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Deliverable 7.2 Cluster analysis of ethnography with young people.Cluster 3: Getting Respect and Seeking Recognition

This cluster brings together four ethnographic case studies of young people’s informal friendship groups from the UK (Slovak-Roma youth in Coventry), Croatia (the BEK squat collective) and Germany (the antifascist boxing club and hip-hop group). The focus of this cluster is on how young people make sense of and opposed to social inequalities that they experience or witness in society. Following the existing debate on the impact that institutional misrecognition has on self-worth, self-esteem and self-recognition (see Lamont et al., 2014), this report explores the informal peer groups as an alternative to institutional environment of meaning making and enactment of values and identities. Our analysis suggests that young people in these informal collectives are engaged in various cultural and political activities (ranging from composing and performing rap and hip hop, and organising martial art training to running a socially inclusive squat) in order to produce safe space for self-realisation aiming to achieve recognition of their values and identities by wider society. Starting with an insightful description of the groups’ practises as a manifestation of shared values, the report argues that these informal collectives provide their members with a safe space outside and beyond of the institutional environment where they can meet, freely exchange their ideas, discuss sensitive issues and express their cultural creativity. The report also provides insights into the role that cultural diversity and aspirations for social inclusion play in shaping identities of young people as members of these informal groups. Through their encounters with the people from diverse social, cultural and economic backgrounds young people connect such intercultural interactions with their own and their families’ experiences of social inequality. This ultimately helps them to understand their social position and energise their groups as collectives of action and creativity. The groups in question have appeared out, or consolidated due to dissatisfaction with the dominant social values and institutional practises that lead to entrenchment of social inequalities and cultural exclusion (particularly in relation to minority and migrant groups). This awareness inspired them to autonomous actions resulting in creative practises which can be defined as a ‘heritage-in-the-making’ since they aim to produce a cultural outcome that projects the values and ideas about a more inclusive society in the future. Sometimes these ideas are expressed as a ‘utopian’ vision of society. The emerging cultural practises as a heritage of the future engages with the established forms and understandings of cultural heritage in society by renegotiating its meaning or even rejecting some dominant interpretations. Thus, ethno-national and racialised perceptions of culture and belonging are found problematic and/or challenged by young people in all case-studies of this cluster. At the same time, the report demonstrates the limitations of the emerging cultural forms by highlighting that inequalities linked to representation of gender differences continue to be largely unaddressed in all of these groups.

cultural heritage, youth, ethnography, identity, recognition, social inequalities, cultural exclusion

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