Belonging or not?: West African youth’s negotiations of everyday spaces

As the West African immigrant population continues to grow amid vitriolic anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant sentiment and violence against unarmed black youth, we examine the socio-political educative needs of these youth. Drs. Schmidt and Knight-Manuel explore how West African immigrant youth take up and negotiate civic belonging and identity across spatial scales. We propose that a stronger conceptualization of civic belonging precedes studies of civic engagement. Civic belonging attends to how people identify the self in/with space. West African youth minimally consider their continental, racial, and religious identities as they navigate civic belonging. The project engages with spatiality to theorize how these identities interact with and produce spaces that generate senses of belonging or non-belonging. To learn about how youth negotiate space, explore the communal possibilities of civic belonging and identifying, and center the voice of African youth, the research utilizes narrative and visual methodologies. The research is conducted with 'Africa Clubs' at three high schools in New York City with significant West African immigrant populations. The findings will analyze how and in what ways spaces in and out of school inform how these youth depict and/or experience the shifting social and spatial relations that enable civic belonging and subsequent engagement.,