In search of a cool identity: how young people negotiate religious and ethnic boundaries in a superdiverse context

Abstract

In this paper, we aim to study how young people navigate a super-diverse majority-minority context, and how they negotiate bright religious and ethnic symbolic boundaries. Our study is based on 40 in-depth interviews with young people from various ethnic, social and religious backgrounds in the super-diverse city of Antwerp. Our analysis shows that young people generally draw on a cultural repertoire of commonplace diversity to navigate various peer relations and present diversity as a normal element of everyday life. However, our analysis also shows how ethnic minority youth experience bright ethnic and religious boundaries and need to navigate social exclusion processes. While minority youth rework bright boundaries by inverting their othered position and redefining coolness through a repertoire of ethnic hybridity, white majority youth face new challenges as their previously taken-for-granted dominant position becomes questioned and contested within a super-diverse setting. Our analysis shows how white majority youth manage their changing social position by drawing upon cultural repertoires of ethnic purity and ‘normal’ youthfulness, yet this also raises the question of whether they can draw on cultural repertoires, which do not imply nativist white identity politics.