Young People and Everyday Multiculturalism

Anita Harris

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136182433
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Unlike as with previous generations, diversity and multiculturalism are engrained in the lives of today's urban youth. Within their culturally diverse urban environments, young people from different backgrounds now routinely encounter one another in their everyday lives and negotiate and contest ways of living together and sharing civic space. What are their strategies for producing, disrupting and living well with difference, how do they create inclusive forms of belonging, and what are the conditions that militate against social cohesion amongst youth? This unique ethnography from education and cultural studies expert Anita Harris explores the ways young people manage conditions of cultural diversity in multicultural cities and suburbs, focusing particularly on how young people in the multicultural cities of Australia experience, define and produce mix, conflict, community and citizenship. This book illuminates rich, local approaches to living with difference from the perspective of a generation uniquely positioned to address this global challenge.

1

AN INTRODUCTION TO YOUNG PEOPLE’S EVERYDAY MULTICULTURES

On a summer afternoon in a school located in a working-class Brisbane neighbourhood, two young women come together to chat to me about cultural diversity in Australia. Ana, recently turned 18, came to Australia from her home country Poland a year ago. She mainly hangs out with the African kids at school, and spends her weekends clubbing or at the beach. Her school friend Marley is 17, born in New Zealand and of Samoan background; she has been in Australia since she was a year old. She enjoys volleyball and church, hangs out with relatives and sticks close to home where she lives with her extended family. Although both claim to be shy, they laugh and talk over one another in their keenness to tell me how life is in one of the most diverse neighbourhoods in this city, how kids interact (or not) in the schoolyard, which groups hang out at the local shopping centre and train station, who looks out for whom and how difference does or does not make a difference – to friendships, relationships, street life, school culture, connection to community, feelings of belonging.

They tell me about their strong friendship, forged across cultural, linguistic and religious difference, and about how the school, their community and the multiculturalism embedded in Australian society provide so many opportunities for productive engagement with different cultures. They also talk about the importance of ‘trying to be Australian’ and of fitting into dominant cultural norms. I hear stories of the cool and smart African guys at school whom Ana describes as ‘her boys’; the Muslim girl who wears a scarf and kisses her boyfriend in public; their fear (which they share, they tell me, with the Indian kids) of groups of whites causing trouble in the city as well as the Pacific Islanders who hang out at the train station; their disdain for girls who wear burqas at the beach; their conspiratorial amusement at kids speaking different languages at school; the Aboriginal girls who taunt Marley for being a ‘dumb Islander’; and the friendships made through their ‘celebrations of cultures’ school programme. They are overwhelmingly positive about multiculturalism; and indeed, both their school and their neighbourhood are places where diversity is actively supported and different people generally live well together. At the same time, they take for granted, and themselves perpetuate, everyday incivilities and indifference. Both express considerable affinity with and respect for some kinds of difference and little tolerance for others. Both are untroubled by students who speak in their own languages at school and yet they take offence at some others – they name Afghanis in particular – whom they perceive as making insufficient efforts to integrate into mainstream culture.

Their own identities, identifications and sympathies are never straightforward. Ana, white-skinned, blue-eyed and of European heritage, feels deeply bonded to young people of African background, especially her best friend from Rwanda. She feels frightened when among those of her own skin colour and knows she is always safe with Africans. Her own immigration and settlement experience has little in common with the experience of her friends, many of whom have fled war and trauma, spent their childhood in refugee camps and arrived with few (and sometimes no) other family members who subsequently often struggle to find work and get established. By contrast, Ana’s parents are economic migrants employed in professional jobs, they speak English with proficiency, her family is intact and she lives in a well-regarded part of the neighbourhood in a modern townhouse. What does it mean that Ana renounces whites and has created such a strong bond across these differences? Equally, Marley is afraid of Pacific Islanders – technically her own cultural group, broadly speaking, and yet not for her a safe identification or a home community. She is suspicious of those who seem nice on first meeting, ‘but you don’t know what they can do to you’, and alludes to intra-community hassles that have caused divisions within what is often perceived as a close-knit, homogeneous group.

