Becoming (ethnic minority) teenagers: a practice study of emotional well-being at a Danish sports school

ABSTRACT

This article explores how everyday school life interacts with students’ practices of ‘becoming teenagers’ at a Danish school, analysing how age and ethnicity intersect with emotional well-being. The article builds on an ethnographic study at a public sports school following ethnic minority and majority students in two school classes from the fifth to seventh grades. Taking a practice approach, the article first analyses school as a social site before turning phenomenological attention to experiences and expectations of becoming teenagers, focusing on the experiences of ethnic minority students. The article addresses how school as social site constituted by discursive, material and social arrangements shapes a normative linear process of becoming at school, that is, becoming a responsible, healthy, Danish citizen. Consequently, dissonance between embodied being and expected normality affects the emotional well-being of ethnic minority students, whose transnational practices are constrained within a national practice architecture.

KEYWORDS:

• Ethnography
• practice theory
• transnational identification
• adolescents
• Denmark
• emotional geography

Acknowledgements

The article is based on a PhD study that is part of the SULIM Research Project – Towards Sustainable Healthy Lifestyle Interventions for Migrants, managed by the Danish Research Centre for Migration, Ethnicity and Health and financed by the Innovation Fund Denmark.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. School leaders, teachers and parents gave written informed consent, while students were given the opportunity to opt in and out of the research throughout the study.

2. Koselleck uses the term ‘acceleration of time’ to discuss a historical condition of time and modernity – how social and historical changes shape the relationship between experience and expectation. However, in the present analysis we use Kosseleck's epistemological categories on the level of the human life-course (2004).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Innovation Fund Denmark.