Seeing (Socially) Dead People: A Sixth Sense Haunting Urban Teens in Sweden and the United States

• In Event: Challeges in Schools: Race, Class, and Gender Perspectives

Abstract

In the movie The Sixth Sense, 9-year-old Cole Sear explains to his Child Psychologist, ”I see dead people…walking around like regular people.” Like Cole, I have a sixth sense. While Cole’s sixth sense allows him to see dead things that most cannot see, I see normal teenagers that others see as “socially dead” things. Over the past two decades of studying the human complexities of urban teens in the U.S. and Sweden, I feel that I am describing something that others, especially journalists, cannot see. Drawing upon studies that elucidate “social death”, interviews with urban students, and discourse analyses of news articles on urban communities, this paper explains why urban teens are too often viewed as socially dead things.

Author

• Lory Janelle Dance, University of Nebraska - Lincoln