Young people’s everyday securities: Pre-emptive and pro-active strategies towards ontological security in Scotland

Botterill, K. , Hopkins, P. and Sanghera, G. (2019) Young people’s everyday securities: Pre-emptive and pro-active strategies towards ontological security in Scotland. Social and Cultural Geography, 20(4), pp. 465-484. (doi: 10.1080/14649365.2017.1346197)

Abstract

This paper uses a framework of ‘ontological security’ to discuss the psychosocial strategies of self-securitisation employed by ethnic and religious minority young people in Scotland. We argue that broad discourses of securitisation are present in the everyday risks and threats that young people encounter. In response and as resistance young people employ pre-emptive and pro-active strategies to preserve ontological security. Yet, these strategies are fraught with ambivalence and contradiction as young people withdraw from social worlds or revert to essentialist positions when negotiating complex fears and anxieties. Drawing on feminist geographies of security the paper presents a multi-scalar empirical analysis of young people’s everyday securities, connecting debates on youth and intimacy-geopolitics with the social and cultural geographies of young people, specifically work that focuses upon young people’s negotiations of racialised, gendered and religious landscapes.

• Item Type: Articles
• Additional Information: This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council [grant number AH/K000594/1].
• Status: Published
• Refereed: Yes
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Botterill, Dr Kate
• Authors: Botterill, K., Hopkins, P., and Sanghera, G.
• Subjects: G Geography. Anthropology. Recreation > G Geography (General); H Social Sciences > HT Communities. Classes. Races; J Political Science > JV Colonies and colonization. Emigration and immigration. International migration
• College/School: College of Science and Engineering > School of Geographical and Earth Sciences > Geography
• Research Group: Human Geography Research Group
• Journal Name: Social and Cultural Geography
• Publisher: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group
• ISSN: 1464-9365
• ISSN (Online): 1470-1197
• Published Online: 26 June 2017
• Copyright Holders: Copyright © 2017 The Authors
• First Published: First published in Social and Cultural Geography 20:465-484
• Publisher Policy: Reproduced under a Creative Commons License