Young People, Social Capital and Ethnic Identity

Social capital and ethnicity are crucial to young people’s understandings of their social world. The strong bonding networks often assumed in ethnic groups suggest that individuals may prefer to be bonded to each other according to shared socio-cultural factors such as shared histories, memories, language, customs, traditions and values. However, bridging forms of social capital allow new understandings of ethnic identities to emerge, and which involve dynamic and complex social processes that are continually changing and evolving according to time, location and context. This book explores the ways in which the concepts of social capital and ethnicity play a central role in young people’s relationships, participation in wider social networks and the construction of identities. Researchers and scholars working in the fields of children and youth studies, education, families, social and racial and ethnic studies, offer differing accounts of the ways in which social capital operates in young people’s lives across diverse social settings and ethnic groups. This edited book is timely and significant given the public interest of researchers, academics, politicians and policymakers working in areas of youth and community work, race relations and cultural diversity. This book was published as a special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies.