Strange Practices

Abstract

Children's fears about strangers are often intense and vivid. While various educational, policing and media initiatives have made children suspicious of strangers, the question of who the figure of the stranger is has not been addressed. The sociology of the stranger anticipates that visible minorities are marked out as strangers. However, for the children in this study, living in a multicultural neighbourhood, the stranger is not a racialized figure. For some children, the category of the stranger has expanded to include all unknowns, while for other children strangers are those whose practices are strange or those who have not been imaginatively incorporated into networks of neighbours and friends.