Shifting the boundaries of cultural spaces: young people and everyday multiculturalism

This paper investigates the significance of everyday intercultural social practice
enacted in the mundane sites of young people’s daily life to the development of
new research directions for multicultural youth studies. It explores the idea of
everyday multiculturalism as an appropriate analytical approach for understanding
the ways that young people deal with cultural difference in conditions of
super-diversity. It considers how this approach gives descriptive and explanatory
priority to sites and literacies such as everyday neighbourhood locales, vernacular
expressions and popular culture that form an important part of young people’s
‘habitus’, and provides insight into how struggles over the decentring of whiteness
from the national imaginary occur in quotidian ways.