (Bateman, 2002; Hill, 1996).

An Inquiry into Youth Perspectives of Community Belonging

Young people interact with their peers and adults everyday at school. Schools socialize students both formally and informally in many ways, on how to think about, and interact with, others in society (Noddings, 1986). I felt that middle school youth could provide a meaningful and information-rich context within which to explore how people think about community relationships and individuality in their everyday lives. Focusing on students in schools within the region of Southern Ontario seemed particularly appropriate given that this area has one of the most diverse populations in Canada. A study was constructed as a hermeneutic phenomenological inquiry into the ways some middle school students think about positive community relationships at school. I chose hermeneutic phenomenology as it is an approach that seeks to capture the essence of phenomena. The position held by ­phenomenological researchers is that phenomena can be best understood through the study of beliefs and attitudes of groups of individuals to reveal shared structures of experience (van Manen, 1990). Hermeneutic phenomenology falls under the phenomenological tradition and focuses on what makes up a thing that without it, it could not be what it is. It seeks to capture some- thing that is both personal and universal in trying to get at a central Exploring the Potential for Community Where Diverse… 145 essence. The objective of the study outlined in this chapter was to better understand community belonging and identify overarching themes, or attributes of this phenomenon. The students’ sense making about community relationships was gath- ered in an essay and poster contest held in the fall of 2008 where they were prompted with the following statement: “Imagine a class where stu- dents feel like they belong, where everyone is accepted, and everyone is committed to getting along and working well together.”1 The essays together gave a consistent essence of sense of community, however as in all research there are some limitations to be considered. Some individual essays suggested other factors that I did not identify as a theme, for exam- ple a few students emphasized that the teacher plays an important role in establishing the class as a community, that having fun together can be an important part of community building, and that interaction both inside and outside the classroom can enhance or inhibit community relation- ships. The posters added another perspective to the data, but I felt that I could not delve deeply into the meaning of the drawings without talking to their creators.2 The essays and posters were part of a contest, so stu- dents may have been influenced to describe what they thought would win rather than their true feelings about community.3 Some people may see the interpretations of the researcher as a limitation in qualitative research. Hermeneutic phenomenology, however, values the history of the researcher and encourages him or her to reflect on interpre- tations and beliefs4 both before and during the research process (Gadamer, 1965/1982). Through this work I, offer my understanding of what I heard from the students and encourage readers to draw their own interpreta- tions. No one interpretation will exhaust the plausibility of another how- ever. In the end, the method of hermeneutic phenomenology suggests that final interpretations and transferability falls to the hands of the reader. The contest was open to all grade 6–8 students, entries were submitted by teachers. Participants included 410 male and female students from grades 6, 7, and 8 (with 114, 165, and 131 submissions, respectively). These young people represented 18 schools of various sizes associated with the public, Catholic and private school systems. The institutions were located across the southern region of Ontario; a region that hosts the most culturally diverse population in Canada and approximately 146 K. J. Cassidy one-third­ of the country’s population (Ontario Ministry of Citizenship and Immigration, 2017).5 The essays and posters were reviewed using a systematic method of analysis that included documenting every step to provide an audit trail for readers (see Cassidy, 2013). I extracted over 2000 data units from the students’ submissions. These units were synthe- sized through multiple rounds of coding that included constantly com- paring each unit to the whole (van Manen, 2007). The process of analysis resulted in five themes describing attributes that the students believe are present when individuals feel they belong: Support for Others, Respect and Care, Dialogue, Healthy Conflict, and Safety. Together the submis- sions also pointed toward one overarching ontology, Being-in-Relation, which outlined a full integration between individuality and community as a “way of being.”6 In the next section I rebuild the participants’ stories within the organizing structure of these themes.

Support for Others

Support for others was a key theme identified in many of the young people’s essays and drawings. Their posters often showed figures aiding each other, while essays described physical and emotional support inside, and sometimes outside, the classroom. For example, one student indi- cated that “if a student within the community is struggling in a certain subject, other members will help that student succeed in a subject they might be weak in”. Another student wrote, “every classmate is needed in order to succeed. When one of us falls, the rest is there to catch them. In a community, nobody is ever alone. We work, make mistakes, teach, and learn together.” Interestingly, some students identified support-giving as a reciprocal rela- tionship where one party receives assistance and the other learns skills and strengths they possess that can make a difference. It was apparent that many students believed community with a culture of mutual sup- port helps members feel safe as they see both that they matter to others and that they will receive help if they need it. The idea of helping others was aligned with theory exploring the potential for difference in community but is somewhat different from traditional sense of community theory. Traditional theory of community Exploring the Potential for Community Where Diverse… 147 suggests that members’ needs will be met through shared goals and norms. Supporting others outside the group is not described (McMillan & Chavis, 1986). In contrast, the literature advocating for difference in community emphasizes care for each individual’s needs both inside and outside the group (Noddings, 1986). Neither body of research explicitly discusses the reciprocal benefit of providing and receiving support in the way that the students described it.

Respect and Care

Another key theme in the students’ contest submissions was the idea of community guided equally by respect and care. Many of the young peo- ple described group-level rules which would allow fair, efficient, and respectful functioning together, as well as individual-level considerations which would demonstrate care within the group. Group-level rules illus- trating respect included honesty, listening, being careful of others’ prop- erty, following through on commitments, admitting mistakes, and not laughing at others. One student wrote,

A vital part of having a positive learning community is showing mutual respect. That means respecting others so that they will respect you. A way you can do this is simply by listening to others and not interrupting when they speak. Also, you can respect others by respecting their property and their opinions.

Individual-level considerations demonstrating care included being atten- tive to people’s feelings, appreciating and encouraging members, and showing kindness. One student wrote, “we help each other not only for work but also when someone is feeling blue or excluded”; another student felt that “it is important to comfort your class-mates when they’re depressed, and feel happy for them when they accomplish something.” Their drawings often illustrated children holding hands, helping, and talking. Smiles were on faces and caring images such as hearts, flowers, and rainbows surrounded some figures. Based on the research, it was clear students wanted rules to make functioning as a group both fair and efficient as well as an ethic of care to support each member. Some youth recognized 148 K. J. Cassidy that the needs of the group and the individuals would sometime come into conflict however, and were unsure of how to proceed when that happened. The ways in which the students advocated equally for group-level respect and individual care is different than the two literature bases explored in this chapter. The traditional sense of community literature focuses more on community functioning emphasizing group norms of fairness and respect only, whereas the other body of literature celebrating difference emphasizes care and suggests that community functioning will evolve from the full participation of different members.

Dialogue

Communication and listening—or dialogue—was another key theme that arose often in the students essays and posters. Many drawings depicted individuals talking to each other. Essays emphasized the impor- tance of listening to each other, and being able to speak honestly. One student wrote that community members “need to pay close attention to other students’ thoughts, feelings, opinions, and ideas”. Another suggested that “it really feels good when you know somebody is listening to you”. A third captured the connection between listening and belonging this way, “when students listen and pay attention the speaker feels like they are being heard and understood, which gives them a sense of belonging.” The youth indicated that whereas listening can facilitate community, negative communication can affect a person’s willingness to express themselves. One student sug- gested, “don’t laugh at others if they get an answer wrong, because you would lower their self-esteem and they would be hurt, and they might not participate much in the future”. For many of the young people, being listened to was essential. They expressed uncertainty about what to do when others do not listen. In the traditional community literature, communication was not dis- cussed at all. Language was simply referred to as part of a community’s common symbol system, suggesting that anything spoken would be received and understood identically by others within one’s community (McMillan & Chavis, 1986). The idea that communication is clear and Exploring the Potential for Community Where Diverse… 149 easily shared of course implies “sameness.” The young people’s ideas about dialogue were like the literature advocating for diversity in community. Here dialogue is identified as central to communicate across difference. Shields (2000) explained that the ability to speak openly and listen deeply “is critical for existing as individuals within a community that avoids oppression and assimilation. Without these dialogic processes, unexam- ined assumptions and differences may remain sources of conflict and ten- sion (p. 290)”.

Healthy Conflict

Healthy conflict was also identified as a theme from the submissions from the cohort. Many of the essays suggested that people should be able to speak their mind even if their views are different than other commu- nity members. Some of the young people recognized that this would inevitably lead to conflict on some occasions. Almost all of the student’s essays and posters portrayed group harmony to varying degrees. Therefore, the idea of disagreement, tension, or conflict was hard to reconcile for some students. They wondered how a community could be successful and safe if people disagreed, and they were unsure of how respect, care, support, and dialogue could be maintained in the face of tension. One student believed that this was possible however. This individual wrote, “a perfect classroom is something like an impossible dream where everyone gets along well and feels at home. Nobody could get along with everybody because we’re all different. However, we could all try to make something close to a perfect classroom.” Managing conflict was clearly an area where the young people were asking for help in maintaining the type of community they aspire to. Conflict was not discussed in the literature focused upon sense of com- munity. It was implied that struggle is eliminated when membership is based on homogeneous backgrounds, values, and goals. In the literature advocating for diversity, disagreement was expected (Abowitz, 1999; Bettez, 2011; Fendler, 2006). Shields (2000) reminds readers that “we will have to confront the difficulties and paradoxes of being open to and respectful of difference” (p. 290). The methods and challenges to working through conflict have not been explored in this literature set, however. 150 K. J. Cassidy

Safety

The final key attribute identified in the students’ submissions was safety. Safety was identified as both an outcome, and part of the process, of community. In a safe community people can offer help and cooperate with others. One of the students who submitted an essay wrote, “In a classroom that has positive classroom community you’ll see a lot more students that are involved and engaged, who are willing to take a risk and try and answer questions or to offer ideas without fear of someone judging them.” Most young people indicated that feeling safe allows people to reveal who they are, share their true thoughts, and make mistakes. Another student suggested,

If the classroom is a community, students will feel more relaxed and comfortable in the classroom environment. If students are comfortable…they will get more work done. It will be easier to try new things that they are not too sure on because there won’t be any pressure.

A number of student essays indicated that feelings of safety will always hang in a delicate balance in community. Harsh words or actions can eas- ily cause members to feel unsafe leading them to turn inward and not participate authentically. The way that the students described the process of slowly building safety is different from previous scholarship. The research on sense of community described safety as coming from relationships with those who are similar and boundaries that exclude those who are different (McMillan & Chavis, 1986). The literature describing community that embraces difference included safety as a key attribute but did not elabo- rate on how safety is built or maintained (Furman, 1998).

Being-in-Relation

Through the analysis it became apparent that notions of individuality and relations could not be separated in the data. This theme served as the ontological context or frame from which to understand the attributes Exploring the Potential for Community Where Diverse… 151 that emerged from the students’ work. The students’ creative and written submissions suggested that in a positive classroom community, people express themselves and learn about who they are as unique individuals through their interactions with others. At the same time, the community itself thrives best from the diversity of unique individuals, each seeing the world in a different way. Many youth acknowledged that finding a community where they are accepted for who they are can be difficult however. One student wrote, in an ideal community “every student is accepted for who they are. Not one student is afraid to show their true self; they are comfortable with who they are. The students’ appearances and backgrounds do not matter.” They sug- gested that when the need to belong is not met, it can come to dominate their focus. A young person explained, “Approval is important because if you don’t [receive it] you will put all your focus and mind on getting those people’s approval. And then your mind will not be able to be on school.” Another youth reflected on the tension between wanting to be seen as an individual and conforming in order to fit in,

Does such an environment exist, where everyone feels accepted and comfortable and confident with each other? While there may be places where it is as good as it gets, nothing is perfect. Being a student myself, I know this to be true. We are the ones that may feel better by putting others down. We are the ones that may not show empathy to others. We are the ones that may lose our intrinsic qualities in order to please our friends and family. But who is to say that we cannot just get along? We don’t need to be friends, but what stops us from just accepting and understanding each other for who we are? What stops us from co-operating with real people, not the people they pretend to be? We stop ourselves and each other. Of course, everyone knows that having a good classroom community is impor- tant. It will not always be perfect, but why not make it as good as possible? Maybe, we know all the qualities of a good classroom community; we just have no idea how to obtain them. What do we do now?

Many students indicated throughout their work that even when one knows the attributes of an ideal community, the process of building and maintaining it is a complex one, given human’s ultimate need to belong. 152 K. J. Cassidy

Exploring the Ontology of ‘Being-in-Relation’

As I considered the data I noted that the student’s overarching belief about individuality and relations was reminiscent of ideas expressed by philosopher Martin Buber. The writings of Buber have also had influence on Nel Noddings, one of the most prominent feminist advocates for diversity within community based on care. Buber has suggested that there are two ways people relate to others in the world; as I–It or I–Thou. In an I–It relationship the other person is simply treated an object to be inter- preted; a person “lets the other exist only as [her or] his own experience” (Buber, 1965, pp. 23–24). In other words, individuals use themselves as the point of reference to understand, analyze, and give value to the other’s actions and words. In contrast, the I–Thou relation is a subject-to-subject relationship where the other person is seen as a unified and unique being that cannot be broken into attributes or analyzed as an object. Where individuals can label others in an I–It encounter, people them- selves can also behave in a way that perpetuates their role as “It.” Buber (1967) described this as “seeming,” which is to act in a way that one believes is desirable. The seeming human, “is primarily concerned with what the other thinks of him [or her], and produces a look calculated to … appear ‘spontaneous’, ‘sincere’, or whatever [she or] he thinks will win the other’s approval” (Buber, 1967, p.28). When people are driven by seeming, their interactions with others do not truly align with who they are, and this may come to distort their sense of self. Buber argued that people easily fall into the trap of seeming because of the deep desire to belong. In other words, humans prefer to be seen and accepted inaccu- rately than to not be seen at all. When individuals are “being” in their interactions with others, they are acting in a way that is true to their authentic selves. They give to the other “spontaneously without thinking about the image …awakened in the beholder” (p. 27). Buber (1970) submitted that when people have I–Thou relations with others, they are given insight into themselves as unique beings, and new possibilities come to light. As people fulfill those possibilities, relations evolve, and new connections are made, which again uncovers new poten- tials. According to Buber’s philosophy, each unique individual is ideally Exploring the Potential for Community Where Diverse… 153 joined, in a journey of becoming, to a network of others who have helped him or her further understand his or her purpose and potential. Here Buber provides further descriptive insight into the potential of, and chal- lenges to, organic community where individuals are heard and belong based on their individual uniqueness. The students’ essays and drawings aspired to a ‘way of being’ much like Buber’s theory of relations. Many of the young people articulated that in a positive classroom community they would be seen and confirmed for who they were. This is similar to Buber’s idea of I–Thou relations where “I” meeting with “I” inherently recognizes that all people are uniquely different. In the study, students suggested they wanted to be themselves but they also wanted to belong. Because the need is so strong, there always exists a temptation to try to achieve that belonging at any cost (Buber, 1967). The students talked about their attempts to act a certain way in order to be accepted and the problems that superficial categoriza- tions such as “the jocks” and “the cool kids” presented. Some students identified that these types of categorizations ultimately excluded people. In contrast to “seeming,” Buber described “being” as when individuals are acting authentically. It seems easier to “be” in an emotionally safe envi- ronment where people care and respect one another, and engage in dia- logue, healthy tension and support.

