Signild Risenfors

The "Immigrant Corner": A Place for Identification and Resistance.

This article shows how young people in a Swedish upper-secondary school negotiate identities through social relations in a particular part of a school corridor that they call the ‘immigrant corner’. This place offers subject positions determined by ethnicity, but the young people also legitimise various forms of intersections of gender, class and generation. However, the ‘immigrant corner’ is not only a place where identifications are performed, it is also a place that gives rise to discussions and challenges of the schools official integration policy. Thus, the place affects those who usually sit there as well as those who do not, and is therefore important for discussions on integration issues on a local, national, European and global level. The theoretical components of this article concern spatial theories according to the concepts of place and space. With regard to place and space, the article outlines and applies the young peoples identity formations, as well as their discussions about integration issues with help from the concept of power geometry — that is, networks of social/power relations.