These two parallel studies in Hamburg and London aim to provide an insight into the different ways in which young people with and without a migrant background live their everyday lives together. The book demonstrates how friendships, tensions, and sometimes adversities are negotiated. It shows how young people construct landscapes of risk and safety and how relations of ethnicity, class, and gender are lived differently in different socio-spatial contexts. In some situations young people develop enjoyable ways of living with differences, in others they live with tensions and conflicts. These may be experienced through notions of ethnicity, but sometimes through feelings of belonging to places and/or specific youth cultures which transcend ethnic differences more often than class differences.
Nora Räthzel is Professor Emerita of Sociology at the University of Umeå (Sweden). Her main research areas are environmental labour studies, transnational corporations and gender and ethnic relations in the everyday. Publications include: Marxist-Feminists Theories and Struggles Today with Khayaat Fakier and Diana Mulinari (eds.); Transnational Corporations from the Standpoint of Workers with Diana Mulinari and Aina Tollefsen; rade Unions in the Green Economy. Working for the Environment (with David Uzzell, eds.).