These young women’s stories and experiences of cohabitation, belongings, subjectivity and intersubjectivity trouble the ways we have come to think about the challenges created by cultural diversity or the common solutions to these. Increasingly, we are told, so much rapid diversity is fracturing communities and threatening national identity. Since the late 1990s, across the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Europe and Australia, concerns regarding globalisation, terrorism, immigration and settlement have come together to generate widespread debate and policy shifts in relation to the management of diversity by the nation state. Borders are being tightened, citizenship is more circumscribed, and new demands are made of immigrants to demonstrate commitment to national values. At the level of social relations, where difference and belonging are most vividly constituted, policy now focuses less on minority rights than on shared responsibility to the community.

What we hear is needed urgently are serious efforts for integration and cohesion: strategies to help people of different backgrounds come together to learn about each other, commit to shared values and participate in mainstream civic and political life. This is especially important in multicultural working-class neighbourhoods, where the need is imagined to be most immediate. A new agenda of social cohesion, social inclusion and social capital has emerged. As Fortier (2008) argues, this new social policy approach to managing cultural diversity is about promoting inter-ethnic propinquity whereby distinct ethnic groups live together peaceably and in civil neighbourliness. In Putnam’s (2000) terminology, the objective is for ethnic groups to ‘bond’ intra-group in order to support one another and provide resources for integration, but then also to ‘bridge’ inter-group to ensure full civic engagement. The aim is to produce communities based on shared values where different people can live together in a friendly, caring fashion. Without this, we risk ghettoisation, ‘parallel lives’, and violence and social disorder on the part of disaffected minorities or resentful autochthons.

In Australia, as elsewhere, young people, especially working-class young people, are central to these debates about diversity and integration. The Cronulla youth riots of 2005 seemed to bring to a head all that was dysfunctional about multiculturalism, and placed young people at the epicentre of the crisis. As Paul Thomas (2011: 1) documents, since the late 1990s, media and political leaders have been preoccupied with issues of youth, multiculturalism and cohesion. Youth-driven civil unrest, terrorist attacks and the visibility of large and youthful immigrant populations in global cities have become constructed as interrelated problems that call into question the sustainability of diversity and the future of the nation as we know it. Without young people improving knowledge and trust across groups, integrating into the mainstream and building a shared sense of belonging, the outlook for multiculturalism is bleak. Ana and Marley’s experiences do not reflect this dystopian view, but nor do they suggest an easy cosmopolitanism, harmonious, cohesive living or new shared forms of belonging to the community or the nation. People mix a lot in their neighbourhood, but the nature of the mix and its effects are less assured. They come together, but do not always reach or even aim for consensus on values. There is also considerable contestation of definitions of engagement and testing of the limits of mainstream culture to support youthful forms of belonging. Conflict is clearly evident in the everyday lives of young people in multicultural cities, but so are connections and solidarities. Racism and prejudice sit alongside care and recognition.

These young women and their peers also complicate dominant ways of facilitating inter-ethnic engagement and cohesion because they do not fit neatly into ethnic categories. They refuse to ‘stay in place’ because of their affiliations and identifications beyond their own assigned group. Ana and Marley repudiate aspects of their own ethnic identities and even move beyond managed civil mixing to bonds that lead to ‘mixed-upness’. Ana’s renunciation of whiteness by getting too close to the black other and through the potential sexual crossing of racial borders is not necessarily the kind of multicultural intimacy sought by proponents of social cohesion (see Fortier, 2008: 83). At the same time, their easy stereotyping does not augur well for good neighbourliness founded on a desire to learn about others and understand their differences. When people do not fit tidily into ethnic groups or if they move beyond or around tolerant neighbourliness, it becomes harder to manage the promotion of social cohesion via inter-ethnic civic bridging.

This does not mean that young people undermine the project of living well together, but rather that their processes of cultural identification, participation and intersubjective relations within the context of diversity are poorly understood. These misunderstandings form part of what Noble (2009a: 25) calls ‘the unreliability of simplistic claims about cultural diversity and young people’. It has long been argued in youth studies that young people’s identities and social ties cannot be approached categorically. The intersectional nature of subjectivity means that it is never possible to analyse the cultural dimensions of identifications and social positionings separately from issues of class, gender, sexuality and age. As Rattansi and Phoenix (2005) elaborate, what is required is an analytical emphasis on

the ways in which individuals occupy multiple positions and therefore have a range of identities, with different ones acquiring salience in different contexts. The differing positions are seen to derive from particular social positions – class, gender, ethnicity – and also from the insertion of subjects into discursive formations and ideologies, such as racism. But these discourses are themselves not monolithic and seamless but internally contradictory and generative of dilemmas which are provisionally and contextually acted upon, sometimes in unpredictable ways.

