Informal learning and youth culture. Aesthetic practices and learning processes in a segregated and multi-ethnical neighbourhood.

This paper has its focus on the encounter between the local youth culture and schools in a multicultural suburban area on the outskirts of the metropolitan district of Gothenburg in Sweden. This neighbourhood have high unemployment, is segregated, many people live in poverty and a majority of the young people are drop-outs from school. The school does not do well when it comes to marks, manly because its not focused on or interested in the world of the young living in this neighbourhood, but as a contrast there is a high level of activities in the youth culture. And it seems as if the young hip hop activists that turn their backs on school tend to organize learning situations in their own collective. The youth culture could in this sense be seen as a place for informal schooling.This paper will explore the possibilities and potentialities in bedded in autonomous learning activities in this local youth culture. The aim is to examine if these learning processes can help the young multicultural activists to understand their position in the segregated Swedish society. One question is related to how the youth culture challenge mainstream conventional understandings of what it means to learn and what is needed and involved in learning practices. There are different answers to this question. One is that it is obvious that similarly to descriptions of how African Reggea and American hip hop can work in Brazilian Favelas, the hip-hop of the collective involves a kind of learning and development of life strategies that deal with areas the schools haven’t been able to provide for (Chang 2005). Another point of departure in relation to this is that within the framework of the collective and though its activities, capacities are developed that compensate for a marginalized and stigmatized existence.

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