Minority young men’s gendered tactics for making space in the city and at school

ABSTRACT

This article draws on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews to explore young minority men’s relation to school and city space in Helsinki from the perspective of their everyday experiences of racialisation in public spaces. The article uses the concept of ‘power geometrical’ relations of space by drawing on several research traditions, including youth and masculinity studies, studies on social space, racialisation and ethnicity, and human geography. The evidence shows the school to be an important site of local and national power geometry (Massey, D. [1994]. Space, Place and Gender. Cambridge: Polity Press), in which ‘informal’ and ‘physical’ spheres are dominated by peers and connect to streets and public spheres (Gordon, T., J. Holland, and E. Lahelma. [2000]. Making Spaces: Citizenship and Difference in Schools. Houndsmills et al. London: MacMillan Press Ltd). The article shows how young minority men knew their place both in narrow local power geometries, and within the wider city and school spaces, exploring how they formed their own lived spaces (Lefebvre, H. [1991]. The Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell), claimed their spaces and marked their spaces with diverse tactics. Some tactics were socially open, such as making friends; some were very mobile, such as claiming their own urban spaces by mobility, or marking and ‘hanging around’; and some involved big groups of friends, crowds, defence and embodied accounts.

KEYWORDS:

• Boys
• race and ethnicities
• youth culture
• secondary education
• embodiment
• sociology
• qualitative interviews
• city space

Acknowledgements

In addition thanking colleagues who worked in these abovementioned projects, I would like to give special thanks to colleagues Elina Lahelma (University of Helsinki), and Sinikka Aapola-Kari and Lotta Haikkola (Youth research network) of commenting this particular manuscript in detailed manner.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Tarja Tolonen is a PhD and docent in sociology, and holds a university lecturer post (research on marginalization of children and young people) at the Faculty of Social Research, University of Helsinki. https://blogs.helsinki.fi/tatolone/author/tatolone.

Notes

1 This research work is connected to the two research projects: Young people’s leisure time conducted by the Finnish Youth research network, and the Material and cultural formation of family project conducted by the University of Helsinki.

2 This research project received research permission, including ethical approval, from the City of Helsinki.

3 All names of the persons, places and institutions referring to the data have been anonymised.

Additional information

Funding

Project Young people’s leisure time funded by the Finnish Youth Research Society, and the Material and cultural formation of family project funded by the University of Helsinki.