Conclusion

Traditionally, community has been understood as forming around com- monality and boundaries, thus limiting considerations of difference within relations (Gardner, 1991; Selznick, 1992; Shields, 2000; Weisenfeld, 1996). Scholars arguing against the idea of community that inherently rejects diversity have suggested that care for others and flexible boundaries should instead be the basis of community understanding (Abowitz, 1999; Furman, 2002; Greene, 1993; Noddings, 2002; Shields, 2002). The students, through their essays and posters, have focused on the interdependence of individuality and relationships, and offered key attributes to the ideal community. These findings contribute to a deeper understanding of the potential for contemporary community in middle 154 K. J. Cassidy school, but also, perhaps beyond. Hermeneutic phenomenology suggests that it is possible to convey a central essence of a phenomenon and seeks to capture features that are at once personal but also universal. Overall, the method used in this study, the broad representation of the sample, and the exploration of ideas through theory help readers tap into the wider potential of this chapter. Of course, any attempt to touch on the universal is simply one interpretation and no one explanation will exhaust the plausibility of another. In the end, transferability falls to the hands of the reader. This chapter explores how some Canadian youth think about belong- ing in school community and whether their ideal community includes difference. The analysis of 410 student-created essays and posters sug- gested five attributes that are present when individuals feel they belong: Support for Others, Respect and Care, Dialogue, Healthy Conflict, and Safety. Together the youths’ submissions also pointed toward one over- arching ontology, Being-in-Relation. The youth believed that commu- nity must include difference. In fact, their essays and posters outlined a full integration between individuality and community as a “way of being.” Themes drawn from the student’s ideas provide a glimpse into the possi- bilities for, and attributes of, communities where difference is embraced. Together the students’ words, against the backdrop of theories of com- munity and the relational philosophy of Martin Buber, provides rich insight. This chapter contributes to the dialogue on contemporary com- munity belonging and may help shift historical understandings of com- munity requiring assimilation to one dependent on human difference. This can be argued to be essential in the complex, integrated, and global society of this twenty-first century.

Notes

1. The organization where I was employed engaged in various initiatives to promote building character and community in school classes. One yearly project was a “Community in the Classroom” essay and poster contest for students. I accessed the essays and posters after student names had been removed as suggested for ethics clearance. For this reason, neither student Exploring the Potential for Community Where Diverse… 155

names nor pseudonyms were used to identify quotes in the research. Some of the teachers who submitted their classes’ work were also included in the larger study, but their perspectives are beyond the intent of this chapter. 2. I was also not able to re-present the posters in the same way that I was able to share excerpts from the student essays. 3. It would have been helpful to be able to further discuss findings with the students involved in the study; however this was not possible due to the nature of the data coming from contest entries. 4. To read more about my personal interest and beliefs about community see Cassidy (2013). 5. This research took place in Southern Ontario, Canada, where the popula- tion is very diverse, so these findings may not necessarily translate to other geographical locations. This study looked at community relationships within a school setting, so findings may also not translate to other com- munity contexts. 6. My use of essays and posters in this research was therefore both an asset and a limitation.

References

Abowitz, K. K. (1999). Reclaiming community. Educational Theory, 49(2), 143–159. Bateman, H. V. (2002). Sense of community in the school: Listening to stu- dents’ voices. In A. T. Fisher, C. C. Sonn, & B. J. Bishop (Eds.), Psychological sense of community: Research, applications, and implications (pp. 161–179). New York: Plenum. Baumeister, R. F., & Leary, M. R. (1995). The need to belong: Desire for inter- personal attachments as a fundamental human motivation. Psychological Bulletin, 117(3), 497–529. Bess, K., Fisher, A., Sonn, C., & Bishop, B. (2002). Psychological sense of com- munity: Theory, research, and application. In A. Fisher, C. Sonn, & B. Bishop (Eds.), Psychological sense of community: Research, applications, and implica- tions (pp. 3–22). New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum. Bettez, S. C. (2011). Critical community building: Beyond belonging. Educational Foundations, 25(3–4), 3–19. Buber, M. (1965). Between man and man (R. G. Smith, Trans.). London: Collins. 156 K. J. Cassidy

Buber, M. (1967). The knowledge of man (M. Friedman & R. G. Smith, Trans.). London: George Allen & Unwin. Buber, M. (1970). I and thou (W. Kaufmann, Trans.). New York: Charles Scribner & Sons. Cassidy, K. J. (2013). The essence of feeling a sense of community: A hermeneutic phenomenological inquiry with middle school students and teachers. St. Catharines, Canada: Brock University Digital Repository. Chavis, D. M., & Newbrough, J. R. (1986). The meaning of “community” in community psychology. Journal of Community Psychology, 14(4), 335–340. Dunham, H. W. (1986). The community today: Place or process. Journal of Community Psychology, 14(4), 399–404. Fendler, L. (2006). Others and the problem of community. Curriculum Inquiry, 33(3), 303–326. Furman, G. C. (1998). Postmodernism and community in schools: Unraveling the paradox. Educational Administration Quarterly, 34(3), 298–328. Furman, G. C. (2002). School as community: From promise to practice. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Furman-Brown, G. (1999). Editor’s foreword. Educational Administration Quarterly, 35(1), 6–12. Gadamer, H.-G. (1982). Truth and method (G. Barden & J. Cumming, Eds., & Trans.). New York: Crossroad. (Original work published in 1965). Gardner, J. W. (1991). Building community. Washington, DC: Independent Sector. Giddens, A. (1994). Beyond left and right: The future of radical politics. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Greene, M. (1993). The passions of pluralism: Multiculturalism and the expand- ing community. Educational Researcher, 22(1), 13–18. Hill, J. L. (1996). Psychological sense of community: Suggestions for future research. Journal of Community Psychology, 24(4), 431–438. Hillier, J. (2002). Presumptive planning. From urban design to community cre- ation in one move? In A. T. Fisher, C. C. Sonn, & B. J. Bishop (Eds.), Psychological sense of community: Research, applications and implications (pp. 43–67). New York: Kluwer Academic. McMillan, D. W., & Chavis, D. M. (1986). Sense of community: A definition and theory. American Journal of Community Psychology, 14(1), 6–23. Noddings, N. (1986). Caring: A feminine approach to ethics and moral education. Berkley, CA: University of California Press. Noddings, N. (2002). Starting at home: Caring and social policy. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Exploring the Potential for Community Where Diverse… 157

Ontario Ministry of Citizenship and Immigration. (2017). People & Culture. Retrieved September 11, 2017, from http://www.ontarioimmigration.ca/en/ about/OI_ABOUT_PEOPLE.html Peck, M. S. (1990). The different drum: Community making and peace. New York: Simon & Schuster. Pooley, J. A., Pike, L. T., Drew, N. M., & Breen, L. (2002). Inferring Australian children’s sense of community: A critical exploration. Community Work and Family, 5(1), 5–22. Sarason, S. B. (1974). The psychological sense of community: Prospects for a com- munity psychology. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Selznick, P. (1992). The moral commonwealth: Social theory and the promise of community. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Shields, C. M. (2000). Learning from difference: Considerations for schools as communities. Curriculum Inquiry, 30(3), 275–294. Shields, C. M. (2002). Cross-cultural leadership and communities of difference: Thinking about leadership in diverse schools. Springer International Handbook of Education, 8(2), 209–244. van Manen, M. (1990). Researching lived experience: Human science for an action sensitive pedagogy. London, ON: Althouse. van Manen, M. (2007). Phenomenology of practice. Phenomenology & Practice, 1(1), 11–30. Weisenfeld, E. (1996). The concept of “we”: A community social psychology myth? Journal of Community Psychology, 24(4), 337–346.

10

(Un)Belonging in Higher Education: Negotiating Working-Class Masculinities Within and Beyond the University Campus

Michael R. M. Ward

Introduction

Over the past quarter of a century, men when compared to their female counterparts, are often reported to be in trouble. These trou- bles are exemplified through high rates of suicide and mental health problems, a lack of appropriate role models, absent fathers, access to secure employment, or drug and alcoholic dependency, (Connell, 1995; Kimmel, 2008; Mac an Ghaill, 1994; McDowell, 2003; Morgan, 2006; Roberts, 2014; Ward et al., 2017). These problems have often been framed as outcomes of a ‘crisis’ of masculinity (Kimmel, 2008; Morgan, 2006; Tarrant et al., 2015). However, this discourse is far from just a contemporary issue and has much longer historical links (Greig, 2012; Segal, 2007). These concerns have also been accompanied by debates surrounding boys’ supposed educational ‘underachievement’ (Morris, 2012; Ward, 2015) and discussions

M. R. M. Ward (*) Swansea University, Swansea, UK

© The Author(s) 2019 159 S. Habib and M. R. M. Ward (eds.), Identities, Youth and Belonging, Studies in Childhood and Youth, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96113-2_10 160 M. R. M. Ward around a ‘poverty of aspiration’ or a ‘poverty of expectation’ amongst boys when it comes to educations (BBC, 2013; Roberts & Atherton, 2011). Yet as I (Ward, 2014a, 2014b, 2015, 2017; Ward et al., 2017) and others (see Ingram, 2009; Kenway, Kraak, & Hickey-Moody, 2006; Weis, 2004) have argued for some time, although the generic category ‘boys’ is often used in policy and cultural commentaries, in reality it is young men from working-class backgrounds who are most often asso- ciated with this ‘crisis’ anxiety. These fears also seem to cross ethnic and racial boundaries (Cobbett & Younger, 2012; Gillborn, 2009; Noguera, 2008) and are a global issue for marginalized men (Edström, Hassink, Shahrokh, & Stern, 2015; Walker & Roberts, 2018). Yet very little work has been conducted around the difficulties and challenges facing white and Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) young men from working-class­ backgrounds who display alternative performances of masculinity. These different performances of masculinity are displayed through academic success and become ‘achieving boys’ (Ingram, 2018) and entering Higher Education (HE) and their experiences within it (Ingram & Waller, 2014; Lehmann, 2013; Sweeney, 2014; Ward, 2018) and beyond it in their home communities. It is these performances of gender which I concentrate on in this chap- ter. I begin by briefly outlining the literature on working-class academic success and working-class men in HE. I then move on to outline the qualitative study this chapter draws on and introduce the research partici- pants. Using two case studies, I then show how some of the cornerstones of a working-class performance of masculinity are being re-fashioned in HE. I define these cornerstones as working hard or ‘grafting’, receiving pride from one’s stoic tasks, and undergoing hardship with the aim of being able to provide for one’s family and to endure this hardship without complaint. I explore how the university process impacts on how they see themselves, but also how their families view them and what this process of social mobility or ‘meritocracy’ (Payne, 2017) means for their perfor- mances of masculinity. (Un)Belonging in Higher Education: Negotiating Working-Class… 161

Academic Success and the Performance of a Studious Working-Class Masculinity

The processes of socio-economic inequalities have long been linked to school in the shaping of gender identities and masculinity over the past half century (Halsey, Heath, & Ridge, 1980; Ingram, 2018; Jackson & Marsden, 1962; Mac an Ghaill, 1994; McDowell, 2003). Until relatively recently research that has focused on working-class academic success at university has tended to focus on adults’ experiences and more specifi- cally mature women’s (Walkerdine, Lucey, & Melody, 2001; Reay, Crozier, & Clayton, 2009) than the traditional university entrant. Yet, studies of working-class young people’s experiences of HE are growing (see Bathmaker et al., 2016; Reay, 2017) and some of this work specifi- cally focuses on how working-class men experiences these spaces and how this impacts on their masculinities (Burke, 2013; Ingram & Waller, 2014; Sweeney, 2014).1 This research is particularly important given the grow- ing gender gap in university admission, especially for marginalised men (Harper & Harris, 2010; The Guardian, 2016). Nonetheless, this work has so far, failed to establish how performances of masculinity at univer- sity, impact on young men’s identities when they return to their home communities. When looking at belonging and identities construction, as Relph (1976) points out, it is through place—and the experiences of different places—that directly impact on people’s lives. As Stahl and Habib’s (2017, 280), suggest belonging is an ‘ongoing negotiation, constantly structured and restructured in a reflexive negotiation around conceptions of respectability, authenticity and value’. There is also a gap in the work here on belonging and masculinity and just like in other areas of their lives, young men at university can and do construct status and meaning- ful identities for themselves through different conceptions of belonging. These can include investment in peer cultures, university events, aca- demic work or via relationships with ‘territories’ and places within and beyond campus (See Cheeseman, 2018; Pembeci, 2018). This chapter aims to begin to fill some of these gaps in the literature on masculinity and belonging. 162 M. R. M. Ward

Considering the arguments raging about the UK Higher Education sector and the on-going tuition fees discussions, coupled with the global debates around sexism and rape culture on university campuses (Pascoe & Hollander, 2016; Phipps & Young, 2015) it is important now, more than ever, to acknowledge the roles university play in this debate and how these settings impact on masculinity. Therefore, the issue of belonging at university, and as Waller, Ingram, and Ward (2018, p. xv) argue, ‘the issue of just who enjoys access to which university, and the experiences and outcomes of graduates from different institutions’ remains important in questions of social justice and masculinity making. A more nuanced cri- tique of the problems and practices associated with being a working-class young man within and beyond these university spaces is needed. This study drew upon contemporary gender theories of hegemonic masculinity (Carrigan, Connell, & Lee, 1985; Connell, 1995; Connell & Messerschmidt, 2005), and the work of Goffman (1959, 1974, 1976) and others influenced by the symbolic interaction tradition (Schrock & Schwalbe, 2009) on the performance of self and the formation of social identity. I argue that Goffman’s often overlooked dramaturgical frame- work (see Jackson & Scott, 2010) has important implications for analys- ing performances of gender and specifically young masculinities. This chapter contributes to the literature on belonging by drawing on my ear- lier term ‘chameleonisation of masculinity’ (Ward, 2015). I suggest that this metaphor is useful as it captures the multifaceted processes that aca- demically successful working-class young men navigate whilst progress- ing through different communities. This process, as Connell (2001) has cautioned, also highlights the structural contexts in which masculinities are performed. I now turn to outline the context and methods that underpin this study, before moving on to look at the case studies of young men and outlining their experiences of HE.

