Faith, Ethnicity, Place: Young People’s Everyday Geopolitics in Scotland
Published on 1 January, 2015.
This report explores young people’s everyday lived experiences of place, politics and identity. We investigate the experiences of young people growing up in urban, suburban and rural Scotland, focussing on everyday geopolitics and patterns of Islamophobia among ethnic and religious minority young people. To explore the issue of Islamophobia in relation to the experiences of young people in Scotland from different ethnic and religious backgrounds who are targeted because they ‘look Muslim’, and to explain how different religious, ethnic and minoritised youths experience and understand Islamophobia, and its impact on community relations, social cohesion and integration; To analyse these experiences within a framework that pays attention to the intersectionality of ethnicity with other identities, such as religion, gender, social class and locality; To detail how young people understand and negotiate everyday geopolitics; and To problematise polarised discourses that see young people as either politically disengaged and apathetic, or politically radicalised and extreme.