| dc.description.abstract | This dissertation is based on 6 months of ethnographic fieldwork at a youth centre in a suburb of Manchester, England. The area is a post-industrial ward, historically characterised by the dying industry previously dominating the area. Today, the industries are gone, and a vast number of the residents are still struggling to find work. The old factory buildings have reopened as daily markets and shopping centres, and manual labour in the industries has mainly been replaced by service sector jobs. The youth centre where I volunteered is one of the improvement measures set out to re-establish the local community. This thesis is an attempt to understand and interpret the individual experiences of the recent changes in the neighbourhood. The conduction of this research is primarily based on an investigation of the people I worked with at the local youth centre. I will draw parallels between political events and changes in British history and its effects on the neighbourhood, and the way people organise themselves socially, experience their everyday lives and the opportunities they perceive themselves as having. I will illustrate mechanisms for creation of distance utilised by individuals in order to establish perceived separation from people, places and social statuses they do not identify, or want to be identified with. In order to give my research more depth and validity, I have also investigated people’s experience of living in the local neighbourhood surrounding the youth centre. I consider this a necessity as the primary users of the centre, and the people I was working together with, were from the local neighbourhood. Of particular interest is the ambiguity in regards to people´s sense of belonging to this place where they lived and, at least for a vast majority of them, had spent their entire lives. This ambiguity took the form of an experienced tension between a deep sense of belonging to the local area and a strong insistence on the individual´s non-identification with the local area. I will also investigate how people were creating distance in confrontations with the class-status. I will discuss the argument made by some scholars before me that the resistance of middle-class values result in a strengthened working class identity. My findings suggest that the individuals commonly categorised as working-class did indeed distance themselves from the middle class, but also from their working-class categorisation. I will in this thesis explore the different nuances of this, the complexities that follow any socially connected group of people, which will necessarily consist of vast diversity. | eng |