Young people’s everyday securities: pre-emptive and pro-active strategies toward ontological security in Scotland

This paper uses a framework of ‘ontological security’ to discuss the psycho-social strategies of self-securitization employed by ethnic and religious minority young people in Scotland. We argue that broad discourses of securitization are present in the everyday risks and threats that young people encounter. In response and as resistance young people employ pre-emptive and pro-active strategies to preserve ontological security. Yet, these strategies are fraught with ambivalence and contradiction as young people withdraw from social worlds or revert to essentialist positions when negotiating complex fears and anxieties. Drawing on feminist geographies of security the paper presents a multi-scalar empirical analysis of young people’s everyday securities, connecting debates on youth and intimacy-geopolitics with the social and cultural geographies of young people, specifically work that focuses upon young people’s negotiations of racialized, gendered and religious landscapes