Negotiations of Belonging: Young Women’s Lived Experiences from Three Marginalized Neighbourhoods

The years of youth are particularly formative, and young people can feel a strong identification with the place where they grow up. However, for young people in multi-ethnic working-class-dominated urban neighbourhoods, their perceptions often come in conflict with the surrounding society’s negative representations. This article draws on research with 40 young women about their experiences of three multi-ethnic working-class-dominated neighbourhoods in Stockholm, Sweden. The aim is to analyse the complexity in the women’s narratives of navigating between feelings of place-based belonging and their strategies to resist stigmatizing discourses. Their narratives reflect a tension between belonging and a longing to move out to move on. Therefore, the article concludes that we need to acknowledge that young women can have a strong identification with the community and the neighbourhood while still imagining their future elsewhere, because of class inequality, racialization processes and expectations of young women to be adaptable and flexible.