Facts

Contact person:
Jacob Lind
Financer:
  • NordForsk
Responsible at MaU:
Jacob Lind
Project members at MaU:
External project members:
  • Aina Landsverk Hagen Daniele Evelin Alves Hilde Rønnaug Kitterød Sara Berge Lorenzen Patrick Lester Kollman - OsloMet
  • Ditte Maria Børglum Tofteng Rasmus Præstmann Hansen - Köpenhamns professionshögskola
Time frame:
01 January 2025 - 31 December 2027
Faculty/department:
Research environment :
Research subject:

About the project

Young people predominantly live in cities, where the urgency of social exclusion is intertwined with numerous other societal challenges. Many of these pressing and interconnected problems, like unemployment, poverty, crime, and gender-based, ethnic, and religious discrimination, affect youth. Integration and social inclusion are often put forth as the “holy grail” that will solve the perceived “problem” of “too much” immigration in Nordic societies – where immigration is represented to be a key factor causing or amplifying these other social issues and young people with migrant backgrounds are stigmatised as a hopeless group that strains the social fabric.

In YouHope we will turn the tide and, following the Nordforsk call, challenge myths and stereotypes of integration issues concerning youth citizens in super-diverse urban communities by looking at the arenas and practices where they collectively engage in hopeful practices. We will do this by 1) conducting a media study on how youth in the Nordic countries are perceived or portrayed as either hopeless or hopeful, 2) engaging and training young peer researchers to collaborate on 3) multi-sited ethnographic network studies of how youth are practising and enacting hope in super-diverse neighbourhoods in the Nordic cities Oslo, Malmö and Copenhagen, with the aim of 4) developing a nuanced vocabulary of hope from the perspective of the youth and disseminate the results through short films, scientific exhibitions and policy briefs presented at a Youth Summit with Nordic stakeholders.

The transdisciplinary cross-national team of researchers with diverse backgrounds in social sciences and arts and humanities will use this new peer-researched knowledge to engage youth and stakeholders in an intergenerational and equalising cross-national dialogue on how to design more innovative and targeted policies for integration that resonates with the Nordic model. We view hope as not merely goal-attainment through individual thinking but as relational possibilities, open-ended processes and generative practices that play out in everyday situated life that contribute to wellbeing. The acts of practising hope are thus both collective, contextual and temporal, and consequently, there is a need to investigate this phenomenon through ethnographic, participatory and arts-based, participatory visual methods where we make room for young people’s voices to be heard in a radical way, through peer-research and film-elicitation.