Abstract
This paper uses a framework of ‘ontological security’ to discuss the psychosocial strategies of self-securitisation employed by ethnic and religious minority young people in Scotland. We argue that broad discourses of securitisation are present in the everyday risks and threats that young people encounter. In response and as resistance young people employ pre-emptive and pro-active strategies to preserve ontological security. Yet, these strategies are fraught with ambivalence and contradiction as young people withdraw from social worlds or revert to essentialist positions when negotiating complex fears and anxieties. Drawing on feminist geographies of security the paper presents a multi-scalar empirical analysis of young people’s everyday securities, connecting debates on youth and intimacy-geopolitics with the social and cultural geographies of young people, specifically work that focuses upon young people’s negotiations of racialised, gendered and religious landscapes.
Highlights
The geography of security is a demanding and critical field of study
We explore how geopolitical tremors are felt by young people and affect their sense of ontological security and being in the world
This paper has presented a relational, multi-scalar and intersectional analysis of young people’s everyday securities as a provocation to advance a social geography of security
Summary
The geography of security is a demanding and critical field of study. In the current transatlantic political climate important questions about the nature of security have emerged. What are the impacts of ‘Brexit’ on individual migrants living and working in the U.K., for example, How does Trump’s claim to ‘build a wall’ on the U.S.-Mexico border shape the emotional and embodied encounters of Hispanic Americans living in the U.S.? These are matters of geopolitical security and of the everyday securities of individuals; the two matters are interconnected and interdependent Whilst these two approaches often operate at cross purposes and have been studied as conventionally unrelated, scholars have sought to bridge the gap through work on everyday, embodied securities (Bondi, 2014; Philo, 2014; Waite, Valentine, & Lewis, 2014). Advocate‘re-scaling’studies of security linking the emotional and embodied experiences of security with broader geopolitical discourse and praxis, illuminating the spaces, relations and subjectivities of security (Enloe, 1989; Hyndman, 2001; Ojeda, 2013; Pain & Staeheli, 2014)
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