(Rattansi and Phoenix, 2005: 104)

Like all subjects, but perhaps more than adult subjects because of the expectation of youth as a phase of ‘becoming’, young people ‘work the hyphens’ (Fine, 1994) of their own identities and ideologies as members of overlapping and clashing networks organised strategically and loosely around culture, gender, age, religion, colour, geography, language proficiency, sexuality, taste and ability. What has been less frequently considered is how, in doing so, they also work the boundaries of community and of the national bond, bringing into question what it means to belong in and make productive a society of considerable cultural diversity. The intersectionality of young people’s identities in concert with their non-compliance with tidy ethnic categories necessitate new ways of understanding how they live multiculturalism beyond the politics of both minority recognition and social cohesion.

The purpose of this book is to consider carefully the experiences and stories of young people of diverse backgrounds living in multicultural cities in order to reconceptualise the parameters of ‘living convivially in an age of difference’ (Castles and Davidson, 2000: 223; see also Gilroy, 2004) to take into account this diversification of identities and the everyday negotiations, within which they become visible, that produce community and nation. Its central concern is the relationship between the experiences and reportage of young people about the messiness of cultural diversity on the ground; and media, political and scholarly focus on the importance of social cohesion, shared values and integration. The book aims to understand how contemporary policy and mainstream political rhetoric enable and delimit some, but also fail to encompass all, of the ways diversity is lived by the current generation of young people – those who are so often worried about and yet also invested in as the hope for a harmonious future.

The book focuses particularly on how young people in the multicultural cities of Australia experience, define and produce mix, conflict, community and citizenship. It explores these domains because they are at the heart of the contemporary cohesion agenda, which promotes contact across difference, the reduction of discord, and the enhancement of shared forms of national and community belonging via participation in civic life, mainstream culture and common values. It considers what this agenda makes possible, visible and also problematic about young people’s everyday negotiation of cultural diversity, and what other work around diversity and belonging is occurring at the margins. It looks particularly at some of the limitations of harmony and integration initiatives and other forms of both multicultural and cohesion politics driven by an older generation. It argues that young people’s expressions of post-minority identities and their multiple, dynamic – and at times conflictual – modes of relationality cannot be contained within the politics of minority recognition nor the social cohesion model of living with difference; indeed they are ushering in a new kind of multicultural citizenship as a result.

Young people have long been the focus of both hopes and fears about the futures of culturally diverse nations, but they are rarely seen as civic actors, creative agents or multicultural citizens in their own right, and the complex realities of their everyday experiences of living in multicultural environments have been overlooked. Work on multicultural or global cities has not typically accounted for the role of young people in shaping culturally diverse urban spaces and cultures. Their presence in the ‘cosmopolis’ is generally only noted when it disrupts the social order (for example, race riots or so-called ethnic street gang activity). Literature on globalisation and transnationalism that has recently engaged the experiences of young people typically positions them as the victims of these processes (for example, as caught between two cultures); as those most inclined towards regressive nationalism, fundamentalism and racism; or as their winners (those most adept at managing a world of fluidity, hybridity and time–space compression via their competence with new media and the global culture industries).

However, the everyday reality of ordinary youth experiences and constructions of cultural diversity is more differentiated and complex than these perspectives allow, and what is required is careful attention to the voices and everyday practices of young people who are living multiculturalism. Researchers in the field have called for debates about cultural diversity, place and global change ‘to engage more closely with lived experience and the changing cultural and material geographies of young lives’ (Nayak, 2003: 178), and to develop empirically grounded and nuanced accounts of intercultural cohabitation (Amin, 2002; Noble, 2009b). This book is intended as a contribution towards such a move. While there is much scholarship on the identity, integration and citizenship experiences of young people from various refugee and immigrant groups, the aim here is to capture the dynamics of culturally diverse everyday life from the perspectives of young people with many different cultural histories, including Indigenous and autochthonous. It does this by closely examining the micro-territories and everyday practices wherein young people from many backgrounds routinely ‘rub up against one another’ and do the quotidian work of living multiculturalism. It inquires into how they work with, produce and unsettle discourses of togetherness, community, belonging, difference and cohesion in their everyday spaces and activities. It attends to their multiple social positionings to understand how contradictions and inconsistencies emerge and are acted upon.

