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Contribution
Description: This paper is part of a dissertation project concerning children's everyday lives in a segregated Swedish suburb. The focus is how children, age 11-12 years old, construct their identities in relation to different places in school and neighbourhood. The starting point to se children as social actors also implies that they take part in (re-)constructing their own social geographies and the conditions there for. I use the concept identity-work which here is understood as a relational process constructed in specific cultural and social settings. This implies that the question of identity-work is difficult to separate from the place 'where it takes place'. I make a point of not making this separation and instead study children's identity-work by starting in the spatial, with their agency and narratives of these places. Places that are not only structuring the identity-work but also become what the children make them to. In the analyses are the children's agency and narratives understood as identity performances. Performances that includes their identity claims and who they relate to.
Methodology: The study is ethnographic, with classic fieldwork methods like participating observations and interviews but also includes children's narratives in different ways, for instance letting them take photographs and work with maps in different ways. The use of these methods aim to come closely children's own perspectives and is in line with the view of children as social actors and by that also co-constructors and reflective agents even in the research process.
Conclusions: The children spend a lot of time everyday in school but also in their neighbourhoods. These are two different kinds of contexts but are not only separate; they also have some overlapping connections. What happens in school might have implications for what happens in the neighbourhood and vice versa. This becomes clear in a situation when it was time to choose school for next year. The segregation in the suburb was strengthened in this process and even if the formal choice was made by the parents was this an important part of the children's identity-work. The children were involved in re-constructing both the neighbourhood and the school situated in that area as no-go-areas. The concept of community discourse and no-go-areas can also be transferred to different places in the school yard. For instance when some children in grade 5 by relating to "the cocky six graders" avoid some places, especially the basketball-court, and construct that as a no-go-area. The basket ball court is at the same time a favourite place for others, a place where you can perform yourself as immigrant guys from the suburb. This is an example of identity-work as a relational process where you construct us in relation to the other.
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