Context and Methods

During the fall semester of the 2015/2016 academic year, I was based at a university which I will call ‘Mountain Lake University’,2 in British Columbia, Canada. Developing on my previous work with marginalized (Un)Belonging in Higher Education: Negotiating Working-Class… 163 men within and beyond educational settings (Ward, 2015; Ward et al., 2017) this qualitative study was conducted to explore a group of aca- demically successful working-class men’s (aged 18–36) experience of HE. I sought to further understand what specific challenges or barriers (e.g. peer and family expectation, finances, mobility) marginalized men faced in accessing HE and to identify if academic success and transition to university meant creating or adopting different or new performances of masculinity to their home communities. The study also investigated to what extent (if at all) did university foster and develop opportunities for men to resist hegemonic forms of masculinity or does it intensify male privilege through misogyny and sexual harassment? The university where the study was conducted, had around 17,000 full-time and 13,000 part-time undergraduate and post-graduate stu- dents, with multiple campuses spread across a large metropolitan area. The university is a ‘comprehensive university’. A comprehensive univer- sity in Canada is defined as an institution that is research intensive, offers undergraduate and post-graduate programmes, but does not have a med- ical school (Macleans, 2018).3 Empirical data collection consisted of a series of individual semi-structured interviews involving young men (supported by some participation observation of student life during the semester). A total of 13 participants were interviewed and they were then invited to attend a focus group at the end of the semester specifically on what being a man and masculinities meant to them. The men identified as gay, bi and straight and came from a range of ethnic backgrounds, with the majority being white Canadian. A flexible interview schedule was used, in which participants were encouraged to talk about their past edu- cational experiences and family backgrounds. Interviews took place on different campuses in university offices and coffee shops. All participants self-identified as coming from low-income families, were in receipt of low-income family grants or were the first in their families to attend uni- versity in Canada.4 Questions also centred on their current lives, with a focus on their identities as young men at university, and how this trans- ferred to their home communities. All interviews were digitally recorded, transcribed and then analysed using thematic analysis to identify key themes (Braun & Clarke, 2012). 164 M. R. M. Ward

Several key themes emerged from the qualitative study, but a particu- larly strong theme was that young men’s masculine identities were power- fully defined by locality and place, and perhaps more significantly, via their interactions with other students at university and people in their home communities. In the remainder of this paper I draw on two case studies to show how two participants in their early 30s, were re-framing their masculinities and a sense of self-worth through academic work. As this chapter will show, these young men believe their futures could not be fully achieved in low-skilled, service sector employment. However, this dual burden of negotiating their masculinity at university and in their home communities, meant these young men failed to feel like they belong to either of these communities.

Introducing Alex and David

Alex was a white, 32-year-old Canadian male in the first year of his English Literature degree. After leaving school at the age of 18 without a high school diploma, Alex working for over a decade in the service sector economy and in various cities across Canada. He returned to education in British Columbia and completed a two-year diploma in English Literature at a local community college. After graduating with high marks, he progressed to Mountain Lake University to study for his under- graduate degree in the same subject. His father worked at a plastic mak- ing factory and his mother at a gas station and was the first in his family to go to university. Alex was originally from a post-industrial town, on the edges of the metropolitan area. His parents and wider family still lived in this town and he visited them there regularly. David, was aged 30 at the time of interviewing and moved to Canada with his parents and younger brother from China in 2004. He was a first-­ generation immigrant, arriving without any formal qualifications, and had only begun to learn English when he arrived. In many ways, David shared a similar educational journey to Alex. He had applied to university after many years in low-skilled service sector work (driving trucks, hospitality, shop work) and completing a two-year foundation diploma (in Psychology) at a community college prior to joining Mountain Lake. His Father and (Un)Belonging in Higher Education: Negotiating Working-Class… 165

Mother owned a small tile shop in the city and he lived with them and his younger brother in a small apartment behind the tile shop. In the following section, I explore Alex and David’s experiences of university and outline some of the reasons why these men embarked on this level of study and how some of the cornerstones of working-class masculinity were being re-fashioned in this context.

Belonging at University

For many working-class young people, the process of entering higher education is fraught with difficulties (Waller et al., 2018). Just like many adults who return to university after a gap, Alex’s journey was a complex one, and it had not been straightforward (Walkerdine, Lucey, & Melody, 2001)

Alex: I moved out early and often, I left when I was 19, I moved to Calgary, lived there for 2 months, couldn’t make anything happen, and it was the middle of winter and I hated it, came back to my folks place, stayed there for a year, then moved in with a girlfriend in X, lived there for a bit, didn’t work out, moved back home again for a few more years, ended up getting one terrible job after another, gas stations, coffee shops, nothing that I could ever move on from.

The struggles of drifting from one ‘terrible job after another’ as Alex put it, took its toll:

Alex: Everyone has always just told me, it’s temporary, it’s just temporary till you find something better, and I’m like, fuck you. This type of experi- ence doesn’t lead to something better, it’s shitty. When you have this skill set, the only type of places that are going to hire you are these places. Getting locked into it, is like a death sentence. I applied to school (univer- sity) here so I could get away from that shit. Because I can’t do that any- more. It doesn’t get better.

Like the young people in Reay, Crozier, and Clayton’s (2009) study, Alex saw university as an opportunity to improve his future life chances 166 M. R. M. Ward and secure meaningful, better paid employment. Whilst aiming to accrue academic, middle-class book-based knowledge through his English Literature degree, he felt he could then move into the publishing, indus- try. He intended to do this by drawing on his experiences of working-­ class toil.

Alex: My dad can roof a house, but I work my guts out studying, I try to apply those principles of hard work to my university work, as I know how shitty life can be.

However, Alex did not seem aware of the forms of social or cultural capital he might need to draw on to achieve this aim. He had no contacts in publishing or experiences in the industry. Whilst Alex drew on his experience of working hard in low-skilled sector work to propel himself forward, David’s inspiration was also fostered by the need to improve his and his families economic situation:

David: Actually, we don’t have much money, our whole family just lives in the warehouse, at the workplace, we can’t afford another place, or enough money for another apartment. This is very tough to say, but because of my brother, he has a serious illness in his eyes and my parents are getting older, I should be the man to support the family entirely.

When I asked him more about this, David told me:

The Chinese tradition for a man is to support a whole family, you can never complain to anybody, this is your job, to be a man, to be a real man you have to take care of your family…., including your parents and your wife, children, this is your own job! Also to find a good job, as in Chinese cul- ture, we always compare with each other, if I make 10,000 dollars per month and another family make 20,000 per month, you are a weak man, not even a weak man, you are NOT a man, you are just a coward, a loser!

The ability to work hard, to provide for one’s family and to be the breadwinner are key attributes of Chinese culture, but more importantly these performances also link with working-class male identities across the globe (Walker & Roberts, 2018). To work-hard and not complain about (Un)Belonging in Higher Education: Negotiating Working-Class… 167 problems with one’s labour is part of the performance and embodiment of a male working-class self. These attributes of toil and studiousness, to battle through challenges when applied to undergraduate study made both Alex and David stand out from their classmates. Both men talked at length about how they felt they did not fit in or belong at Mountain Lake. Part of this as Alex outlines below, was due to his age, but it was also evidence from their work-ethic:

Alex: I don’t have peers. Obsessively the other students in my class should be, but I am probably 10 years older than some of them, I am older than my TAs (Teaching Assistants). They look like children. I get places early, then it becomes a place of chatter, and gossip, nothing of substance. And I’m also not doing anything of substance here either, I expected to be criti- cal, to take things apart, then write something, no it’s listen to the lecture, write it up, correct the spelling and get a B+.

For Alex, his hopes of being involved in scholarly work, were not being fulfilled and as he illustrates here, his studious performance of masculin- ity, his toil and effort, he felt was at odds to his younger classmates. This work-ethic, was also at odds with how David saw his peers:

David: I don’t have a personal friendship, sometimes I do jobs with people, but I just call them partners, or just classmates, my main concern is to work. I always stay in the library till around 9pm. Even if I finish my class in the morning, I will stay in the library. I just don’t want to let my parents down.

The classroom space, like for Alex, appears to be a lonely place for David and he did not seem to belong to this place. As Stahl and Habib (2017) suggest belonging is a process of negotiating complex territories, and it was through his more studious performance of masculinity that David was (un)belonging here:

David: Because I think, because of my age, they are only 18 or 19 years old, time for fun, come on man, don’t start it, especially in the first months, nobody is in the library, you go for partying, or shopping something like that, but I never think that, actually this jacket, I’ve worn it for 8 years, I don’t think I need to buy new stuff. 168 M. R. M. Ward

When I asked Alex if he has any tactics for belonging or if he had to be different person here or chamelesonise (Ward, 2015) he told me:

Alex: All the time! The person I am with my girlfriend, is different to the people I mix with here [university]. Here I have to keep them at arm’s reach, because I am not comfortable with any of them, and I don’t want to come across as weird or off putting, as they are so much younger. I am spoken to by a lot of them only when they have too. I am not a serious option for conversation, it’s almost like you speak to someone in retail, I am almost invisible.

Alex here does not seem comfortable in this space, and in order to try and belong, he has to chameleonise his masculinity. He shrinks away from his out of university self, (the person he claims he is with his girlfriend) to make himself almost ‘unseen’ and become a silent part of the space he inhabits. Alex is performing something of an elective belonging here. Whilst the discourse about education for working-class young people often seems to be about widening participation to university, for these two young men this is only the start of the battle. Both felt outsiders due to their work-ethic and in some respect, age. Ironically both participants felt their studiousness, and care for their academic work, marked them out as being different. In Alex’s case, he felt he had to change the person he was and become almost hidden and to reduce his masculinity in this space. This chameleonisation process (Ward, 2015) was one way for him to maintain his own autonomy in a situation where he felt uncomfort- able. This feeling of not belonging at university, was further exasperated when they returned to their home communities. In the following section, I outlined how people in their home communities often viewed them in a different way now they were university students.

Belonging at Home

Away from the university campus, both men struggled with their student identities and how they were viewed by others from their home commu- nities. As I have outlined in previous work, with marginalized young (Un)Belonging in Higher Education: Negotiating Working-Class… 169 men, geographical place is an important aspect of masculinity making (Ward, 2015). For Alex, who came for a post-industrial region on the outskirts of a big city, attending university was unusual:

MW: What sort of neighbourhood would you say Oakridge is? Alex: Not poor, but…definitely cheap. Most of my school friends at one time or other have sold pot, were in gangs or my neighbour got involved in the hells angels, one guy who was one of my worst bullies from high school died not long ago from a drugs overdose. I really don’t miss him. Not many people come here [university].

Alex’s desire to seek an alternative pathway to adulthood in his 30s and develop a different performance of masculinity, away from the violence and crime of his home town, made him feel out of place when he returned.

MW: And when you go back to Oakridge, do you feel you fit in? Alex: I don’t. There’s this thing about Oakridge where if you are there it is really hard to get away. It takes a long time to get there and I long time to get back, the commute to the city just takes ages, 2 hours each way. Parks and prisons, a railyard, old mills. A lot of tradesman, a lot of retail, lot of low income…very white, I didn’t see anyone black till I was about 12! This one time in Oakridge when I went back from uni, I wore this cardigan and I went out and someone went to me, ‘oh look at this hipster’, I don’t think they have seen one apart from on the internet.

This feeling of not belonging went beyond the physical distance from the city, it also included the attributes of the ‘uniform’ of his front presen- tation of self (Goffman, 1959). As a student, Alex was experimenting with his sense of fashion and wore what he feels were different types of clothes to his peers. The ‘hipster’ look, which draws on a middle-class bohemian fashion, was out of place in Oakridge’s working-class commu- nity where more traditional versions of masculinity (Connell, 1995) were on display. This new ‘uniform’ brought him negative attention and marked him out as different. Alex also discussed at length how his own interests in reading, writing and playing computer games were also at odds with the leisure pastimes of people in his family and how masculini- ties were usually performed: 170 M. R. M. Ward

Alex: It’s like this cultural thing, go hunting, go fishing, go home, go drink- ing with some friends, its empty, devoid of meaning, that doesn’t produce anything, it preserves a heritage, but now I find those things are empty, it’s not that I dislike them, but as a lifestyle choice I don’t like them

Even for David, who lived in the city where the university was located, he was not able to talk about his university experience in an honest way with his family, a constraint of his chameleonisation. His student iden- tity, was based solely on the effort he exerted in his studies and his careful impression management of a studious performance of masculinity was extremely tough on him. As he outlined below, he hid the challenges he faced from them as he was expected to be studious due to his cultural background:

David: I never talk to them about my university, because I talked about what defines a Chinese man? You never complain, even if life is tough, I never tell them. This is the behaviour of a coward, a loser, even if your life is tough, you need to be a tough guy and just deal with it. They expect me to study, so I do. I just keep going.

