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This is the published version of a paper published in Journal of Youth Studies.
Citation for the original published paper (version of record):
Coe, A-B., Rönnblom, M. (2019)
Collective caring: creating safety through interactions between young activist groups and young adults in Sweden
Journal of Youth Studies, 22(6): 839-855
https://doi.org/10.1080/13676261.2018.1546384
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Journal of Youth Studies
ISSN: 1367-6261 (Print) 1469-9680 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cjys20
Collective caring: creating safety through
interactions between young activist groups and young adults in Sweden
Anna-Britt Coe & Malin Rönnblom
To cite this article: Anna-Britt Coe & Malin Rönnblom (2019) Collective caring: creating safety through interactions between young activist groups and young adults in Sweden, Journal of Youth Studies, 22:6, 839-855, DOI: 10.1080/13676261.2018.1546384
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13676261.2018.1546384
© 2018 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
Published online: 18 Nov 2018.
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Collective caring: creating safety through interactions
between young activist groups and young adults in Sweden
Anna-Britt Coe
aand Malin Rönnblom
ba
Department of Sociology, Umeå University, Umeå, Sweden;
bUmeå Center for Gender Studies, Umeå University, Umeå, Sweden
ABSTRACT
Existing research explores safety among young adults as a complex phenomenon in diverse social spaces. Nonetheless, it largely approaches perceptions of unsafety and safety strategies as discrete individual action. In this paper, we show how safety is created through the social interactions between young activist groups and their main target or audience, young adults. Our study aimed to explore how young adults created meanings and actions of safety within their activism. Grounded Theory method was use to collect and analyze qualitative interviews with young adults of ten social change groups located in two medium-size cities in Sweden. To interpret our findings, we drew upon interactionist concepts of shared de finitions and joint action [Blumer, Herbert.
1966. “Sociological Implications of the thought of George Herbert Mead. ” American Journal of Sociology 71 (5): 535–544]. Shared de finitions challenged narrow notions of unsafety by identifying uniform categories and harmful stereotypes as the source of the problem, and thereby locating constraints upon the capacity of di fferent groups of young adults to define situations as (un)safe.
Joint action combined an immediate response of moving to where young adults were with an enduring response of being there for young adults. Combined, these constituted an overarching social process of collective caring, which we linked to Isabel Lorey ’s [2015.
State of Insecurity. London: Verso] concept of practices of caring.
ARTICLE HISTORY Received 19 June 2018 Accepted 4 November 2018 KEYWORDS
Activism; gender;
interactionism; safety; social processes; youth
Introduction
It is not di fficult to find reasons to be concerned with the safety of young adults, who in Sweden range in age from early teens to late twenties. Most obvious is that physical and psychological safety enables young adults ’ development as persons and as members of society (Lerner, Fisher, and Weinberg 2000; NRCIM 2002). Ensuring young adults ’ safety is complicated given their ambiguous standing in between child and adult as well as the lengthy path to adulthood. Teenagers remain dependent upon adult members of society, who are accorded physical, emotional and legal independence (Moore 2017;
Moore and McArthur 2017). Dependence upon adults continues after teen years, as the
© 2018 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
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