Racialised Youth In the City: Everyday Racism, Misrecognition, and Counter-Narratives

Cities are not neutral spaces. For racialised young people, urban environments are daily sites of encounter with racism, embedded in policing, housing, and public space. Yet racialised youth are rarely passive. They respond, contest, and reimagine these conditions and develop counter-narratives.

This session invites contributions exploring how racialised youth respond to everyday racism and institutional misrecognition. A central concern is how young people develop moral and cultural repertoires to assert dignity and social worth (Lamont et al., 2016), drawing on peer solidarities, community narratives, and collective self-representation.Urban space is central to how racism is lived and contested. Racialised youth encounter exclusion in streets, schools, and housing estates, but the city is also where counter-narratives are produced through storytelling, placemaking, and everyday practices of solidarity and belonging.

We welcome ethnographic and participatory contributions across diverse urban contexts addressing one or more of the following:

• How do racialised youth respond to everyday racism and misrecognition? What repertoires do they draw on to assert dignity across ethnic, generational, and urban contexts?
• In what ways do racialised youth contest racialisation in schools, public space, housing, and policing?
• What forms of counter-narration, digital storytelling, or placemaking do racialised youth use to produce alternative representations of themselves?
• How do racialised youth navigate and remake urban space, and in what ways does the city become both a site of exclusion and counter-narrative?
• How do spatial and temporal structures of urban marginality (precarity, waiting, restricted mobility, deferred futures) shape young people's strategies of resistance and aspiration?