For David, the attitudes of what being a Chinese man meant, what defines masculinity in China and his families culture, are with him across the different aspects of his life (see Lin, Haywood, &, Mac an Ghaill, 2017). According to him, the only way he feels he can belong in his home community, is to continue to work tirelessly and not complain, buying further and further into meritocratic notions that are not only cultural, but promoted by the higher education system. He stressed this to me very strongly when I asked why he felt he couldn’t complain, ‘If I say my life is tough, I am much weaker than my parents’ generation, my life still so much better than theirs’. But studying for David was loaded with risks, not just with the finan- cial costs, but also the hopes and dreams of his future self and his family future.

David: I am studying so I can be more financially secure, and be a better prospect. In China, if you don’t have a car, a house, you won’t find a wife, (Un)Belonging in Higher Education: Negotiating Working-Class… 171

you can’t find a wife, that’s the truth, absolutely, you say, will you marry me, and maybe the girlfriend will say yes because she loves you, but her family will say no, they will ask, do you have a car, do you have a house, and if not, they’ll say no and they will not let you marry them! It is very difficult to find a girlfriend, and a life partner, very difficult and it is exactly the same in the Chinese community here in Canada.

For David [as with Alex above] his off-campus masculinity was shaped by a cultural heritage of heterosexuality and having to gain material wealth to fulfill the expectation placed on him and to belong. University, was one way for him to achieve these goals, but the process was loaded with risks and there were no guarantees at the end of the years of studying that these goals would come reality.

Conclusion

The chapter has sought to add to the literature on place-connected iden- tities, gender performances and belonging, by focusing on the narratives of two young men attending university in British Columbia, Canada. As I, and others, have previously written about young people’s identities are heavily connected to place (Stahl & Habib, 2017; Ward, 2015). The uni- versity experience offers the potential for young people to find a new place to belong that differs from their outside communities. For working-­ class young men it also provides the opportunity to perform masculinity through studious academic labour. As this chapter has shown, this studi- ous display did not fit easily with some of their university peers, but it also left them feeling out of place with the more traditional masculine practices that were the default reference points in their home communi- ties (hunting, fishing). These communities were often situated in less affluent areas, or with other men in their families, such as fathers, broth- ers who were in more traditional ‘male’ occupations such as various skilled trades or factory work. Other participants told me that they felt under huge amounts of pressure from their families to succeed in order to become the main breadwinner for the household and could not tell their families how much pressure they felt they were under. Both Alex and 172 M. R. M. Ward

David, whose narratives I have outlined here, had issues around (un) belonging at university due to feeling out of place due to age, but also because they felt their work ethics was at odds with their peers. These young men are trying to be successful in response to middle-­ class culturally ascribed ways of success and embrace a neo-liberal agenda within a globalised workforce. However, these agendas come into conflict with the heritage of their locale and the associated expectations of man- hood. These working-class ‘achieving boys’ offer a hybridised form of masculinity, trying to escape but also falling back and feeling the pressure to perform traditional classed masculinities. The implication of this on their ability to achieve their goals is important and illustrates how much harder working-class boys must work than those from more privileged backgrounds in order to be successful in different aspects of their lives. These narratives also show us that we must begin to question very narrow definitions of success and achievement, to live fulfilling lives.

Notes

1. It is not my intention in this chapter to discuss the nuances and differ- ences between various providers of higher education. For further informa- tion on this, and how it links to masculinity making and social inequalities, I would direct the reader to Harper and Harris (2010) or Waller et al. (2018). 2. All name used as pseudonyms 3. The Canadian Higher Education sector is diverse, but can be broadly split into three categories. Those with a medical school and doctorial pro- grammes, those without a medical school, often terms ‘comprehensive’ and smaller universities based on the liberal arts model found in the US. See https://www.timeshighereducation.com/student/best-universi- ties/best-universities-canada for further information [Accessed 18 March 2018]. 4. Some participants who were the sons of immigrants, or have moved to Canada, explained that their parents did have formal university qualifica- tions, but these were from non-English speaking countries and were not viewed as acceptable in Canada. (Un)Belonging in Higher Education: Negotiating Working-Class… 173

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Portraits of Place: Critical Pedagogy in the Classroom

Sadia Habib

Introduction: The Places that Young People Come from

Exploring and challenging the politicisation of place(s) is particularly urgent for young people who find not only are they incessantly demon- ised, humiliated and vilified by societal discourses (Hopkins, 2010), but so too are their communities and places (Hayward & Yar, 2006; Le Grand, 2013, 2014; Tyler, 2008, 2013; Tyler & Bennett, 2010). In this chapter I adopt Hopkins’ (2010, p. 11) notion of place as “connected to other places”, but also as “self-contained and distinctive”, with “open and permeable boundaries, shaped by complex webs of local, national and global influences and different social and cultural flows and processes”. Through reflecting upon the significance of “self, place and community” (Guajardo, Guajardo, & Casaperalta, 2008, p. 3), the young people in my research recognise the uniqueness and connectedness of place. Williams, cited in Gruenewald (2003, p. 3), made the connections

S. Habib (*) Manchester, UK

© The Author(s) 2019 177 S. Habib and M. R. M. Ward (eds.), Identities, Youth and Belonging, Studies in Childhood and Youth, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96113-2_11 178 S. Habib between “place + people = politics”. By exploring Britishness, the young people and their teachers whose views I discuss in this chapter, begin to make sense of the place and people question as a political one. Young people may find they are traversing a fractured socio-political terrain as neoliberal discourses about multicultural citizenship and national identity ignore the experiences of oppressed groups (Sleeter, 2014). Giroux (2013, p. 8) suggests these neoliberal discourses succeed in “stifling critical thought, reducing citizenship to the act of consuming, defining certain marginal populations as contaminated and disposable, and removing the discourse of democracy from any vestige of pedagogy”. In this chapter I draw upon key principles of critical pedagogy1 to sup- port the idea that schooling might be the means through which societies can seek to foster “critical, self-reflective, knowledgeable” citizens (Giroux, 2013, p. 3). Through research conducted with young people in south-­ east London, I explore how young people perceive the pathologisation of their locales and (imagined) communities by wider public, media and political discourses.

Context and Methods

Situated in Bermondsey, southeast London, in a traditionally White work- ing-class community, my research site was a secondary school for 11 to 18 year olds. Historically, and perhaps to some extent still today, the area where the school is located is a notorious space where right-wing racism has been pervasive.2 The British Fascist Party marched there in the 1930s; British National Party3 (BNP) marches were prominent in the 1990s and 2000s; electoral support rose for the National Front4 in 2002, and for the BNP in 2010 (Jensen, Jayaweera, & Gidley, 2012). The marches predomi- nantly involved BNP outsiders coming into Bermondsey in an “ugly and intimidating” manner (Locality, 2013). Yet it was often the local Bermondsey residents who were tarnished by wider society as far right rac- ist chavs. The pejorative label chav is commonplace vocabulary to abuse the White working class in England, synonymous with the “White trash” of the USA (Tyler, 2008; Tyler & Bennett, 2010). Chav is the new folk devil Portraits of Place: Critical Pedagogy in the Classroom 179

(Hayward & Yar, 2006; Le Grand, 2013), almost replacing the term “underclass” in media discourse (Hayward & Yar, 2006). Taking a mixed methods approach, the study into Britishness and belonging consisted of classroom-based ethnographic research5 con- ducted throughout 2007 and 2008 into two classes of young people6 who were creating emotive self-portraits about belonging to Britain in their GCSE7 Art lessons. I interviewed the two Art teachers and paired stu- dents about the discourses of Britishness that emerged in the project. I also collected data about the teaching and learning processes through observa- tion, interviews with teachers and students, and extensive questionnaires with students in both classes.8 These carefully chosen methods created a multi-layered understanding of the narratives of identity and belonging, as well as the pedagogical processes that were significant to the young people and their Art teachers. Critical insights into the significances of young Londoners’ everyday place-based racialised and classed belongings and identities were investigated. In the next section I briefly discuss the importance of critical and self-reflective acts of learning for young peo- ple’s sense of identities.

Critical and Self-Reflective Acts

Young people—frequently the focus of debates on citizenship and belong- ing in modern multicultural societies (Butcher & Harris, 2010; Fortier, 2008; Habib, 2017)—become “everybody’s business”, with society plac- ing “hopes for building a better world” upon them (Smyth & McInerney, 2007, p. 37). Yet, young people are frequently maligned in media and political rhetoric, with policies of social control to discipline them increas- ingly justified in the interest of social harmony (Grattan, 2009; Habib, 2017; McDowell, 2012; Smyth & McInerney, 2007; Ward et al., 2017). Often young people are not given sufficient opportunities to practise critical, collaborative and self-reflective acts of learning about belonging in multicultural societies. Those from marginalized communities often feel invisible in public discourse about identities and belongings (Habib, 2017; Harris, Roach, Thiara, Amory, & Yusuf, 2003; Smyth & McInerney, 2007; Stahl & Habib, 2017). Schooling must be seen as a 180 S. Habib process that can “enable” students or “silence” students; this chapter shows how critical pedagogy is an approach that “affirms the voices of teachers and students while simultaneously encouraging them to be self-­ reflective and more socially critical” (Giroux & McLaren, 1989, p. xxxii). Critical and self-reflective acts of learning regarding place identities seek to illuminate how identity cannot be defined in one consistent way. The students in this research came to understand how identities are “sev- eral, sometimes contradictory or unresolved” (Hall, 1996, p. 598), and that identities are not about “people that look the same, feel the same, call themselves the same”. Instead classroom-based critical self-reflections resulted in the young people coming to view identity “as a process, as a narrative, as a discourse, it is always told from the position of the Other” (Hall, 2000, p. 147). The young people talked openly about their feelings of belonging, their relationship to place, and their understandings of their own identities. In the next section, I briefly outline the possible benefits for students and teachers who use critical pedagogy approaches when exploring identities and belongings in self-reflective ways.

Critical Pedagogy, Identities and Belongings

Contemporary contradictions and contestations regarding identities and belongings need to be examined through a critical lens. The ways that space and place can change the course of young people’s lives, for example, is now being increasingly documented by scholars of youth (Cuervo & Wyn, 2014; Ward, 2015; Ward et al., 2017). Conflicts between the “global/ local, private/public, identity/difference, knowledge/feelings, etc” are seen by visual arts pedagogues as potentially resolvable through “critical theori- zation” (Tourinho & Martins, 2008, p. 63). Critical pedagogues recognise that teaching and learning is more than just teaching and learning. It also concerns understanding marginalised communities, examining how the status quo maintains a powerfully oppressive hegemonic order, as well as critiquing the “social, economic, psychological and political dimensions of the schools, districts, and systems” (Kincheloe, 2007, p. 17). The young people in my study were able to critically examine the con- tradictions and contestations involved in their everyday belongings to Portraits of Place: Critical Pedagogy in the Classroom 181 place(s), as well as reflect upon the politics of (un) belonging to place(s). The teachers and young people experienced the ways that creating art can be beneficial for those who wish to engage in sensitive and respectful cultural knowledge acquisition (Kara, 2015). As the next section of this chapter reveals, young people in south east London express their indi- vidual and collective belongings and identities in self-assured, decisive and lively ways. Importantly their expressions are conducted in a manner that they recognise is an act of resistance, a challenge to prevailing myths about their place of Bermondsey.

Portraits of Place: Critical Pedagogy

The narratives and discourses employed by the young south-east Londoners provide powerful insights into the racialised and classed nature of local—and national—belongings, as well as about identities as processes, as narratives and as discourses. In discussing my research on young people’s identities and belongings, I focus on how young people’s conceptions of (un) belonging to the local, as well as to Britain, require an attentive engagement with a critical pedagogy of place.

