Migrant youth with no-life in Danish welfare society
This article analyses how children and youngsters with ethnic minority background are constructed as ”strange troublemakers” and assume identities as “migrant with no-life” in a social educational leisure institution, ”Baglandet”. Baglandet admits children considered to be ”associationless” and ”at risk of criminality”, and attempts to ease the children back into ”normal” institutions. However, the institution is a part of the Danish social welfare system characterized by contradictory and paradoxical institutional logics as well as professional practices. Dynamics of both inclusion and exclusion are at stake in this system, and therefore Baglandet works simultaneously both with and against its own purpose. One problematic consequence of this is the production and institutionalising of deviant identities for ethnic minority children in Denmark.
