The Shape of Belonging for Unaccompanied Young People

The Shape of Belonging for Unaccompanied Young People

This book offers a novel and groundbreaking understanding of the concept of belonging, capturing its complexities, its multiplicities, shifts, and its ruptures through the accounts of the lived experiences of unaccompanied young people. Through a rich and unique empirical and theoretical analysis, it sheds new light on the nature, constituents, and workings of belonging within conditions of displacement. Arguing against the binaries of ‘belonging/unbelonging’ and the prevailing notions and dichotomies of belonging, the book offers a nomadic, rhizomatic understanding of belonging, uniquely highlighting the virtuality of belonging as real, wherein belonging is tied to possibility and potentiality as well as to actuality. This book is a testament to the complicated, troubled and paradoxical experiences of belonging under highly constrained and precarious conditions of the UK’s asylum system.

Özlem Ögtem-Young is a sociologist and qualitative researcher working in the areas of migration, belonging, poverty and inequality, currently working as a Research Fellow within CHASM at the Department of Social Policy, Sociology and Criminology, the University of Birmingham.