Committing to a Critical Pedagogy of Place

Critical pedagogy of place involves deliberately combining two separate, but sometimes overlapping, strands of place-based education and critical pedagogy (Gruenewald, 2003).9 Critical pedagogy recognises the signifi- cance of context by emphasising how struggles experienced by students are specific to their local communities and local contexts (Cutts, 2013; Giroux, 2013). The young people in my research engaged in what Said (1994, p. 610) calls “the struggle over geography”, a struggle “complex and interesting because it is not only about soldiers and cannons but also about ideas, about forms, about images and imaginings”. One student in the study, Ellie, actively resisted the ugly label of a city chav, demonstrat- ing insights into what it means to challenge the imposition of public— often negative—discourses about place and class (see the next section). 182 S. Habib

Media and political discourses amplify a contradictory identity of those they stigmatise as chavs, as well as of the places they come from. Often chavs are racialised as embodying dirty, poverty-stricken Whiteness (Tyler, 2008), while simultaneously being epitomised as “a bunch of rac- ist bigots” (Jones, 2011, p. 9) or “filthy White” racists (Tyler, 2008, p. 25). To interrogate the struggle over place and belonging, the young peo- ple in this study were guided away from traditional banking methods of teaching that elevate teacher knowledge (Freire, 2000). The teachers in my research promoted engaged pedagogy, recognising “we learn best when there is an interactive relationship between student and teacher” (hooks, 2010, p. 19). Traditional ‘banking’ methods of schooling assumes teachers hold ‘knowledge’, which they transfer to students (Freire, 2000). Freire (2000) coined the idea of the banking method of education to refer to traditional, passive and mainstream teaching styles where teachers ‘deposit’ information and knowledge into empty ‘accounts’ (students). One of the teachers I interviewed, Mr Martin, was adapting his teach- ing while re-emphasising to students that the Art project was not “his perspective”:

Mr Martin: …they were waiting for me to say ‘You can’t do that! It has to have a flag in it… or it has to have some bit of culture in it…’… I moved in my approach and I sort of said “You do it. There’s a reason why you are doing it”…

Mr Martin’s Freirean approach to the Art lessons resulted in the dis- missal of didactic, almost oppressive, ways of doing teaching and learn- ing. Knowing students are often unfamiliar with pedagogies that develop criticality and authentic conversation, Mr Martin was deter- mined to provide a space for students to actively and critically engage in reflection and dialogue about place-based identities. Good teaching rec- ognises knowledge does not pre-exist, but is to be created by learners (Brookfield, 2009). In the research both Art teachers took great lengths to apply this notion about ‘knowledge and understanding’ in their classrooms. What happens then when teachers like Mr Martin, and his Portraits of Place: Critical Pedagogy in the Classroom 183 colleague—Ms Anderson, disrupt traditional teaching techniques, and empower young people to lead the class discussion on what it means to belong to a place? Incorporating critical pedagogy principles in the Art lessons opened up a space where young people felt confident and bold in (re)presenting their experiences and ideas of (un) belonging to place. By promoting critical questioning, which is “the epistemic stance of critical learners and citizens” (Shor, 1996, p. 54), the teachers could cultivate students’ critical exploration of multicultural British identities. Although the project ini- tially concerned what it meant to belong to Britain, teacher Ms Anderson explained the subsequent journey was “very personal (about) which direction they chose to take… we gave them a lot of freedom to take it off in their own direction and so what happened happened”. When reflecting upon meanings of Britishness, students often seem more concerned with their locales (Maylor, 2010; Phillips & Ganesh, 2007; Scourfield, Dicks, Drakeford, & Davies, 2006). Both teachers, in my research, also found that the Art students were often keen to discuss local belongings and identities, rather than national affiliations and attachments. What happens when young people explore identities and belongings by engaging with a critical pedagogy of place? The next sec- tion draws on the results of a critical pedagogy that understands that national identity exploration cannot afford to ignore local or global place-­ based identities (Back, 1996; Gilroy, 2002; Maylor, 2010; Phillips & Ganesh, 2007; Scourfield et al., 2006).

Identities and Belongings in Bermondsey and Britain

Students were learning new ways of engaging in a critical pedagogy of place. One student, Ellie, described the project as “open”, “we could interpret it however we wanted to”. Ellie and her peers were courageously beginning to trust their own voices, delighting in creative art education. They were “creating, inquiring, and reflecting” (Booth, 2015, p. 58). Adolescence is a crucial time of identity formation (Mauro, 1998; McGann, 2006), and making art is potentially healing and therapeutic for young people (Chilton & Leavy, 2014; McNiff, 1998). The teachers 184 S. Habib observed that exploring identities through Art was cathartic and mean- ingful for the students. Ellie’s teacher, Ms Anderson, observed her stu- dent getting to know the self and deliberating upon social class struggles and her relationship with wider society:

Ms Anderson: …she wanted to get some of her…angry feelings out about being seen as a chav…which is obviously in her mind not a very nice term…that people have called her…so she did this really interesting piece of work…beautifully done… of her face that is kind of chained around… with Tiffany chains and bracelets, and Lacoste logos and all the kinds of fashion labels that go with that idea of being a chav. And then a gun that was shooting Burberry bullets…at her head…and Lacoste crocodile trying to eat her…

Freire (2000) emphasises the necessity of ‘conscientizacao’, that is criti- cal reflection about societal oppressions. My research presents young people—like Ellie—who are aware of how popular media and political discourses demonise and vilify them, as well as the places they inhabit, through humiliating classed and racialised discourses. During an inter- view Ms Anderson also stressed the significance of giving students, like Ellie, a safe opportunity to use art, to mull over identities in meaningful, creative and purposeful ways:

…for her I think she found it really useful because it gave her a chance to actually say something about herself… that maybe she can’t actually directly say in day to day life.

The teachers actively reflected upon the young people’s emotional involvement in place-based identity exploration. During his interview, Mr Martin expanded on these ideas and suggested the students had made

really powerful artworks that have led us to read into it more and think ‘Actually that is quite a sophisticated comment you have put in there’ so it’s very healthy kind of letting the kids reflect on that.

Often the teachers and students commented upon how identity work about Britishness and belonging can unleash racist attitudes and Portraits of Place: Critical Pedagogy in the Classroom 185 perceptions. One student, Joe, suggested Britishness and Whiteness intersected in his locale. In London, place-based categories such as “‘Cockney’, ‘English’, ‘working class’ and ‘British’” are constructed as “subcategories of whiteness, each superficially racially unmarked, yet all are sites of struggle over their racial meanings” (Wemyss, 2009, p. 69). In the paired interview with Joe and his peer, Kadisha, Joe racialised belonging to different parts of London depending on whether he deemed them multicultural or not:

Joe: I don’t consider Fulham10 to be a British part of London…Because of the races in that area. They are just all Indians that live in Fulham—and yeah, I wouldn’t consider that place to be British if I was in search for British people.

In looking at how the art project opened up spaces for discussing youth identity and belonging, another student, Jodie, explained outside of school most of her friends were ‘White British’, whilst in school she had friends of “many different cultures and races”. Multicultural schools can be advantageous in providing ‘safe spaces’ (Antrop-Gonzalez, 2006; Ghosh & Galczynski, 2014), as ‘coming-together’ places in locales where youth, like Joe or Jodie, can engage in cultural exchanges about identities and belongings. In the paired interview, while Joe’s peer, Kadisha, argued the local places of Rotherhithe and Bermondsey were alike, Joe disagreed and claimed in “Bermondsey, there’s a lot more gang action. Rotherhithe’s a lot more laidback”. Joe positioned Rotherhithe as desirable and respect- able, contrasting with what he perceived as violent and multicultural Bermondsey. Kadisha again contested the place-based prejudices she felt Joe was reproducing. Kadisha explained she had witnessed “a lot of fights” living in Rotherhithe. Ideas about territorial borders in London, and where a sense of belonging begins and ends, were emerging in their discussions of identity and (un)belonging. Territorialism is often “cul- tural rather than geographical” (Hewitt, 1986). The “Silward” area, for example, which Kadisha regarded as part of Rotherhithe, according to Joe was part of neighbouring Deptford, although another time he seemed unsure. 186 S. Habib

Kadisha unpacked Joe’s ideas on “high raised” buildings leading him to confess to stereotypes about what it might mean to belong to Bermondsey and Rotherhithe:

Joe: Like it sounds horrible… but I feel that all people who have just come to this country, they are on benefits, ain’t got really good jobs, ain’t got a lot of money so live on estates and stuff and most estates are in Bermondsey. You don’t really get estates in Rotherhithe, except maybe Silward… but maybe that’s not even Rotherhithe. I consider that road, like Surrey Quays, anywhere beyond McDonalds that is not Rotherhithe.

Place identities are frequently constructed in relation to ‘Other’ people and places (Massey, 1994; Twigger-Ross & Uzzell, 1996). While housing estates are often pilloried by media and political discourses, those inhab- iting these spaces might think positively about their neighbourhoods (Herbert & Rodger, 2016). During the paired interview with Joe and Kadisha, I asked the students what lay beyond McDonalds, to which both firmly replied the borough of Lewisham. Joe added that Lewisham begins where buildings become “high-raised”, which Kadisha contested as racialised discourse:

Kadisha: You are trying to say that all White people live in houses and Black people live in high-raised flats (laughs) Joe: Yeah, they do. Kadisha: You can’t say that!

Joe admitted it was a “stereotype” that he did not agree with:

Joe: I don’t agree with it. It’s my opinion. Kadisha: Exactly, so you agree with it. You’re saying that’s your opinion.

The Art project inspired critical reflections and dialogues with peers and teachers. Kadisha was able to challenge stereotypes and myths about place- based classed and racialised belongings. Joe’s reference to the high-rise­ and low-rise residences manifested youth encounters with territorial boundar- ies. Boundaries “between the desirable and the rough, between the Portraits of Place: Critical Pedagogy in the Classroom 187 established and the incomers, and between the respectable and disreputa- ble are typically well-rehearsed social boundaries” (Husband, Alam, Hüttermann, & Fomina, 2014, p. 1) that young people might encounter. Kadisha attempted to clarify Joe’s stereotypical assertions about immi- grants and Blacks residing in “flats”, reminding him about professional migrants working in London. She contested his view “foreigners” were benefit-claiming, high-rise flat dwelling and unemployed, by highlight- ing affluent and ambitious immigrants, referring to doctors, entrepre- neurs and home-owners. In discussing the relationship between place and belonging, when Joe conflated ideas about minority ethnic communities and the welfare state, Kadisha argued minority ethnic individuals are often affluent with professional and entrepreneurial skills. On the one hand, Joe dismissed exploration of place, belonging and identity as only appealing to young people from other cultures, while, on the other hand, he was delighted about the space the project had given him to express his ideas about his own identity, and to draw on his pas- sion for local cultural history:

Joe: I learnt about the dockers and that from my dad ‘cos he used to work on the rice mills when he was fourteen… The rice mills… down Rotherhithe Street. They are still there.

When I ask him to tell us more about the docks, Joe is animated about family and local history:

Joe: They just made boats come in with a load of rice and they like sacked it and packed it and all that… My granddad worked there his whole life. Which he told me. He worked there, his sisters, his brothers. He had like six brothers and sisters…And he said that his whole family grew up in the rice mills as a docker.

Following in his family’s footsteps, Joe, in the past, might have sought work on the docks. Since the decline of the docks though, the army seemed an appealing post-education route for Joe. Owning his sense of Britishness for Joe was (re)presenting his patriotism in his artwork and discussing family, locality, and British history, as well as his enthusiasm for the army. 188 S. Habib

Conclusion: Racialised and Classed Belongings to Britain

The narratives and discourses employed by the young south-east Londoners in this chapter provide insights into the racialised and classed nature of local and national belongings in contemporary London. Identities, as we have seen through the use of art-based critical pedagogy, are in process, influenced by discourses about which young people con- struct powerful narratives. Kadisha and Joe’s conversation on Britishness, place and race highlight the importance of exploring social inequalities and deconstructing the powerful media and political discourses deni- grate multicultural Britain. Joe’s discourses about multicultural belong- ings also reveal that opening up spaces to tackle prejudice, stereotypes and racism through schooling is necessary. This chapter has argued that identity and place exploration is impor- tant for young people, in particular for young people who feel that they are “marginalised” and “devalued” by wider society (Batsleer, 2008, p. 17). A curriculum that is “rooted in place”, and pedagogies that respond to the locale permit young people to develop knowledge of the self and of their histories (Guajardo et al., 2008, p. 8). Place-based peda- gogies can be adopted by students and teachers seeking to resist perni- cious wider discourses about identity and belonging. Place-based education can motivate young people to become critical citizens who aspire to contribute to their communities and their society (Habib, 2017). For the young people in this research, place identity was closely tied up to their sense of personal identity. Self-esteem and con- fidence about place translated to their conceptions of self-identity and collective belongings. This research has shown young people are often keen to explore attachments to local place and belonging to commu- nity, and that critical pedagogy in the classroom has the potential to produce articulate and bold students who challenge the demeaning images of communities and places that are common in public discourses. My research was informed by critical ideas about cultural and educa- tional practices as able to yield new ways of interrogating mainstream Portraits of Place: Critical Pedagogy in the Classroom 189 discourses about identities (Weedon, 2004). Critical pedagogy principles and practices encourage students to become responsible, active partici- pants or citizens, and to not be afraid of striving for social change and social justice. Through critical pedagogy and place-based education, youth studies scholars can learn about the significance of place attach- ments for young people’s sense of identities and belongings. Rather than focus on official political discourses about places, moving forwards, more empirical data is needed about the impact on young people’s identities of place-based discourses (Thomas, 2011). Alternative respectful ways of discussing citizenship, race and migration which support frameworks of equality, anti-racism, and which ensure the rights of marginalised people are required (Finney & Simpson, 2009). These can be made possible through arts-based critical pedagogies. To encourage young people to become more reflexive is an under-­ emphasised practice in educational spaces, and yet critical pedagogues frequently seek to draw attention to these as core to social change. Educational researchers inspired by transformative activist research often recognise that social change requires educational institutions to elevate issues of “self, place and community” (Guajardo et al., 2008, p. 3). In this chapter we saw how the dialogue between Joe and Kadisha opened up spaces to explore social changes, and the reflexivity encouraged by the teachers permitted students, like Ellie, to challenge social stereotypes. Young people who find themselves negotiating turbulent social changes against a backdrop of policies of austerity and neoliberalism, might find that reflecting upon self, place and community can help them to come to terms with the challenges of identity and belonging in local, national and global contexts. Rising social inequalities inscribed in the communities and places that young people inhabit will result in far-reaching and often devastating consequences on their hopes, ambitions and lives, if these social inequalities remain unspoken and unchallenged.

Notes

1. Critical pedagogy is also practised as “liberatory pedagogy’, empowering pedagogy, radical pedagogy, engaged pedagogy, or pedagogy of possibil- ity” (George, 2001). 190 S. Habib

2. Runnymede (2014), describe Bede House Association demonstrating a community stance against racism, working with tenants, police and the council to reclaim St George’s Day. Consequently the BNP no longer march in Bermondsey (Locality, 2013). 3. The British National Party (BNP) is a far-right fascist political party. 4. The National Front is a far-right fascist political party. 5. My research embraced features of educational, urban, and critical eth- nography, arts-based educational research, as well as critical race meth- odology and critical pedagogy, for these value participant voice and empowerment, inspire social justice and social change. 6. There were 34 students in total (aged 14–15), 16 students in one class and 18 students in the other class. Pseudonyms for teachers and students are used throughout my chapter. 7. The General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) is a qualifica- tion normally taken by 16 year old students in the UK at the end of compulsory education. 8. Ethnographers might incorporate questionnaires as an additional research tool (Wolcott, 1997). 9. Spatialised critical theory and racialised critical geography complement critical pedagogy; helpful in interrogating connections between power, race and place, they can work alongside a critical pedagogy of place (Gruenewald, 2003). 10. Fulham, an area in the London borough of Hammersmith & Fulham, lies approximately 8 miles west of Bermondsey.

