This paper focuses on the marginalized position of young male adolescents living in underprivileged urban areas in Germany and the reasons for their low school-achievement. The PISA-study showed that there is strong relation between socio-economic status and educational achievement (Baumert et al. 2001). Students with lower class backgrounds do not have the same chances to succeed within the German school system (Vester 2004) especially males (Geißler 2005). If we focus on adolescents, it is necessary to link the social situation with the psycho-social demands of adolescence as a developmental process. The young person has to reposition himself as no longer a child but not an adult yet. It is a process of individuation (King 2004); a phase searching for the person one wants to be. And these demands of adolescence correlate with the social milieu it takes place in. Thus, we have to ask, what it means to grow up in an underprivileged area and how this is related to educational achievement. Bourdieu (e.g. 1990) showed the relation between the Habitus of a person and the achievement in educational systems and in society. According to Bourdieu (1984) there are milieu specific advantages and disadvantages for achieving within a modern and supposedly meritocratic education system. Hence, it is not the individual performance in school which is relevant to succeed, but the social heritage of the person. There are different ways of being as a result of a specific Habitus and the same time they are the Habitus (Bourdieu 1990) that forms the person. Within the debate about marginalized youth there is a tendency to determine their marginalization by labelling them as such (Rüther 1975). That does not mean that they are not in a precarious situation because statistically they are (e. g. Becker/Lauterbach 2008). But this perspective is unable to also recognize the options and the chances - especially what kind of chances – these youngsters posses. The aim of this contribution is to enlighten these mechanisms of disregard the adolescents have to deal with. Therefore, the theory of recognition (Honneth 1995) will be used as heuristic framework. But – to come back to Bourdieu – it is necessary to take the difference of the Habitus into consideration: What is recognizable in terms being successful or a favourable adolescent development? The adolescents this paper refers to live in underprivileged urban areas with a very low average income, high unemployment, a large number of people depending on welfare, and a high proportion of people with immigrant backgrounds. Moreover, they achieved relatively low in school and occupation. On the example of two case-studies it will be reconstructed how different narrative self- and world-drafts include very different strategies. As mentioned before, not only the social situation will be considered but also the processing of adolescent demands. Referring to an intersectional approach (Klinger/Knapp/Sauer 2007) there are various factors that on the one hand influence the achievement of marginalized youth in general and on the other hand the individual strategies and options.

To overcome or at least reflect on the danger of disregard, it is inevitable to take a look at the subjective perspective of the adolescents themselves: How do the present themselves and how do they judge their own position? What are there strategies to deal with upcoming problems? Considering the problem of what is recognizable, it is also interesting to investigate the adolescent’s experiences of disregard. Therefore, narrative interviews (Schütze 1976) have been chosen in order to avoid forcing a pre-determined structure on the interviewee’s report and to allow the adolescence to organize their stories for themselves. In the analysis of the interviews a triangulation of two reconstructive methods has been used: the structural narration (Rosenthal 1993) analysis and the inference analysis (Kokemohr/Prawda 1989). These methods allow reconstructing the structure of the text on a formal and a content level.

Considering that there are differences caused by different Habitus, it is plausible to expect the adolescents living in deprived areas have to deal with different modes or grids of recognition – e. g. in school on the one hand and in their peergroup on the other hand – and they have to find a way to cope with it. And these challenges interfere with demands of adolescence. King (2004: 42) says that negatively experienced social conditions can have catastrophic implications on the process of individuation. Hence, the thesis is that experiences of disregard can play an important role on various levels, but they also might lead to creative new solutions and strategies of action. Adolescence is both, a critical and a creative phase, because what can be a unique identity is being implemented for the first time. Thus, there is not only the option of creating new subjective perspectives, but also for society in general – that would be the sociological view.