Youth Negotiate Research Articles

Shifting Boundaries: Immigrant Youth Negotiating National, State, and Small-Town Politics. By Alexis Silver. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2018. $90.00 (cloth); $27.95 (paper).

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewShifting Boundaries: Immigrant Youth Negotiating National, State, and Small-Town Politics. By Alexis Silver. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2018. $90.00 (cloth); $27.95 (paper).Nilda Flores-GonzalezNilda Flores-GonzalezArizona State University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by American Journal of Sociology Volume 124, Number 6May 2019 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/704058 Views: 76Total views on this site For permission to reuse a book review printed in the American Journal of Sociology, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

1Malaysia? Young people and everyday multiculturalism in multiracialized Malaysia

ABSTRACTIn Malaysia over the last decade, a more meaningful form of multiculturalism beyond mere tolerance has been encouraged through the 1Malaysia initiative of the Najib government. This paper explores how a framework of everyday multiculturalism can enhance our understanding of the ways Malaysian youth negotiate formal injunctions to build unity in diversity while an inequitable multiracialism persists both structurally and informally in Malaysian society. We illustrate how an everyday multiculturalism approach reveals on-the-ground processes of the (re)production of unequal difference and ordinary possibilities for interethnic conviviality.

Shifting Boundaries: Immigrant Youth Negotiating National, State, and Small-Town Politics

Shifting Boundaries: Immigrant Youth Negotiating National, State, and Small-Town Politics

The Ambivalence of Belonging: The Impact of Illegality on the Social Belonging of Undocumented Youth

How do undocumented young people establish a sense of belonging when they are afraid to disclose their migratory status? And when they could be separated from the persons they love and care for? Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Canada, this article explores how illegality shapes youth’s belonging. It argues that the experiences of undocumented youth, as well as the attitudes of the state towards them, must be understood as forms of “structural ambivalence.” On the one hand, I show how marginality is reproduced not only through explicit policies of exclusion (e.g., deportation, surveillance, or immigration documents), but also through laws and practices that are often silent and opaque, rendering people non-existent at a social and legal level. On the other, I analyze how youth negotiate such discourses of invisibility by forming a revocable sense of belonging. I suggest that ambivalence is not only produced by the social exclusion of young people. It is also a form of agency which enables youth to endure the risk of deportation, and to detach themselves from the disempowering conditions they are caught in.

Book Review: Shifting Boundaries: Immigrant Youth Negotiating National, State, and Small-Town Politics

Book Review: Shifting Boundaries: Immigrant Youth Negotiating National, State, and Small-Town Politics

Safe Routes to School? Black Caribbean Youth Negotiating Police Surveillance in London and New York City

In this article, Derron Wallace examines how Black Caribbean youth perceive and experience stop-and-frisk and stop-and-search practices in New York City and London, respectively, while on their way to and from public schools. Despite a growing body of scholarship on the relationship between policing and schooling in the United States and United Kingdom, comparative research on how students experience stop-and-frisk/search remains sparse. Drawing on the BlackCrit tradition of critical race theory and in-depth interviews with sixty Black Caribbean secondary school students in London and New York City, Wallace explores how adolescents experience adult-like policing to and from schools. His findings indicate that participants develop a strained sense of belonging in British and American societies due to a security paradox: a policing formula that, in principle, promises safety for all but in practice does so at the expense of some Black youth. Participants in the ethnographic study learned that irrespective of ethnicity, Black youth are regularly rendered suspicious subjects worthy of scrutiny, even during the school commute.

Growing up on the sidelines: identity negotiations of Palestinian youth from ‘collaborating’ families relocated to Israel

ABSTRACTBy examining the experiences of the children of Palestinian collaborators whose families have relocated to Israel, this study explores how youth negotiate self within the context of marginalisation and cultural dislocation. Due to the actions of their parents, the research participants have become outsiders and outcasts in their Palestinian communities of origin, outsiders in Israel, and outsiders among Israeli-Arabs. Based on qualitative, in-depth interviews with 11 Palestinian male youths, we describe and analyse the experience of identity negotiation in the context of fear and their families’ past deceit. Our findings highlight that the youths’ identities are negotiated by engaging in a dialogue of self on belonging and not belonging that is based on visions of their past, present and future selves. This is accompanied by a forced dialogue with others, explaining who they are in order to fit in with the ‘audience’, a presentation that is then acted out.

