STOLT! Om ungdomar, etniciteter och gemenskaper

Based on one year of fieldwork in a junior high school on the outskirts of Stockholm, this thesis examines how young people interact and express ethnicity, nationality and multilingualism in everyday interaction. The study focuses on how young people with the experience of migration, either themselves or within their families, creatively express, and thereby create, ethnicity in their everyday lives. The focus is on the students’ own actions and their discussions surrounding ethnicities and how ethnic categories are filled with meanings. The analyses are based on participant observations and field notes, as well as more than 300 hours of audio recordings and transcriptions. The analyses highlight how young people use multilingualism and ethnical categories as resources and how they use laughter, humour, teasing interaction and self-irony to both challenge and strengthen each other as well as to establish and manifest communities. Local categorizations such as ”Svenne” and ”Import” are used to define both their peers and the Other. Swedishness is a prevalent norm, but it is open to positioning and negotiation. One of the social rules among the students concerns being proud of your background – pride that can be expressed both verbally and visually – for example, by wearing ethnic and national symbols to highlight belonging. Ethnic categories are not rigid in the students’ social interactions. Rather they are fluid and changeable, something that Stuart Hall refers to as new ethnicities, which are locally created and related to diversity. The analyses show that ethnicity, like other categories of identity, is not a thing that people are born with, but rather something that is staged and used as a resource in everyday social interaction. This study highlights how these categories are accomplished in action.