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Conclusion: Young People Negotiating Belonging in Changing Times

Sadia Habib and Michael R. M. Ward

Introduction

Throughout this edited collection, scholars have shown that researching young people’s conceptions of identities and belongings is urgent and necessary. Young people, as change-makers, are crucial to how societies can become more socially just in the future (Habib, 2017; Hamid, 2017; Leistyna, 2009; Smyth & McInerney, 2007). However, when researching young peoples’ conceptions of belonging, it is clear identi- ties and belongings are in flux, for “identities are never completed, never finished; that they are always as subjectivity itself is, in process”

S. Habib (*) Manchester, UK M. R. M. Ward Swansea University, Swansea, UK

© The Author(s) 2019 195 S. Habib and M. R. M. Ward (eds.), Identities, Youth and Belonging, Studies in Childhood and Youth, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96113-2_12 196 S. Habib and M. R. M. Ward

(Hall, 1991, p. 47). Recent theoretical work focused upon young peo- ple’s experiences and conceptions of belonging present identities as multiple, shifting and heavily connected to place (Farrugia & Wood, 2017; Stahl & Habib, 2017; Habib & Ward, 2019; Ward, 2015). Building on this work, the scholars in this collection demonstrate how young people are frequently negotiating their relationships with people and place, often in relation to the shifting and fractured emotions involved in belonging. Identities, Youth and Belonging: International Perspectives reveals the myriad of ways in which youth studies researchers are writing about how young people respond to social changes associated with modernity and globalization, which, to varying degrees, contribute to both social cohe- sion and fragmentation. The research presented extends recent studies of theories of belonging which explore the lived experience of youth responding to change in everyday multicultural societies within an increasingly globalised world (Butcher & Harris, 2010; Coffey & Farrugia, 2014; Cuervo, Barakat, & Turnbull, 2015; Farrugia, Smyth, & Harrison, 2014; Furlong, Woodman, & Wyn, 2011; Habib, 2017; Hall, Coffey, & Lashua, 2009; Hamid, 2017; Shildrick, Blackman, & MacDonald, 2009; Stahl & Habib, 2017; Habib & Ward, 2019). Our collection has followed this trend of demonstrating how young people assert their agency, how young people negotiate belonging in a wide range of international contexts, where they experience the “the ordinari- ness of change” (Hall et al., 2009, p. 560). In operationalizing theories of belonging, and theories associated with belonging, to investigate youth experiences, the research presented in this collection directly addresses the urgent need for scholarship which places young people’s voice as paramount. Ensuring young people are able to represent themselves is essential to our ethic of care as researchers (Coffey & Farrugia, 2014), however, gaining trust in research settings with young people takes time and patience, and cannot be expedited (Habib, 2017; Stahl, 2016; Ward, 2015). Each scholar in the collection has taken care to foreground young people’s agency and young people’s voice. Therefore, we see the collection as making a significant contribution to contempo- rary youth studies in building upon recent emphasis upon space, place and identity formations. Conclusion: Young People Negotiating Belonging in Changing… 197

What Can Space Tell Us about ‘Youth’?

The scholars in this edited collection demonstrate that space and place inevitably leave an indelible impression on young people’s identities, as Ward (2015, p. 2) writes, young people’ spaces and places impact “who they can be and become”. Readers have seen young people in a range of countries—England, Scotland, Turkey, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Spain, Indonesia, Canada and Australia (as well as in on-line spaces)—and how they contend with evolving and place-connected identities and belong- ings. At the forefront of the analysis is how young people construct meaningful identities for themselves through their relationships with place, and how this works in relation to their conceptions of belonging. Such an undertaking by the authors, requires an emphasis on the impor- tance of place and space. Space and place, as we have observed in this collection, are meaningful to young people who are working out new ways to belong at times when social changes impact their everyday lives. Young people’s (un) belongings become more about the spatial rather than just the temporal. We recognize the complexities and nuances of (re)presenting young people’s identities and belongings that have shaped the field of youth studies (Coffey & Farrugia, 2014; Farrugia & Wood, 2017). One such contemporary complexity to bear in mind is the way that Furlong et al. (2011) identify the once divergent paths taken by scholars of youth stud- ies as now coming closer together, resulting in, for example, two authori- tative distinct approaches of ‘youth cultural studies’ and ‘transitional studies’ now increasingly merged in youth studies. The previous “stratifi- cation of youth studies”, Furlong et al. (2011, p. 356) argue “has been damaging and, we would suggest, has occasionally diverted attention away from the most crucial sociological questions”. Both structural per- spectives and cultural perspectives need to work in tandem if we are to continue to move forwards in (re)presenting young people’s voices (Furlong et al., 2011). This, we feel, is an approach which we have adopted in this volume to understand youth, identity and belonging in changing times. As identities are influenced by multiple intersectional categories such as social class, gender and ethnicity, as well as “education, religion, their 198 S. Habib and M. R. M. Ward neighbourhoods, leisure practices, media consumption, families and peer networks” (Matthews, 2016, p. 84), young people’s experiences and meanings of place identities can be wide-ranging and distinctive. Fusing together ‘cultural’ approaches with ‘transitions’ approaches (Furlong et al., 2011), when investigating and analysing these aforementioned identity categories we consider to be paramount. In this concluding chapter we synthesize the main themes in the belonging literature in order to understand how belonging is being con- ceptualized, what scholars are still hashing out, and also the limitations of belonging when considered as a conceptual tool to understand the expe- riences and agency of young people. This concluding chapter draws together the themes from the book that connect the young people across the globe, while positioning the collection within the recent develop- ments in youth studies scholarship, and furthermore makes observations about the way belonging and un-belonging are operational globally.

The Importance of Young People’s Agency

In researching how young people form their identities as decision makers and active citizens, the scholars in this edited collection demonstrate the ways in which young people are marking out notions of belonging and how, sometimes, these notions are marked out for them. The young peo- ple in these chapters have spoken confidently about the resources and support they feel they need to realise their hopes, ambitions and dreams (see Chaps. 3, 8 and 9 in particular). Scholars of youth studies emphasise the significance of choices and agency in how young people construct their lives (Choudhry, 2010). Therefore, for those researching the experi- ences of contemporary young people, it becomes imperative to (re)pres- ent the twists and turns young people experience as they evolve, and as do the places and spaces they inhabit. Importantly young people are able to make use of “different social spaces and subcultural identities to reveal complex social negotiation as they encounter diverse social action within the community” (Shildrick et al., 2009, p. 460). To capture the complexities encountered by young people negotiating belonging—and the importance of agency within this Conclusion: Young People Negotiating Belonging in Changing… 199 negotiation—the collection showcases research in a range of places such as urban London neighbourhoods (Chaps. 2 and 11), the Yogyakarta music communities in Indonesia (Chap. 3), the congregation of a Zimbabwean migrant church in South Africa (Chap. 4), in educational institutions in Turkey, Scotland, Australia and Canada (Chaps. 5–7 and 9/10 respectively), as well as in on-line virtual spaces (Chap. 8). The research from these diverse settings (educational institutions, places of worship, virtual environments, the street and spaces of consumption) highlights the importance of key sites and communities that play a role in shaping young people’s lives across the globe. Looking across the scholarship presented in the collection, there is a clear trend in how some scholars theorise the nexus of youth identities and senses of belongings as closely connected to artistic or religious spaces (in particular, see Joy White’s Chap. 2, Oki Rahadianto Sutopo’s Chap. 3, and Charles Dube’s Chap. 4), while others have illustrated what it means for young people’s sense of belonging in reference to their experiences with transitions (Vicki Trowler in Chap. 6), as well as displacements and mobilities (Fiona Picton and Grant Banfield in Chap. 7). Others empha- sise the importance of gender and power (see Chap. 8 by Miño-Puigcercós et al.), or community, belonging and difference, as significantly influenc- ing the identity formation of young people (Chap. 9 by Cassidy, Chap. 10 by Ward, and Chap. 11 by Habib). We see scholars using a range of methodological tools including online data, interviews and participant observation, as well as classroom pedago- gies to foreground young people’s voices. Young people are shown to be agentic in the construction of their identity, and we learn how their agency is closely tied to place, but also to social expectations, social tradi- tions, and social stereotypes. We glimpse the extent to which young peo- ple are able to resist and challenge social assumptions and social obstacles as they negotiate their sense of belonging. Consistent across the collec- tion is how researchers have sought to champion the agentic energy, cre- ativity and sense of social justice that, for many, remains at the heart of what informs the choices made by many young people. We know young people today find themselves in positions where they are negotiating multiple and often contradictory discourses concerning the varied roles they are compelled to play in society. However, as young 200 S. Habib and M. R. M. Ward people come to terms with the ‘politics of belonging,’ where entitlement and status arguably play more of a role (Yuval-Davis, 2006), the interna- tional scholars in this collection shape the field through asking compel- ling questions. The scholars pursue a conversation about the agency involved in young people’s negotiation of identities and belongings.

Theorising Young People’s Identities and Belongings

Drawing upon interdisciplinary perspectives of space and place, we hope the collection begins a reflective conversation about how theories of belonging are being operationalized in the study of youth identity. We see the theories presented in in this edited collection as building upon the theoretical work in more recent studies on youth referenced in the intro- ductory chapter (c.f. Threadgold & Nilan, 2009; Coffey & Farrugia, 2014; Farrugia & Wood, 2017; Fraser et al., 2017; Stahl & Habib, 2017, Habib & Ward, 2019). Authors highlight key problematics such as how some young people might construct counternarratives to social expecta- tions which has been noted in studies of youth (Habib, 2017; Smyth, Robinson, & McInerney, 2013; Stahl, 2017). We also see how young people must learn to appraise or contest the ways in which they are iden- tified as minorities in educational landscapes. Such problematics lead to a delicate balancing act around theory. In theorizing young people’s sense of belonging, researchers require adept tools. In Chap. 5, Pembeci, for example, draws upon theories of space in the work of Setha M. Low and Henri Lefebvre in his research on young people’s identities. Pembeci highlights the reasons he believes a theory of space supports his theorising about belonging, “it provides a powerful tool for uncovering both blatant and subtle forms of exclu- sion, injustice, biases and inequality”. In Chap. 6, Trowler also refers to the significance of theories of space when it comes to researching and writing about belonging. She dismisses traditional theories about student transition/engagement/success as simple, uncritical and out- dated. Instead Trowler prefers to engage with a theoretical framework of space that “embraces space and movement as literal and metaphoric Conclusion: Young People Negotiating Belonging in Changing… 201 embodiments of the multiple simultaneous, multidirectional and often contradictory dimensions of transit and transition” as encountered by young students. Bourdieusian concepts of ‘habitus’ and ‘field’ and Margaret Archer’s theory of reflexivity come together in Chap. 7 where Picton and Banfield argue that the concept of ‘habitus’ should “not be jettisoned but reconsidered as encompassing a capacity approach to understanding agency”. As practices, discourses and ethos of particular locales, spaces and institutions contribute to shaping the ‘ways of being’ for young people, the study of belonging, is critical (Stahl & Habib, 2017). In reflecting upon how belonging is explored, we see the authors using theory to explore the tensions faced by youth as they seek stability and belonging while the society that they inhabit continues to evolve. Dube (Chap. 4), for example, poses a question concerning the negotiation of belonging among Zimbabwean youth in South Africa: what happens to the church space when it must accept social changes such as an increase in migration resulting in fast evolving diverse places and societies? In other chapters, belonging is discussed in reference to youth working to adapt and posi- tion themselves in fragmented and rapidly changing societies (Clayton, 2011; Hopkins, 2010; Sanderson & Thomas, 2014; Habib & Ward, 2019). White (Chap. 2) describes identity, place and belonging in urban east London where unemployment and austerity result in social instabil- ity for young Londoners. Belonging, used as a conceptual tool, allows the authors to capture how young people negotiate their reflexive understanding of their locale, as it requires theorising belonging as ‘multidimensional’ (Farrugia & Wood, 2017; Sand, 2017; Stahl & Habib, 2017). A common thread that runs through the collection is that youth, belonging and place are social constructions (Hopkins, 2010). In their empirical and theoretical research, these authors have discussed how young people can and do con- struct status and meaningful identities for themselves through their con- ceptions of belonging, and that often this is heavily influenced by their relationships with ‘territories’ and places. In theorizing belonging, the scholars foreground the importance of place, recognizing that young peo- ple’s sense of place is tied closely to how they both perceive and experi- ence social relations. 202 S. Habib and M. R. M. Ward

Place-Making and Music

The first two chapters in the book showed how young people’s sense of place-making is constructed through musical expression.1 In exploring how young people improvise as artists, Chap. 2 focuses upon the UK Grime music scene and young musicians growing up in ‘the Ends’ of Newham, in multicultural East London. In Growing up in ‘the ends’2: identity, place and belonging in an urban east London neighbourhood, White shows young Londoners living in high poverty experienced Grime music as a creative and cultural opportunity, simultaneously witnesses to a socio-political landscape of austerity measures and increasing inequalities in their home of Newham. The socio-economic circumstances for young people are shown by White to have been heav- ily influenced by neoliberal politics and policies, thus young people have been impacted by austerity cuts and mass unemployment. Yet Newham was a place where the young people felt a sense of belonging, and where they were able to provide a space to connect their belonging to their craft of music-making.­ Despite the neoliberal backdrop of social inequalities pervading young people’s lives, there was hope and confidence for young people gained through their relationship with a creative cultural form of music-making. White explains how music contributes to a sense of place and how this is interwoven with a sense of belonging for young people who “use music to construct identities and that despite chronic social issues, these identities may be a source of validation, comfort and recognition” (this volume). She evidences young people speaking with warmth and dignity about place; for exam- ple, one participant in the study, Ian—a 22 year old Club and Radio DJ—speaks fondly of ‘the ends’: “I grew up round here, in Manor Park. It’s a bit humble you know. Everyone knows each other, it is really a humble place” (this volume). In exploring youth’s conceptions of belonging, White argues that “it is the lived experiences in everyday encounters at school, work or on the street corner that informs how young people come together to perform identities as MCs, entrepreneurs, and musicians” (this volume). Similarly the young people that feature in Oki Rahadianto Sutopo’s study of young Conclusion: Young People Negotiating Belonging in Changing… 203

Indonesian musicians, career mobility and feelings of home, also point towards connections between everyday lived experiences, place and iden- tities. Sutopo explains that

for young musicians living in Indonesia, the ultimate meaning of ‘home’ is a space where they can make sense of what happens in everyday life, make sense of their career, and also predict a relatively clear vision of the future (this volume).

Though the young people could make decisions to move to Jakarta or Bali for the sake of a pursuing a potentially successful musical career with better chances of employment and higher wages, Sutopo describes young people choosing to make certain sacrifices and remain in their hometown of Yogyakarta. One of the participants in the study, Hernan, explains that familial obligations played a part in why he chose to stay in Yogyakarta, rather than move to the bigger cities. In considering the importance of belonging, Sutopo’s analysis reveals that for young people like Hernan, the role of the family may influence young people’s relationship with place, while for other participants in his study the role of the wider musi- cal community was also significant. One of the young Indonesian musi- cians, for example, reflected upon the support and friendship received in sites where non-hierarchical and informal relationships prevailed (See Chap. 3, this volume). Even though remaining in Yogyakarta is not tra- ditionally seen as a big achievement for a musician, these young Indonesian musicians work hard to re-define the meanings of success, while remaining attached to the local. In terms of belonging then, these young Indonesians are compelled to consider their sense of belonging by making life-changing decisions in terms of career mobility. They make conscious choices not to move to the bigger Indonesian cities of Jakarta or Bali as often expected of those ambitious for a musical career. In Young Indonesian Musicians, Upward Career Mobility and Feeling at Home, we saw the young Indonesian musicians negotiating the potential and pos- sibilities of belonging to the local with becoming successful in their careers. The narratives of the young musicians illustrated the significance of belonging to family and local community when making significant life decisions about musical careers. 204 S. Habib and M. R. M. Ward

Ethnic Minority Young People, Identity and Belonging

The book also contained chapters that conveyed what it might mean for young people to belong to a minority group as they negotiate the socio-­ educational and socio-religious milieux of the nations they inhabit. Chapter 4, Religion and (re)negotiation of belonging among Zimbabwean migrant youths in South Africa by Charles Dube, focuses upon a Pentecostal church in South Africa that shapes the everyday experiences of identities and belongings of young Zimbabwean church-goers. Dube’s ethno- graphic study highlighted the ways that Zimbabwean youth negotiate and renegotiate the doctrine they learn in church with their experiences of everyday social life in South Africa. Dube asked early on in his chapter: “What happens when a church’s doctrine is ‘tested’ by migration and high levels of ethno-racial diversity?” (this volume). Dube’s study referred to the notions of belonging among Zimbabwean youth migrants who attend the Forward in Faith Ministries International (FIFMI), a Pentecostal church with a global presence, as he considered the connec- tions between migration and chance encounters with people from other religions. After conducting field-work, Dube concluded that “to under- stand young people’s practices of belonging means considering the vary- ing and often contradicting significance attached to religious affiliation by individual congregants in the situations they find themselves in”. Dube found that the young Zimbabweans—who were negotiating ways of belonging in South Africa—would be meeting religiously diverse peo- ple, and would be able to maintain convivial relationships. Chapter 5 also recounted the experiences of belonging of young people from a minority group, in this case young Kurdish people in an educational setting in Turkey. In the chapter entitled Strategies of Belonging on Campus: Experience of Being Kurdish at a Turkish College, Baris İsci Pembeci demonstrated how Kurdish young people learn ways of belonging in spaces where institutional prejudice operates against them. Pembeci’s research shows how institutional discrimina- tion impacts young Kurdish student’s identities, as they find them- selves in precarious positions negotiating the politics of belonging and the politics of place, coming to terms with the ways in which Conclusion: Young People Negotiating Belonging in Changing… 205

Kurdishness is perceived by those aligned to Turkishness. Pembeci emphasises the intesections between space, place and power: “Space is never passive, neutral, stable nor indifferent with regard to its con- tents. I argue that space has power relations embedded within it which actively factor in everyday confirmation and contestation of exclusion and belonging in a discriminatory campus” (Chap. 5, this volume). Distinctive spaces where discrimination takes place are discussed to show the extent of negotiation of belonging that young people must partake in on a daily basis; in the classroom, the dormitory, and out- side open spaces.

Spaces of Education and Learning

Following on from the discussion of identity construction in educational spaces in Turkey and Canada, Chaps. 6, 7 and 8 built upon the previous arguments about ways in which diverse young people are experiencing and practising ways of belonging, by engaging with new insights into young people’s place identities in Scotland and Australia. In Chap. 6, Transit and Transition: student identity and the contested landscape of higher education, Vicki Trowler investigated transition, engagement and reten- tion as impacting upon university undergraduate students’ sense of belonging in Scotland. The chapter showed how the university becomes a contested site when it comes to identity expression. Trowler demon- strated that student identities are tied up with notions of belonging in a Higher Education context, where students must navigate significant transitions in contested landscapes. Like the students in Baris İsci Pembeci’s chapter (Chap. 5, this volume), the young people in Trowler’s research also experienced feelings of ‘displacement’, as they negotiated the politics of belonging alongside the politics of space. Trowler high- lights how the young students “move through physical, cognitive and emotional spaces and places, making sense of themselves and their envi- ronments, as they forge their identities and develop (or not) a sense of belonging” (Chap. 6, this volume). 206 S. Habib and M. R. M. Ward

Chapter 7, Using Bourdieu to Understand the Pathways to Belonging that are Forged by Young Students of Refugee Experience in an Australian Mainstream School by Fiona Picton and Grant Banfield, relayed the lived experiences of young refugee students negotiating their identities within mainstream schooling. The chapter drew upon ethnographic research with primary school students of refugee status who were studying at a primary school in a disadvantaged area of Adelaide, South Australia. Again like Pembeci (Chap. 5, this volume) and Trowler (Chap. 6, this volume), Picton and Banfield explored the important intersections between displacement and (un) belonging, for those who sometimes do not feel that they belong. Picton and Banfield showed that the processes of displacement and belonging can be seen “to represent the re-forging of identity” as young people’s “subjectivities rub abrasively against the gritty realities of the foreign (and often alienating) objective structural and cul- tural conditions of learning to ‘do school’” (this volume). The chapter highlights how often young people might be immersed in a state of con- stant negotiation of the politics of belonging. In this instance, belonging is generally linked to elements of stability and familiarity for young peo- ple, however for young primary school students from refugee back- grounds, they are at a disadvantage: displacement is in the foreground and thus a sense of stability and familiarity is often absent.

Belonging to Community

Chapters 8, 9 and 10 emphasise the importance of community and belonging, particularly how young people are able to engage in ways of thinking about belonging to community—real or virtual. Chapter 8—Identity, Mobility and Sense of Belonging: Understanding the power relationships in a feminist virtual community by Raquel Miño-Puigcercós, Pablo Rivera-Vargas and Cristóbal Cobo Romaní—reported the findings of a digital ethnographic research study on young people’s experiences with virtual spaces where they moved beyond local communities to make social connections in online social spaces. Drawing upon a case study of Feminismes—a Facebook group with high participation of Spanish young people—the chapter illustrated how identities and belongings con- Conclusion: Young People Negotiating Belonging in Changing… 207 structed in the virtual space can become forms of disruption and resis- tance, and a challenge to patriarchy. Rules in these online communities were not always established from the beginning, but evolved as new obstacles and challenges to belonging emerged in the online spaces. For example, the need for an administrator was established once the com- munity witnessed that aggression was being displayed or power was being abused by some community members. But then the administrator herself was placed in a position of power, and would tend to find herself balanc- ing the needs of the community:

On the one hand, the administrators wanted to facilitate freedom of expres- sion because a certain degree of security opened up possibilities to generate disruptive discourses and to build their identities. On the other hand, they also wanted to forbid sexist and aggressive discourses that were making it impossible to maintain a dialogue with peace and respect. (this volume)

The significance of the online being a safe space for these young people is emphasised throughout the chapter. The authors maintained that some young people might perceive online social spaces as offering a safe haven in a persistently changing world that they inhabit; thus, belonging, according to these authors was seen as heavily tied with feelings of secu- rity, mobility and inclusion. Chapter 9, Exploring the potential for community where diverse indi- viduals belong by Kate Cassidy, like the preceding chapter, also raised notions of community and belonging, but this time the case study revolved around a Canadian middle school. Young Canadians reflected upon their meanings and experiences of community relationships through partaking in an essay and poster contest where they imagined a class where students experienced belonging and acceptance. Ideas about individuality and difference were analysed in reference to belonging to culturally diverse spaces in Southern Ontario, Canada. The young people perceived belonging as necessitating communities where the values and principles of safety, respect, care, dialogue, support, and also ‘healthy conflict’ flourished. The young people significantly described community as including difference. Cassidy showed young people as actively con- structing the meanings of community; for example, the students described 208 S. Habib and M. R. M. Ward

‘respect’ and ‘care’ as key components of a community that values diver- sity and individuality: “Many of the young people described group-level rules which would allow fair, efficient, and respectful functioning together, as well as individual-level considerations which would demon- strate care within the group. Group-level rules illustrating respect included honesty, listening, being careful of others’ property, following through on commitments, admitting mistakes, and not laughing at others”.

(Un) Belonging, Community and Education

In Chap. 10, (Un)Belonging in Higher Education: Negotiating working-­ class masculinities within and beyond the university campus, Ward fur- thers the notion of young people negotiating institutional space, by focusing on young working-class men’s experiences of higher educa- tion and how they performed their masculinities within and beyond this space. The scholarship draws on a small qualitative study con- ducted in British Columbia, Canada. Ward shows how for some young men, who are the first in their family to attend university, it can be a difficult place to negotiate. These difficulties include not engaging with their peers and feeling that their work ethic was at odds with other students. These feelings of (un) belonging continued beyond the university campus, and in their home communities where they often felt isolated and were unable to fully articulate the stresses and pres- sures they felt under due to their family’s cultural heritage. In Chap. 11, Portraits of Place: Critical pedagogy in the classroom, Habib argues for young people to be offered educational opportunities within schools to explore what it means to belong to a place, as well as inter- rogate the ways in which their politics of ­(un)belonging is tied up with social categories of class, race and ethnicity. Habib argues that con- temporary contradictions and contestations regarding place-based identities and belongings need to be examined through a critical lens. Critical pedagogy is seen as a useful approach for learning and teach- ing about place-based identities and (un) belongings. Conclusion: Young People Negotiating Belonging in Changing… 209

Moving Forwards: Youth Identities and Belongings

The recent special issue in the journal Young entitled Spatialising Youth Identities: Interdisciplinary Engagements focused on how youth studies have struggled to keep up with the changing spatial dimensions of youth which has arguably led to the dominance of homogeneous and placeless narratives of youth. In the special issue, Farrugia and Wood (2017, p. 211) explain that “spatiality is re-emerging as critical to the social land- scapes of young lives in different parts of the world, and that a focus on space offers new opportunities to rethink the nature of youth itself”. We believe it is important for scholars of youth studies to defy urban myths that seem prevalent in society about young people, for example, the assumptions and declarations that young people have allowed the online and digital world to impair their experiences of family and education (Livingstone & Sefton-Green, 2016). There are other pressing areas of research required when it comes to young people’s identities and belongings. Cuervo et al. (2015), for exam- ple, call on youth studies scholars to address the neglect of Indigenous issues in youth studies research both in Australia and throughout the globe. Moreover, they emphasise the urgency of research about young people, and especially about Indigenous young persons, that will “take seriously the conceptual framework of belonging—not as an alternative to the notion of transitions but as another theoretical tool that facilitates awareness of ‘the nature and quality of connections between young peo- ple and their worlds’ (Cuervo & Wyn, 2014, p. 905)” (Cuervo et al., 2015, p. 5). Whilst addressing gaps in the current research on young people’s identities and belongings is imperative, youth studies must also continue to research the “old and the same” (Shildrick et al., 2009, p. 462), and the continuous and the ordinary (Hall et al., 2009). The authors in this book have contributed multiple and interest- ing ways of understanding the meanings and experiences of identities and belonging for young people inhabiting local, national and global spaces that are both subject to continuity and change, and that are both ordi- nary and new. Readers were able to accompany the authors and their 210 S. Habib and M. R. M. Ward young research participants on journeys where concepts of, for example, community, belonging, family, home, place-making and displacement were explored as core to the lives of young people throughout the world. We would hope that future scholarly work can build on the ideas exam- ined in this book by further researching and writing about the meanings and experiences of the aforementioned concepts as young people describe them in their own words and voices. We would like scholars of social sci- ences, humanities and educational studies to conduct new theoretical and empirical studies, so we can continue to build interdisciplinary con- nections that illuminate in rapidly changes times how meanings of iden- tities and belongings are produced and re-produced by young people locally, nationally and globally.

