Doctoral Dissertation Research: Minority Youth and Everyday Negotiations of Place and Marginalization

University Of Texas At Austin, Austin TX

Investigators

Abstract

Researchers and policy makers have long been interested in understanding how growing up in impoverished neighborhoods impacts the life prospects of minority youth. As the gap between affluent and impoverished neighborhoods widens and as young adults remain stuck in poor urban communities, it has once again become imperative to understand how place shapes young people's aspirations and perceptions of their future. This project will address these questions by analyzing what urban minority youth learn about their community and how they use this knowledge to assess their future options and opportunities. Given the proliferation of place-based programs and policies geared to benefit youth in marginalized communities, this project will provide timely, policy-relevant information about the spatial factors most influential to structuring young people's aspirations and pathways to adulthood. The findings from this project will therefore inform urban reforms taking place within neighborhoods that have recently become part of a federally supported Choice Neighborhood program. The project will also contribute to efforts to create place-based indicators that capture young people's access to opportunities and prospects of attaining upward mobility. Additionally, by positioning young people's knowledge and perceptions as central to analyzing the effects of place, this project will generate theoretical insight that furthers our understanding of how particular places take on significance in shaping young people's lives and life course. In doing so, it will help advance geographical research on life course transitions and push sociological research on neighborhood effects to account for the everyday experience of growing up in a marginalized community. The project blends literature from children's geography, social mobility, and life course studies to examine how young people's aspirations are shaped through their experiences in and of everyday places. Conceptually, the project frames young people's communities as formative geographies, learning spaces wherein they are absorbing information about their everyday surroundings and using this knowledge to evaluate the opportunities and pathways that are available to them and to people from their neighborhood. The study will explore how young people's everyday surroundings become formative by combining participant observations with go-along interviews to examine what African American and Latino/a youth have learned about their community and how that links to the way how they plan their lives. These methods will enable the researchers to gather in-depth, ethnographic information about what young people see, hear, say, and feel about the people, places, and spaces around them and observe the messages and advice they receive about how to grow up and get ahead in life. Semi-structured interviews will also be conducted with community members, teachers, and property managers who help construct young people's experiences of their community. Taken together, this methodological approach provides the spatialized perspective necessary to analyze how urban minority youth make sense of where they start out in life and evaluate what the possible pathways to success are from their particular social and spatial location.