Negotiating the Stranger: Youth Citizenship in a Small Midwestern Town

• In Event: Dissertation workshop session
  In Special Session: Youth, Citizenship, and Belonging

Proposal

In the United States, long heralded as the land of immigrants, conceptions of ‘who is a citizen’ are deliberated in academic literature and popular media alike. Evident in the rhetoric surrounding the outcome of the 2016 American presidential election, the rise of populist nationalism has again exposed this debate. Refugees and immigrants are increasingly framed as the unassimilable other and “strangers at the door” of rapidly changing nations (Bauman, 2016). Simultaneously, as Russell Hochschild (2017) wrote in her recent study, many rural, white, blue-collar, Americans feel like “strangers in their own land” and seek to protect their traditional American values envisioned to be under attack. These two stereotypical “sets of strangers” – “strangers at the door’ (immigrants) and ‘strangers in their own land’ (white estranged) – increasingly live in the same small Midwestern communities – resulting in an intriguing space to explore conceptions of citizenship and belonging.

Writer Phil Christman (2017) describes Midwesterners; “We think of ourselves as basic Americans, with no further qualification.” However, the narratives of who is considered worthy American citizens are under constant negotiation, and are mired by the violent and historical structural constraints surrounding class, religious identity, gender, and race. Instead of relying on the stereotypical tropes of the “sets of strangers,” this dissertation focuses on the mechanisms, negotiations, and discourses positioning who is deemed a “stranger” and who is recognized as worthy of belonging in a small Midwestern town.

Theoretically, I build off the work of Shirazi (2018), amongst others who found the educational experiences of youth reveal broader “struggles over which bodies, histories, and cultural practices count as American” (p. 116). Unlike the scholarship of Shirazi (2018), Abu El Haj (2015), Jaffe-Walter (2016), Ghaffer-Kucher (2008) and Maira (2009) who focus on the conceptions of belonging among specific urban ethnic groups, this dissertation seeks to illuminate the negotiations of belonging within a small rural town with a multitude of “others.” It is guided by the Foucauldian concept of subjectification as used by Ong (2003) and defined as the “dual process of self-making and being-made within webs of power linked to the nation state and civil society” (p. 263-264). My research questions are as follows:
1) How do global, national, and local discourses and practices “make” youth into citizens?
2) How do youth “self-make” and negotiate their identities as citizens within the discourses present in society and the school?

To shed light on these questions, my research design is similarly composed of two interrelated parts, to be conducted over a proposed nine-month time period. The first aspect, an immersive multi-site community ethnography, is intended to illuminate the everyday practices, discourses, and mechanisms surrounding the high school students in this small rural Midwestern town. This dissertation employs an “ethnography of the local” framework as utilized by Miraftab (2016). According to Buroway (2001), the ethnography of the local framework seeks to illuminate “what we understand to be ‘global’ is itself constituted within the local; it emanates from very specific agencies, institutions and organizations whose processes can be observed first-hand” (p. 150). In this study, observation and analysis of everyday behaviors can highlight the intersectional structures of power that position some individuals to belong and mark some as strangers.

Along with a critical feminist lens, I also draw from a post-structural epistemology, and thus consider individuals’ discourses and actions as continuously composing the institutions of a ‘place.’ While influenced by intersectional structures of power and the individuals’ place within these structures, these feelings of belonging are not prescribed and are instead continuously negotiated. It is within the discourses and practices of youth, educators, and community members that possibilities of belonging are mutually constituted. The second aspect of this project is a direct focus on the narratives shared by a small cohort of youth about their experiences of belonging; how they “self-make” their experiences of belonging and thus, how they are “self-making” their community and nation. I will be in the sixth month of data collection during the mentoring workshop.

This work is relevant to all living in the United States, as it focuses on the discourses and practices that determine who belongs in society and who can belong in the future. This work also furthers a recent line of scholarship challenging the urban, metro-centric focus of prior youth citizenship within the context of globalization. Awareness of small-town youths’ experiences open up possibilities of critique and imagination of a more inclusive and dynamic future for these individuals, these small-town communities, and the nation at large.

Author

• Heidi Fahning, University of Minnesota