Finding the Way Home

These two parallel studies in Hamburg and London aim to provide an insight into the different ways in which young people with and without a migrant background live their everyday lives together. The book demonstrates how friendships, tensions, and sometimes adversities are negotiated. It shows how young people construct landscapes of risk and safety and how relations of ethnicity, class, and gender are lived differently in different socio-spatial contexts. In some situations young people develop enjoyable ways of living with differences, in others they live with tensions and conflicts. These may be experienced through notions of ethnicity, but sometimes through feelings of belonging to places and/or specific youth cultures which transcend ethnic differences more often than class differences.

Dr. Nora Räthzel is Professor of sociology at the University of Umeå, Sweden. She investigates forms of resistance and subordination through class, ethnic, and gender relations in cities, and among workers in transnational corporations.