Social capital and ethnicity are crucial to young peoples understandings of their social world. The strong bonding networks often assumed in ethnic groups suggest that individuals may prefer to be bonded to each other according to shared socio-cultural factors such as shared histories, memories, language, customs, traditions and values. However, bridging forms of social capital allow new understandings of ethnic identities to emerge, and which involve dynamic and complex social processes that are continually changing and evolving according to time, location and context.
This book explores the ways in which the concepts of social capital and ethnicity play a central role in young peoples relationships, participation in wider social networks and the construction of identities. Researchers and scholars working in the fields of children and youth studies, education, families, social and racial and ethnic studies, offer differing accounts of the ways in which social capital operates in young peoples lives across diverse social settings and ethnic groups. This edited book is timely and significant given the public interest of researchers, academics, politicians and policymakers working in areas of youth and community work, race relations and cultural diversity.
This book was published as a special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies.
1. Introduction: Young people, social capital and ethnic identity Tracey
Reynolds
2. In Transition: Young people in Northern Ireland growing up in,
and out of, divided communities Sheena McGrellis
3. Social networks and
identity negotiations of religious minority youth in diverse social contexts
Arniika Kussisto
4. Transnational family relationships, social networks and
return migration among British-Caribbean young people Tracey Reynolds
5.
Enabling and constraining aspects of social capital in migrant families:
ethnicity, gender and generation Elisabetta Zontini
6. Care leavers and
social capital: understanding and negotiating racial and ethnic identity
Ravinder Barn
7. "True stories from bare times on road": Developing
empowerment, identity and social capital among urban minority ethnic young
people in London, U.K. Daniel Briggs
8. Young peoples social capital:
complex identities, dynamic networks Susie Weller
Tracey Reynolds is a Senior Research Fellow at the Families and Social Capital Research Group, London South Bank University.
