Immigrant Youth, Hip Hop, and Online Games

Anti-Muslim racism and xenophobia on the one hand and (the fear of) Salafite hostility on the other are two of the most essential problems facing Europe today. Both result from the spectacular failure of the continent's integration policies that have either insisted on immigrants' rigid assimilation or left them fret on their own. This book radically breaks with the contemporary approaches of immigrant assimilation and integration. It instead sheds light on non-institutional approaches that facilitate inclusion by introducing three alternative small-scale projects that have made a difference in the lives of urban working-class youth, specifically with second-generation immigrant roots, in Vienna, Austria. These projects include an online gaming research project, hip hop as an art form, and social work as a pedagogic practice (an approach often referred to as street work). After exploring historic and structural condition of marginalization in Austria, the book investigates working-class teenagers' social networks and describes an online game designed to provide a platform for interaction between non-immigrant and immigrant youth who usually do either not interact or display prejudice when they engage with each other. Hip hop can provide both the necessary outlets for alienated youth to articulate their frustrations and highly effective tools for transforming inclusion conflicts, by offering individual teens the necessary means to gain the resilience and social grounding necessary to help overcome exclusion and marginalization. In addition to the individual young person's agency the inclusion process, of course, also requires corresponding efforts by the majority society. Social work with marginalized youth is crucial for successful inclusion. Specifically individual support and small-scale settings provide a unique opportunity to open up spaces for discouraged and disaffected teenagers to gain self-worth and dignity. While the book focuses on identity formation and the teenagers' agency it argues that only projects that include both "newcomer" and "native" can aid in overcoming exclusionary attitudes and policies, eventually allowing some form of social bonding to take place.