#IfTheyGunnedMeDown: The Double Consciousness of Black Youth in Response to Oppressive Media

Following the death of Michael Brown, an unarmed Black teenager, at the hands of a white Ferguson police officer in 2014, a social media hashtag emerged drawing attention to the power (and potential bias) of the media in representing Black youth. #IfTheyGunnedMeDown asked the semi-rhetorical question, “Which picture would the media choose to represent me if I were killed by police?” and offered a choice between two contrasting images—one a presumably positive representation and the other stereotypically negative. Through a content analysis of 100 pairs of juxtaposed images from the first 24 hours of the hashtag, I examine the ways Black youth negotiate oppressive media representations and produce their own self-images. Through their strategic political response, the users of the hashtag demonstrate their “double consciousness” in a Du Boisian sense as well as their acute understanding of the specific symbols that mark a Black body as threatening and those that mediate the supposed threat. In doing so, however, they expose the limited number of templates available to them for performing an identity interpreted positively by the mainstream media and broader social world, as well as the continuing role of respectability politics in shaping public perceptions of Black youth.

Opportunities, challenges, and transitions: educational aspirations of Pakistani migrant youth in Hong Kong

ABSTRACTThrough the experiences of Pakistani-migrant families in Hong Kong, this paper explores ethnic minority students’ aspirations for education, work and the future in a context where education is highly valued but also extremely competitive. The first part depicts how Pakistani youth and their parents articulate their aspirations and opportunities and investigates the sociopolitical changes in education that are creating new opportunities for young Pakistani students. The second part considers the challenges from the larger Hong Kong society and within the Pakistani community that may hamper aspirations. The last part examines transitions and promises and the ways Pakistani youth negotiate for better futures. This article delineates the intertwining dynamics of cultural consensus, cultural dissonance and children's agency as the youth navigate the terrain of education and career.

Healthy habits are no fun: How Dutch youth negotiate discourses about food, fit, fat, and fun.

In this article, we use the notion of "biopedagogical practices" to explore how Dutch youth respond to health messages that focus on body weight. Previous studies suggest that such health messages encourage body dissatisfaction in youth. Few studies, however, focus on the local/cultural specificity of youth's responses to these biopedagogical practices. In this article, we address questions about the re-interpretation of and resistance to health messages that Dutch youth engage in and how these can be understood in their local context. The data were drawn from two previously conducted studies in which a total of 64 Dutch teenagers (aged 12-18 years) took part. We employed a variety of qualitative data collection methods and a feminist poststructuralist perspective to analyze how Dutch youth negotiate biopedagogical practices about health. The results show that our participants constructed health in terms of appearance and reproduced negative constructions regarding fat embodiment. Yet they also often circumvented "healthy" lifestyle behaviors prescribed by biopedagogies of health. They did so first by avoiding physical activities because they were afraid of displaying fat embodiment in the settings of sport and physical education where surveillance is omnipresent. Second, they disregarded advice about healthy eating by drawing on having fun as an alternative discursive resource. We argue that having fun is both part of youth culture and characteristic of the discourse about sociability ( gezelligheid) that is a central element of Dutch culture.

Representing and Reconciling Personal Data and Experience in a Wearable Technology Gaming Project

Extant literature has largely not examined how users critically engage with their physical activity monitors, as objective data sense-making is often deemed superior to users’ subjective realities. Our research, however, examines how middle-school youth encounter the representation of their data, as it is converted and actionable in an online game. This ethnographic study illustrates how youth negotiate conflicts between their data and embodied experience. Using a grounded theory approach, our analysis of interviews and focus groups reveals emergent categories of resistance such as youth evaluating the incompatibility of the device, disputing the device's step-count accuracy and syncing, and disputing the game's conversion of steps. In particular, we highlight the ways youth sometimes privileged their embodied recollections over the device's seemingly accurate data. The article also provides a case of a day during implementation when youth converged on a single form of resistance, game conversion, and examines their reasoning and alternate forms of data validation that we saw in-action on that day. Finally, we discuss benefits to learning and critical engagement that result from users’ disputes and conclude by positing the promise in designing physical activity monitors for engagement, instead of exclusively persuasion or reward.

Will You Stand for Me? Authentic Cariño and Transformative Rites of Passage in an Urban High School

This case study documents a small, urban high school that implements firewalks, innovative rites of passage in which low-income, racially, culturally, and linguistically diverse youth publicly reflect on their personal and academic development. Drawing from anthropological scholarship on rites of passage and scholarship on color-conscious care, I examine firewalks through a model of authentic cariño, which incorporates interpersonal and institutional care and emphasizes the dynamic interplay of familial, intellectual, and critical care. Based on analyses of school culture and firewalk enactment, I argue that authentic cariño is essential to nondominant students’ success and that rituals like firewalks productively help youth negotiate emergent cultural identities and develop collective social conscience, reflexivity, and agency.

