Shifting the boundaries of cultural spaces: young people and everyday multiculturalism

Abstract

This paper investigates the significance of everyday intercultural social practice enacted in the mundane sites of young people's daily life to the development of new research directions for multicultural youth studies. It explores the idea of everyday multiculturalism as an appropriate analytical approach for understanding the ways that young people deal with cultural difference in conditions of super-diversity. It considers how this approach gives descriptive and explanatory priority to sites and literacies such as everyday neighbourhood locales, vernacular expressions and popular culture that form an important part of young people's ‘habitus’, and provides insight into how struggles over the decentring of whiteness from the national imaginary occur in quotidian ways.