Fearless Girls in Public Places: Understanding the Relationships between Gender, Ethnicity and Place

Professor Nora Räthzel

In a project looking at young people in two neighbourhoods in Hamburg the 14-15 year old girls in our sample described a great number of fears they connected with public spaces. However, there was a group of girls, who said they were not afraid of the streets and liked to spend most of their leisure time there. The talk will concentrate on these girls, asking what were the conditions, which made their fearless behaviour possible: It will look at the girls’ ethnic background, their education and class and will try to understand their behaviour within the context of their respective neighbourhoods, one of which was constructed as right-wing and “German”, the other as populated by “dangerous foreigners”.

Bio

Nora Räthzel is professor of Sociology at the Department of Sociology, Umeå University (Sweden). Her research areas include: issues city development and sustainability, the everyday life of workers in transnational corporations, and trade union politics in relation to the North-South divide and environmental degradation. In all these areas she looks at the power relations in terms of gender, ethnicity, class, and place.  Her most recent publication is entitled Finding the Way Home. Young People's Stories of Gender, Class, Ethnicity, and Place in Hamburg and London ( Editor along with Phil Cohen, Les Back, Michael Keith and Andreas Hieronymus).

Contact email: N.S.Al-Ali@soas.ac.uk