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Contested Citizenships : reflections on the Politics of Belonging for ―Youth of Immigration‖ in the Greater Barcelona Area

Abstract

The proposed paper is framed within the global context of immigration and migrations and the ensuing debates around citizenship and belonging, inclusion and exclusion. Schools, as the social institutions charged with the task of "absorbing" and "integrating" the children of "immigrants", can thus be seen as the primary sites where the politics of belonging (Yuval- Davis, 2006) and struggles over belonging and citizenship are waged. The proposed paper aims to provide some emergent findings on schooling of "immigrant" youth and their experiences of (non) belonging in a Catalonian high school. The work, based on current fieldwork taking place in a high school located in an affluent area of Barcelona, draws on ethnographic case-studies of eight =immigrant' youth (from various national origins) in their third and fourth years of compulsory education, alongside focus group interviews and participant observation conducted in the school site. In particular, the work engages with the contradictions inherent in schools and the manner in which national systems of education are implicated in constructing different "kinds" of citizens (Westheimer & Kahne, 2004) and reproducing hierarchies of belongingness, even in their efforts to "welcome" and "include" (Gitlin et al., 2003). The paper will thus center on exploring the following preliminary questions: (1) what are the larger ?official? citizenship/membership narratives invoked and promoted within the school? (2) What role do institutional structures play in constructing immigrant youth's belonging or non-belonging within (and beyond) the space of schools? (3) In what ways do immigrant youth negotiate their belonging within and beyond school? In concluding, the paper aims to illuminate the ways in which structures, discourses, and power relations -both within and beyond the school- impact students' belonging and are ultimately implicated in immigrant youth's social and academic engagement and integration (Gibson et al., 2004; Carter, 2005)

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