This book illustrates how young people negotiate new ways of being together and new possibilities for connection to, and participation in, community and the nation that both exceed the limits of conventional multicultural policy and raise questions about the new focus on cohesion. In particular, it suggests that their expressions of subjectivity and modes of social relations disrupt expectations that diversity can be managed by simply recognising and then integrating fixed and singular minority identities into a consensus-based civic order. It points towards the emergence of nascent forms of multicultural citizenship founded in:

1 unstable and multiple cultural (and other) identifications that demand recognition as legitimately national subjectivities, and

2 practices of civic participation that resist the achievement of consensus, common values and bounded community, but offer more dynamic and unpredictable kinds of productive relationality in their place.

In developing this analysis, the book draws on the idea of everyday multiculturalism (Colombo and Semi, 2007; Wise, 2009a; Stratton, 1998). Within the interdisciplinary field of what we might call multicultural youth studies, there is a rich body of work on young people’s views of multiculturalism, many studies of the identity issues faced by so-called ethnic minority youth and a small number of analyses of spectacular subcultures of racist youth. However, what is often sidelined is the broader question of how young people of different backgrounds live together, or simply, in Giddens’s (1984) term, ‘go on’ in a culturally diverse society. What is often under-theorised in these debates is the significance of everyday intercultural social practice enacted in the mundane sites of daily life. A focus on everyday multiculturalism involves attention to the ordinary social spaces within which people of different backgrounds encounter one another, and the mundane practices they construct and draw on to manage these encounters.

As Semi et al. (2009: 67) argue, this approach ‘enables us to view multiculturalism – that is, situations of co-existence in the same social space … as a concrete, specific context of action, in which difference comes across as a constraint … and as a resource’. In other words, multiculturalism is a dynamic, lived field of action within which social actors both construct and deconstruct ideas of cultural difference, national belonging and place making. Such a perspective moves beyond the focus on ‘ethnic’ groups or individuals and their capacity to adapt, as well as more conventional politics of recognition that tend to assume fixed ethnic identities. Instead it addresses places and practices which produce and rework cultural subjectification through mix, encounter, conflict and negotiation, always in relation to other kinds of social positionings.

This approach becomes particularly compelling in the context of current debates about the place of young people in super-diverse Western societies; these debates tend to draw on conventional tropes of young people as a problem – and in particular, as having personal, attitudinal or behavioural difficulties in relation to living in diverse societies. For example, there are rising concerns about young people of immigrant background who are failing to ‘adapt’, a view that has targeted Muslim youth in the West in particular, and has constructed issues such as unemployment, poverty, political voice, social exclusion and racism as ones of individual risk factors and resistance to integration (Poynting et al., 2004). Primarily, the debate focuses on identity and attitude as both the source of the problems that young people face and as the sites for intervention in the forms of education and integration. Youth is imagined, then, as a time of social and psychological development wherein young people are managed by the expert knowledge of adults in order to be produced as successfully integrated citizens.

Implicitly, cultural diversity is also something to be managed by (white) adults, for this ‘adaptation’ perspective constructs the nation and the community as a preexisting and fixed entity into which young people must integrate. For Western countries characterised by super-diversity, national identity still tends to equate to a dominant white ethnicity that tolerates and even celebrates the co-presence of ethnic others who accede to its ‘values’ and accept its hegemony. The shaping of this kind of national imaginary is presented as ‘a process that has been completed’ (Turner, 2003: 415) – specifically by a previous generation. The construction of young people as in need of integration is thus an important aspect of assuaging anxieties about the stability of national culture in times of rapid diversification of the population.

A focus on everyday multiculturalism enables an alternative reading of young people and diversity. Rather than identifying the problem as one of integrating young people into an already fixed idea of the nation and its values, such...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Series Editor’s Introduction
• Acknowledgements
• 1. An Introduction to Young People’S Everyday Multicultures
• 2. Hyper-Diversity, Multiculturalism and Social Cohesion
• 3. Mix
• 4. Conflict
• 5. Community
• 6. Citizenship
• Conclusion: Living Together beyond Cohesion
• References
• Index