Suchergebnisse

In this article, affiliations between ethnic majority and minority youth in leisure surroundings around Finland are scrutinised. It is asked how these affiliations are formulated: To what extent they are based on individual choices and factors such as ethnicity, class and locality? The twofold data of the study consists of (1) interviews of ethnic minority youth (n = 38) and (2) observations and interviews of ethnic majority and minority youth (n = 13) conducted in the fields of youth work. The results of the study indicate that peer affiliations among ethnic minority youth are determined through complex positionalities. Even though in the interview data most youth present themselves as individuals not constrained by structural factors, in the observation data affiliations are generally formulated through processes in which ethnicity, class and locality are intertwined. In contrast to 'common knowledge', deprived urban localities and rural areas offer fruitful spaces for interethnic affiliations.

AbstractThis article examines how the notion of multiculturalism is defined at the level of Finnish youth work. Local youth work is examined as a subpolitical arena in a rapidly changing and culturally diversifying society where answers by public institutions are not available. The essential objective of this article is to unravel the rationales of multicultural subpolitics and examine which policies these rationales enable. The data of the study consists of ethnographic observations of and interviews with youth workers in eastern Finland. The results of the study indicate that the subpolitics of multiculturalism are implemented through strategies of rationalisation and governance of minority populations rather than by recognising national and cultural ambivalences. The thesis is that such (sub)politics may reinforce the risk of cultural and ethnic demarcations among young people.

Availability and access have been central worries that are discussed related to children's and young people's sport and other structured leisure activities. In this article, we shift the focus towards children's and young people's experiences of violence perpetrated by coaches or leaders within such activities in Finland. We use a large-scale survey on children's and young people's experiences of violence in different spheres of life (Finnish Child Victim Survey 2013) as the data, and concentrate on the significance of gender and ethnicity for the experiences of violence within structured leisure. The results show that boys report significantly higher levels of emotional, physical and sexual violence perpetrated by a coach or a leader within leisure activities than girls; and immigrant background seems also to increase the risk of being victimized. With the help of logistic regression analysis, we assess the role of other background factors in experiencing violence within structured activities, but conclude that the significance of gender and ethnicity persists even when factors related to the family background are taken into consideration.