REACH har hovedfokus på barndom og barnehager i storbyer. Derfor er vi glade for å kunne dele våre tanker og spørsmål med forskere fra hele verden på et Forskningssymposium ved Københavns profesjonshøjskole (University College Copenhagen, KP) 22. og 23. oktober om Marginalisering av familier og ungdom i storbyer.

Med dette temaet retter symposiet et spesielt fokus på forholdet mellom relasjonelle aspekter på den ene siden og sosiale, økonomiske og strukturelle forhold andre siden.

Gjennom vårt innlegg ber REACH om innspill knyttet til:

• Hva er de særskilte vilkårene og utfordringene for utvikling av tillit i en storby?
• Hva er de særskilte vilkårene og utfordringene for tillit mellom barnehagen og tilstøtende institusjoner og samfunnsforhold?
• Hvordan legger storbybarnehagens systemer og ansatte til rette for utvikling av tillit i sine møter med barn og deres familier?
• Hvordan kan tillit bygges og utvikles som et redskap for inkludering og for å motvirke og forebygge utenforskap?

På symposiet deltar prosjektleder for REACH, Mette Tollefsrud, Inger Marie Lindboe og Emad Al-Rozzi.

Bakgrunn om symposiet

More than half of the world’s population now live in urban areas and there are increased differences between growing up in rural or urban areas in terms of unequal access to opportunities creatingsocially vulnerable positions. According to Waquant (2008), big cities are products of economic growth as well as the engines for economic growth. Big cities are also sites for the dismantling of life-forms (Lebensforme) (Højrup, 1983, 1995) that are detrimental to growth and by extension they also harbor the emergence of potentially new life-forms. As a result, the spaces and social profiles of urban areas are altered as they engage with globalization and growth – but they do so in different ways and with different outcomes for different neighborhoods and residents.

This means that the city’s cultural geography and social circumstances generate unequal and unpredictable conditions for families, children and youth. There is a growing awareness of how the composition and complexity of urban areas produce many pedagogical challenges in relation to marginalized and socially vulnerable groups. In a Danish welfare state context, there is also a realization that the professionalization in the form of standardized pedagogical and social services do not adequately take into account the very varied Regimes of Urban Marginality (Waquant, 2008) and needs of the most marginalized and socially vulnerable.

It is therefore important that social educators (pedagogical staff), teachers and social workers take into account how the unequal and unpredictable limitations and possibilities that spaces and relations of urban areas offer, frame work with marginalized/socially vulnerable families, children and youth. We think of such practices as place-sensitive pedagogies, i.e. pedagogical methods that allow the professionals to work with the differentiated conditions and spatially varied situations that marginalized and socially vulnerable Groups find themselves in. Within very short geographical distances, or even within the same neighborhood, residents can experience differentiated economic and social conditions – structural relations that may also change over time.

Pedagogical work with marginalized and socially vulnerable families, children and youth in big cities is thus both about the possibilities to access, engage with and participate in growth and change-oriented life-forms, but also about the specific mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion that they experience. Ethnic, social and territorial stigmatization (Waquant, 2008) demarcate social life-forms that pursue other values or goals than those valid in the hegemonic urban regimes. These marginalized life-forms can for example be observed either as social isolation or in the construction of oppositional solidarity groups such as gangs or ghetto communities.

The ethnic, social and territorial demarcations of the city require a professional capacity to read and see the limitations and possibilities that emerge in the encounter between places and residents (Gruenewald, 2003). There is a need for more scientific research on the relations between place, social conditions and opportunities for families, children and youth as they intersect in specific urban spaces.