The Promise of Belonging: Racialized Youth Subject Positions in the Swedish Rural North

Abstract

This article analyses how youth subject positions of the ‘racialized other’ are produced, and how these positions interconnect with the concept of belonging to the rural community. We do this by analysing 15 group discussions with 63 young people living in rural areas in northern Sweden taking a discursive psychology approach, and focusing on how discourses produce certain subject positions of ‘the racialized other’. Drawing on the concepts of the politics of belonging and the ‘stranger’, we argue that discourses on belonging to the (rural) community create boundaries that exclude ‘other’ youth, as well as resistance and contestation. The subject positions that such discourses produce represent racialized youth in stereotypical ways and imply a promise of belonging for certain ‘others’ based on their fulfilment of particular norms. However, such a depoliticized promise of belonging that places the responsibility for becoming integrated on the ‘others’ was also challenged. Firstly, in relation to criticisms of the welfare system, and secondly, in relation to racism as an unwelcome threat in rural communities.