The ambiguous work of creating communities

Our presentation is based on a study of young people living in deprived urban neighbourhoods in Copenhagen participating in a community-creating project coordinated by Actions Aid Denmark. The study involves 19 young people between 15 and 20 years of age. The data is 19 journey maps (Nielsen & Sørensen, 2018) conducted individually or in groups of 2-6 young people. The maps express the young people’s experiences of taking part in journey of learning, taking action and creating local communities. The maps demonstrate how people are located in relation to others as well as movements and causes demonstrating how they understand e.g. who is acting and who is acted upon. While the Actions Aid’s project talks about ‘community’ in singular, our analysis of the young people’s stories shows not only one, but three kinds of community-formation in: 1) ‘a small, project-defined community’, 2) ‘a larger, local community’ and 3) ‘a big societal community’. In our presentation we will discuss how these different kinds of communities are formed, what positions of participation they allow for and what possibilities and limitations they construct for young people in deprived urban areas.