Notes

1. Sand (2017, 302) argues “a central aspect of young people’s place-making is being able to improvise involving materiality, sociality, cultural norms and musical expression”. 2. The ‘ends’ is a slang term used by London youth to refer to their home, place of residence or neighbourhood. Possibly originating from Jamaican English, the term might be used in the sense of “area/estate/neighbourhood”, as in “what ends are you from?” (Kerswill, 2014). The use of the term is not just contained in London, but is used by young people in other mul- ticultural cities.

References

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A B Adulthood, v, 18, 35, 36, 38, 43–46, Beck, U., 1, 35, 36, 38, 39, 41, 43, 169 45 Agency, 3, 4, 13n4, 38, 47, 71, Belonging(s), vi, vii, 1–13, 17–28, 96, 106, 108–111, 35, 37, 39–47, 51–63, 69–82, 115–117, 136, 196, 198, 87–91, 93, 94, 98–101, 201 105–117, 123–137, 141–146, Ambitions, 7, 189, 198 153, 154, 161, 162, 165–171, Archer, M., 106, 109, 114–117, 179–189, 195 118n7, 201 Bermondsey, 178, 181, 183–187, Arts, 24, 92, 115, 124, 172n3, 190n2, 190n10 179–186 Black, 19, 20, 23, 26, 27, 29n4, 52, Aspirations, 12, 160 56, 64n1, 94, 95, 169, 186, Austerity agenda, 18–19, 25 187 Australia, 7, 10, 13, 46, 107, 108, Black and Minority Ethnic (BME), 111, 113, 114, 197, 199, 205, 160 206, 209 Black Atlantic, 20, 23

1 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

© The Author(s) 2019 213 S. Habib and M. R. M. Ward (eds.), Identities, Youth and Belonging, Studies in Childhood and Youth, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96113-2 214 Index

Bourdieu, P., 10, 35–41, 45, 90, 91, Culture, vi, 3, 6, 9, 37, 47n1, 53, 60, 105–117, 206 75, 78, 88, 96, 99, 107, 108, Britain, 179, 181, 183–189 117, 124, 146, 161, 162, 166, British National Party (BNP), 178, 170, 182, 185, 187 190n2, 190n3 Britishness, 178, 179, 183–185, 187, 188 D Buber, Martin, 141, 152–154 Dialogue, 11, 55, 72, 131, 141, 146, 148–149, 153, 154, 182, 186, 189, 207 C Difference, vi, 5, 8, 11, 55, 61, 63, Canada, 11, 53, 141, 144, 145, 77, 79, 80, 82, 88, 95, 126, 155n5, 162–164, 171, 172n4, 133, 141–144, 146–150, 153, 197, 199, 205, 207, 208 154, 172n1, 180, 199, 207 Cape Town, 52, 54–57, 102n2 Displacement, vii, 4, 76, 93, 95, Capital, vi, 3, 21, 25, 36, 38–41, 108, 199, 205, 206, 210 45–47, 64n2, 90, 91, 99, Diversity, 3, 4, 8, 52, 54–57, 60, 69, 101, 110, 113, 114, 124, 126, 133, 144, 149, 151–153, 126, 166 204, 208 Career, 9, 19, 35–47, 203 Chav, 178, 181, 182, 184 Church, 9, 51–54, 56–63, 199, 201, E 204 Education, vi, 2, 3, 7, 19, 28, 37, 38, Citizenship, citizen, vi, 7, 22, 75, 40, 43, 73, 75, 108, 127, 160, 178, 179, 183, 188, 189, 198 164, 181–183, 188, 189, City, 19, 24, 37, 38, 41–43, 45, 190n7, 197, 205–206, 208, 209 46, 47n3, 55, 56, 59, 64n2, Educational change, 87, 189, 210 71, 75, 79, 90, 114, 164, Employment, 18, 159, 164, 166, 165, 169, 170, 181, 203, 203 210n2 ‘The ends,’ 8, 17–28, 81, 145, 154, Community, vii, 4, 9–13, 19, 22, 163, 171, 190n7, 202 26–28, 36–41, 54, 55, 58, 62, England, 20, 46, 92, 178, 197 88, 90, 98, 100, 117, Ethics, ethical, 3, 7, 97, 108, 115, 141–154, 160–164, 168–171, 147, 154n1, 196, 208 177–181, 187–189, 190n2, Ethnicity, ethnic, 13n1, 19, 20, 25, 198, 199, 203, 206–208, 210 53, 54, 56, 57, 59, 73, 76, 77, Critical pedagogy, 12, 177–189, 208 112, 160, 163, 187, 197, Critical theory, 180, 190n9 204–205, 208 Index 215

Ethnography, ethnographic, 9–11, H 24, 51–53, 56, 57, 70, 74, Habitus, 90, 91, 99, 106, 109–117, 106, 107, 117n3, 128, 179, 201 190n5, 204, 206 Happenstances, 57–59 Hermeneutic phenomenology, 141, 144, 145, 154 F Higher education (HE), 10, 11, 69, Facebook, 11, 91, 92, 128, 131, 135, 74, 75, 82, 82n1, 87–102, 206 159–172, 205, 208 Family, v, 2, 3, 7, 9, 37–39, 41, 53, History, v, 28, 55, 57, 71, 72, 76, 88, 92, 114, 151, 160, 163, 78, 82, 94, 95, 102n2, 108, 164, 166, 169–171, 187, 198, 114, 125–127, 142, 145, 154, 203, 208–210 159, 178, 187, 188 Female, 41, 44, 90, 132, 134, 145, Home, vi, 9, 24, 27, 35–47, 88, 159 90, 95, 97, 99–101, 108, Feminism, feminist, 10, 123–137, 110, 114, 129, 133, 135, 143, 152, 206 149, 160, 161, 163–165, Feminist theory, 141 168–171, 202, 203, 208, Field, vii, 1, 5, 10, 26, 35, 37, 40–43, 210, 210n2 45, 57, 95, 97, 107, 109, 110, Hope, 4, 7, 8, 39, 43, 45, 167, 112–115, 117, 118n7, 170, 179, 189, 198, 200, 123–125, 197, 200, 201 202, 210 Forward in Faith Ministries International (FIFMI), 51–53, 56–61, 204 I Freire, P., 182, 184 Identities, vii, 2–13, 17–28, 47, 51, 53–55, 57, 58, 60–62, 74, 76, 87–102, 105, 106, G 108, 110, 112, 114, Gender identity, 161 123–137, 143, 161–164, Global, vi, 1–13, 18, 19, 28, 51, 56, 166, 171, 178–189, 71, 105, 132, 154, 160, 162, 195–200, 202–210 177, 180, 183, 189, 198, 204, Imagined communities, 12, 88–94, 209, 210 100, 101, 178 Globalization, vi, 1, 196 Individuality, 11, 142, 144, 146, Grime music, 8, 18–20, 22, 23, 25, 150, 152–154, 207, 208 26, 28, 29n5, 202 Indonesia, 9, 36–38, 45, 46, 47n3, Group identity, 129 197, 199, 203 216 Index

Inequalities, 6, 9, 18, 21, 25, 41–43, Middle class, 37, 87, 95, 166, 169, 45–47, 70, 72–74, 80, 82, 172 82n1, 92, 126, 137, 161, Migration, migrant, vii, 21, 51–63, 172n1, 188, 189, 200, 202 187, 189, 199, 201, 204 Interpersonal relations, 123 Mobilities, vii, 4, 9, 11, 18, 35–47, 123–137, 160, 163, 199, 203, 207 K Multiculturalism, multicultural, 2, 7, Kurdish, 9, 10, 12, 69–82, 204 8, 20, 24, 25, 27, 178, 179, 183, 185, 188, 196, 202, 210n2 L Music, vii, 9, 13n4, 18, 19, 22–26, Late modernity, 45 35–47, 56, 199, 202 Local, locality, vi, 2, 9, 11–13, 17, 21, 24, 27, 36, 37, 39–44, 46, 53–55, 62, 71, 72, 82, 95, N 124, 129, 164, 177, 178, 180, National, nation, vi, 2, 9, 12, 13, 181, 183, 185, 187–189, 203, 19, 20, 29n4, 36, 39, 41–43, 206, 209 46, 54, 55, 57, 63, 70, 72, London, 7, 8, 12, 17–28, 178, 181, 75, 80–82, 177, 178, 185, 187, 188, 190n10, 199, 181, 183, 188, 189, 204, 201, 202, 210n2 209 Neighbourhood, 17–28, 55, 57, 133, 169, 186, 198, 199, 210n2 M Neoliberalism, neoliberal, 18, 21, 25, Male, 27, 37, 80, 132, 135, 137, 172, 178, 189, 202 145, 163, 164, 166, 167, 171 Newham, 8, 9, 17–28, 202 Masculinities, 11, 159–172, 208 Non-traditional students, 88 Media, 2, 4, 12, 20, 22, 25, 70, 79, 91–93, 99, 111, 125, 126, 178, 179, 182, 184, 186, 188, O 198 Online networks, 124 Methods, methodology, 9, 11, 12, 22, 23, 36–37, 73–74, 91–93, 106, 117n3, 127–128, 145, P 146, 149, 154, 162–164, Pentecostalism, 51–54, 58, 60 178–179, 182, 190n5, 199 Phenomenology, 71, 141, 144 Index 217

Place, vi, 2, 17–28, 35, 53, 70, 88, 160, 161, 163, 177–184, 188, 109, 124, 142, 161, 177–189, 189, 190n5, 190n8, 195, 196, 196 198–201, 204–206, 209, 210 Place-making, 8, 202, 210, 210n1 Resistance, resist, 5, 11, 41, 43, 77, Politics, political, vi, vii, 2, 5, 10, 12, 101, 127, 132, 163, 181, 188, 13n4, 21, 43, 46, 47, 52, 55, 199, 207 69, 71–81, 83n3, 98–101, Respect, 11, 42, 89, 90, 110, 129, 124–126, 133–137, 178–182, 131, 134, 135, 141, 146–149, 184, 186, 188, 189, 190n3, 153, 154, 168, 207, 208 190n4, 200, 202, 204–206, Rotherhithe, 185–187 208 Rural, 7, 46, 64n2, 114 Poverty, 8, 17, 18, 20, 23, 25, 58, 160, 202 Power, 70–74, 76–78, 81, 82, 88, S 92, 95, 110, 117, 126, 129, Safe spaces, 123–137, 185, 207 131, 134–137, 188, 190n9, School, 4, 10–13, 27, 37, 73, 89, 96, 199, 205, 207 105–117, 124, 133, 141, 144, 145, 151, 154, 154n1, 155n5, 161, 163–165, 169, 172n3, Q 178–180, 182, 185, 188, 202, Qualitative research, 145 206–208 Scotland, 10, 12, 88, 91, 92, 197, 199, 205 R Sense of community, 4, 13, 58, 128, Race, racial, 53, 54, 57, 61, 73, 95, 142–146, 148–150 100, 160, 185, 188, 189, Skills, 4, 38, 40, 113, 117, 146, 190n5, 190n9, 208 164–166, 171, 187 Reflexive, reflexivity, 1, 3, 6, 7, 36, Social acceptance, 201 39, 106, 108, 114–117, 130, Social change, vi, 1, 2, 6, 18, 21, 44, 161, 189, 201 115, 116, 189, 190n5, 196, Refugees, 10, 13, 55, 105–117, 206 197, 201 Religion, 3, 4, 51–63, 77, 197, 204 Social class, 82n1, 184, 197 Research, vii, 2–11, 21, 22, 25, Sociality, 8, 51–54, 58, 60, 62, 36–37, 39, 43, 45, 47n1, 210n1 47n3, 47n4, 51, 53, 57, 62, Social sciences, 92, 210 64n3, 73, 74, 106–108, Sociology, 1, 3, 6, 109, 115, 118n6, 117n3, 125, 127–129, 134, 118n7, 143, 197 137, 141, 142, 144, 145, 147, South Africa, 9, 51–63, 94, 197, 150, 155n1, 155n5, 155n6, 199, 201, 204 218 Index

Space, spatial, vi, 2, 7, 8, 17, 36, 42, Urban, 4, 6–8, 17–28, 55, 61, 53, 69–82, 88, 95, 110, 124, 190n5, 199, 201, 209 161, 178, 196, 197, 209 Spain, 125, 126, 197 Stereotypes, 4, 12, 21, 99, 111, 186, V 188, 189, 199 Virtual communities, 123–137 Student identity, 10, 87–102, 168, 170, 205 Student transition, 87, 96, 100, 101, W 200 Well-being, 25, 36, 46 Subculture, subcultural, 25, 198 White, 19, 52, 54, 64n1, 87, 94, 95, 102n2, 163, 164, 169, 178, 182, 186, 202 T Working class, 11, 159–172, 178, Temporal, 5, 95, 96, 116, 197 185, 208 Transition, v, 4, 6, 7, 10, 17, 35–38, 43–46, 47n1, 87–102, 108, 126, 163, 197–201, 205, 209 Y Transnational, 12, 53, 56 Yogyakarta, 9, 36–39, 41–46, 47n3, Turkey, 69, 70, 74–76, 83n3, 197, 199, 203 199, 204, 205 Young people, v, 1, 17, 35, 51, 92, 105, 124, 141, 161, 177, 195 U Youth, v–vii, 1–13, 18, 19, 25, 26, Unbelonging, 4, 11, 82, 159–172, 28, 35, 47n3, 51–63, 181, 183, 185, 197, 198, 208 125–128, 141, 144–148, 151, Unemployment, vi, 18, 19, 21, 201, 154, 180, 185, 186, 189, 202 196–202, 204, 209–210, United Kingdom (UK), 8, 17–20, 210n2 23, 25, 26, 29n3, 29n5, 54, 89, 92, 93, 162, 190n7, 202 University, v–vii, 4, 10–12, 19, 38, Z 60, 69–82, 88–94, 96, 97, 99, Zimbabwe, 52, 53, 55, 56, 62, 63, 118n5, 159–172, 205, 208 63n1, 64n2, 197