Living Online on the Street: Street-involved Youth Negotiating Online Access on the Street

Living Online on the Street: Street-involved Youth Negotiating Online Access on the Street

How Chinese Are You? Adopted Chinese Youth Negotiate Identity and Culture by Andrea Louie

Andrea Louie, How Chinese Are You? Adopted Chinese Youth Negotiate Identity and Culture. New York: New York University Press, 2015. 304 pp.How Chinese Are You? joins a growing body of anthropological literature on transnational adoption (see Kim 2010, Marre and Briggs 2009, Seligman 2013, Volkman 2005a, Yngvesson 2010), including studies of the adoption of Chinese children to the United States (Dorow 2006). Louie's distinctive contribution to this literature is her comparative focus on white American and Asian American adoptive parents.1 She asks how these parents differently approach the challenge of fashioning Chinese identities and for their children. Conducted over an eight-year period in the California Bay Area and St. Louis, Missouri, the research has an important longitudinal perspective. Most of the children whose parents Louie met in the earlier phase were still quite young, as adoption from China to the US only began in substantial numbers in the mid-1990s. By the final phase of her research, in 2009, these children had grown into young teens, with voices and opinions of their own to complicate-and make more interesting-the efforts of their parents.Louie's interest in these issues builds on her earlier work on Chinese Americans who travel to China on roots trips and on her broader concerns with Asian American culture, politics, and history (Louie 2004). In the first two chapters, she contextualizes her project both in terms of these interests and the emerging literature in the field. Throughout the book she positions herself sensitively, as a Chinese American anthropologist, aware that her interlocutors may respond to her in particular ways-either as embodying some sort of Chinese American to which they aspire, or as not really Chinese or Chinese American. Louie does not speak fluent Chinese, she is married to a half-Chinese man who grew up in Salvador and has relatives in Kentucky, and her young (not adopted) son is not quite sure of his identity. Louie struggles to decide whether she should be providing him with Chinese language lessons to help him craft his (2), and she asks how her struggles connect to or differ from those of adoptive parents, both white and Asian American.Questions about cultural identity and race will be familiar to both scholars of adoption and adoptive families, as for more than two decades adoption professionals in this country (and elsewhere) have exhorted adoptive parents to teach their children about their birth culture and to foster the child's respect and love for her country of origin. Parents get these messages from many quarters: adoption social workers at home, the media, organizations like Families with Children from China, entrepreneurs selling China-themed picture books and panda pajamas, adoption officials in China. Embedded in these admonitions are unspoken and unclear assumptions about and identity. Must families perform a celebratory version of culture? Incorporate values assumed to inform a Chinese approach to and the world? Acknowledge and address long histories of racialization and discrimination in the US?The desire to shape Chinese identity is etched into the adoption process from the start. In Chapter 3, Beginnings, Louie accompanies a group of parents on their two-week adoption trip to China. In Chapters 4 and 5, we meet a number of adoptive parents, primarily Asian Americans in the Bay Area and whites in St. Louis. In contrast to white parents, Louie argues, Asian Americans have the privilege of authenticity (90): they look Chinese (or Asian) and they have at least some degree of history and tradition to draw upon. One Chinese American mother commented: cannot help but be authentically Chinese...I can do I want, I don't have to eat jook [Chinese rice porridge] or anything (88). This privilege, Louie contends, enables [Asian American parents] to flexibly interpret both new and old practices as representing Asian or Chinese traditions for their family (91). …

“Ride or Die”: Therapeutic Interventions for Retaliatory Violence Among Youth

Background: Violence among youth continues to be a serious public health concern across the nation. Researchers have increasingly argued that effective violence preventions efforts and practice must consider the lived experience of youth. Retaliatory violence (i.e., violence in response to a perceived attack or threat) is a major concern and risk issue for young people, and has been increasingly linked to lethal violence. Primary care and mental health practitioners can play a vital role in helping young people who struggle with retaliatory violence to understand the emotions and decisions associated with these situations. However, there is limited research advising clinicians on how to help youth negotiate these issues in treatment. Methods: In this paper, we offer a brief review of the literature regarding youth and retaliatory violence, discuss the role of psychotherapy with this population using case reports, and offer clinical recommendations for clinicians working with this population. Clinical case reports from a community clinic in an urban neighborhood in the northeast are utilized to illustrate challenges and successes involved in psychotherapy aimed at helping youth manage retaliatory violence. Results: Clinician responses that validate the complexity of threat and identity issues experienced by clients but also offer face saving non-violent options are beneficial. We also discuss gender and fighting behaviors that have implications for how girls learn to resolve conflicts in later life. Conclusions: It is critical that clinicians use interventions that are grounded in the norms in which youth live and help them generate non-violent responses to perceived threats, but enable both parties to save face and therefore preserve a sense of identity and dignity. Keywords: Retaliatory violence, youth violence, violence prevention.

