Abstract
This study relationally analyses the processes of the construction of difference and the processes of identity construction in which young adolescents and pre-adolescents with migrant backgrounds within formal educational contexts are involved. The text aims to show and describe how otherness and identity work in an intersectional way. Our analysis considers intersectionality as the most appropriate way of approximation to the reality observed. To do so, we work from biographical interviews and life stories of young people produced through our own respective fieldwork. This material had been analyzed looking for the relations between identity categories (gender, religion, nationality...) and how these categories are interpreted for the young adolescents involved in the research. We research in twelve andalusian high schools with students, teachers and families. Along three scholar years, we made 132 interviews and 13 discussion groups. This allows us to address the theoretical objects of the study (otherness/identity) in a contextual and process-based way.
Highlights
Looking at the situation of young people with a migrant background in their roles as secondary students, we ask ourselves, how are they building their identities? How are they perceived and built in the schools? Are these constructions of otherness4 relevant to them? What kinds of categories are operating in these constructions? We work on the assumption that it is not possible to set previous information that could give us with certainty which socio-cultural categories are the most powerful to understand how the representations of otherness in school contexts are generated; and we cannot either know which identity elements are more important for young people with a migrant background
Rea (2006), have helped us to bring closer the more traditional approaches and/or exclusively referring to immigration policies to the analysis of the migration phenomenon as a social issue in globalised societies: we see the immigrant –understanding that this demographic-based term transforms into a socio-cultural category from which we identify certain individuals and that, only occasionally, is related to the idea of “foreigner”–; is currently contemplated as the summum of otherness. (RUBIO-GÓMEZ and OLMOS-ALCARAZ, 2013, p. 3)
The objective of this study is to show the operating way of the identity and otherness construction processes experienced by the students when they are the key actors of a migration project, and how is that shown within the school context
Summary
Looking at the situation of young people with a migrant background in their roles as secondary students, we ask ourselves, how are they building their identities? How are they perceived and built in the schools? Are these constructions of otherness relevant to them? What kinds of categories are operating in these constructions? We work on the assumption that it is not possible to set previous information that could give us with certainty which socio-cultural categories are the most powerful to understand how the representations of otherness in school contexts are generated; and we cannot either know which identity elements are more important for young people with a migrant background. Looking at the situation of young people with a migrant background in their roles as secondary students, we ask ourselves, how are they building their identities? How are they perceived and built in the schools? Are these constructions of otherness relevant to them? What kinds of categories are operating in these constructions? We work on the assumption that it is not possible to set previous information that could give us with certainty which socio-cultural categories are the most powerful to understand how the representations of otherness in school contexts are generated; and we cannot either know which identity elements are more important for young people with a migrant background. We are aware that both processes are closely related -they are two sides of the same coin-; and that socioculturally constructed categories such as “race”/ethnicity, social class or gender (and aspects related to religion, language or national background), as categories that emerged when “we talk about immigration”, work in an interrelated, interdependent and contextual way
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