Young People Negotiating Difference in cON/FFlating Spaces

The FWF-project beYOND uses an innovative multi-method approach to accompany young people in negotiating abundant sexual and gender identities in entangled online-offline everyday spheres. Therewith the interdisciplinary project team of geographers and communication scholars seeks to contribute to a better understanding of social exclusion and inclusion processes in the digital age. Identities are not fixed, but are constantly negotiated. And they are diverse. Social notions of gender roles, sexuality, language, class, appearance, and attribution of ethnicity play into their construction process. Identity negotiation and attribution are strongly connected with social processes of exclusion and inclusion and thus with both social cohesion and conflict. The technologies and media relevant in this process are continuously changing due to technological innovations and new developments and their very different social appropriations. Digital technologies and media are an integral part of young people`s everyday lives. They have become central to their negotiations of their identities just as they have for the formation of their opinions, knowledge, values, and relations. Although technologies open up new opportunities for experimentation, learning, information and socializing, they have similarly been found to be spaces of tantalizing peer pressure, exclusion, and bullying, sometimes leading to violence, with severely detrimental effects to young peoples mental health, self-confidence and identity building. Furthermore, digital spaces in which such identity negotiations take place are by no means separate from offline everyday life, but are inextricably entangled with it, which makes the negotiation of abundant sexual and gender identities even more contested and the young people involved often more vulnerable. The investigation of such complex social processes of identity negotiation is therefore pursued by beYOND with a multi-method and longitudinal approach, which uses different qualitative, mobile and digital methods to gain new insights into the complex offline-online everyday spaces of young people. The project team compares identity negotiations of young people in different European regions through time.