Engaged African Refugee Youth Negotiating Schooling in America: An Inquiry into the Influence of Culture and Social Structure

This article explores how six ethnically diverse African refugee youth transcended constraining social structural forces and maintained high levels of academic engagement at a high school in a small Northeastern city. Using ethnographically contextualized case study methodology, this article examines the refugee youths’ processes of acculturation and adaptation to American schooling. The article particularly examines the role of pre-resettlement social circumstances in refugee camps, home cultural influences, and parental scholastic expectations in shaping the participants’ scholastic engagement. The findings suggest that the participants’ resilience and optimism about the promise of American schooling in tandem with local community-wide support produced agency with which they transcended countervailing forces in schooling. This phenomenon is conceptualized in this article as agentic scholastic engagement.

Crossing Boundaries: Acts of Citizenship among Migrant Youth in Melbourne

This paper focuses on how migrant youth in Melbourne with experience of direct or indirect migration negotiate cross-cultural engagements and tensions between family, community and the greater society in which they are supposed to participate as political subjects. It examines whether the meaning and interpretation of citizenship in Australia allows migrant youth to act as full and active citizens with all the contradictions and difficulties inherent in acting as “a bridge between two worlds”. By voicing the personalised journeys of young people dealing with uneasy questions of displacement, identity and belonging, this paper examines the complex ways through which migrant youth negotiate and in some cases bridge intercultural tensions within a multicultural society.

Queer youth, Facebook and faith: Facebook methodologies and online identities

‘Making space for queer-identifying religious youth’ (2011–2013) is an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)-funded project, which seeks to shed light on youth cultures, queer community and religiosity. While non-heterosexuality is often associated with secularism, and some sources cast religion as automatically negative or harmful to the realisation of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) identity (or ‘coming out’), we explore how queer Christian youth negotiate sexual–religious identities. There is a dearth of studies on queer religious youth, yet an emerging and continuing interest in the role of digital technologies for the identities of young people. Based on interviews with 38 LGBT, ‘religious’ young people, this article examines Facebook, as well as wider social networking sites and the online environment and communities. Engaging with the key concept of ‘online embodiment’, this article takes a closer analysis of embodiment, emotion and temporality to approach the role of Facebook in the lives of queer religious youth. Furthermore, it explores the methodological dilemmas evoked by the presence of Facebook in qualitative research with specific groups of young people.

Refugee youth, belonging and community sport

This article examines community sport as a site where refugee youth negotiate belonging, which is conceptualised as a dynamic dialectic of ‘seeking’ and ‘granting’. Drawing on three years of ethnographic fieldwork among Somali Australian youth at community football (soccer) clubs in Melbourne, the article identifies the kinds of belonging that are constructed by refugee youth in community sport, the social processes that facilitate or impede these belongings, and the forms of boundary work involved. The belonging negotiated by Somali Australian youth in community sports clubs is multi-layered, dynamic and situational, and involves multiple boundary shifts. It operates at varying scales of experience from the sports team and local community to the transnational. The article shows that while social boundaries such as clan, team and locality are porous, other boundaries of inclusion/exclusion, notably gender, ethnicity and religion, tend to be more stable and more difficult to cross for Somali Australian youth in community football clubs.

Subjects of Development: Teachers, Parents and Youth Negotiating Education in Rural North India

This article examines negotiations of school education in a mountainous rural region of North India. I show how such negotiations are a part of broader cultural politics of development differentiated by class, generation and gender. In doing so, I address the utility and limitations of governmentality as a framework to understand how education and development shape young people’s relationships to changing terms of social reproduction. My analysis draws on ethnographic studies of the micro-politics of development and education to highlight how they work through both disciplinary and governmental forms of power to re-entrench existing inequalities and boundaries, yet also involve negotiations and contradictory experiences by teachers, parents and youth. I argue that such experiences and articulations on the part of ‘subjects’ of development signal the limits of governmental power, and counter notions of inevitable outcomes and choices for the futures of rural youth and their communities.