Politics of Re-framing: Youth and the Struggle for Equal Participation in the Urban Peripheries of Sweden

Abstract

Based on research conducted in four different areas in the Swedish urban periphery, this chapter draws attention to different forms of participation that challenge dominant, stigmatizing discourses and unequal conditions of participation affecting urban youth. Departing from a frame analysis approach, the aim of the chapter is to examine how social movement organizations and individual youth in the urban periphery challenge current social inequalities and stigmatizing discourses by engaging in a politics of re-framing reality. The analysis illustrates how problems such as social exclusion are constantly renegotiated and how both social movement organizations and young people are engaged in learning how to understand and to change these problems. There is not one problem of social exclusion, but rather a variety of ways of framing this problem. Depending on how the problem is framed, different scenarios for the future emerge. Current conditions and developments are not given – rather, they are the result of a politics of re-framing, a constant struggle. Social movements as well as young people in the urban periphery are active participants in this struggle. Although the struggle for equal participation takes on different forms, it is based on same critical analysis of current circumstances which are perceived as unequal, illegitimate and in need of change. In these critical reflections of reality, possibilities for transformation emerge. The outcomes of these struggles are yet to be seen.KeywordsPolitics of re-framingUrban peripherySocial exclusionSocial movements Stigmatization