Racialised young people in Britain face an intensifying landscape of exclusion, surveillance and criminalisation through multiple interacting state institutions. These interventions are often justified in law, policy and political discourse through appeals to public safety, where Black and Brown, working-class young people are regularly positioned as potential or actual threats to the safety of the public, other young people and often even themselves.
My research project will examine how notions of safety are mobilised across policy, political discourse and institutional practices, surfacing the implicit assumptions that shape these narratives. I will also seek to gain an understanding of how young people framed in this way understand their own safety and their place within these systems of harm, mapping the forms of safety they create for themselves – outside of the state provisions they are excluded from. Through this research, I aim to identify tensions between state conceptions of safety and the lived experience of those subject to ‘safety-making’ interventions, identifying where these policies enacted in the name of protection can themselves generate harm.
I came to this research through my work across several grassroots community organisations, which has focused on resisting racism and state harm across the education, immigration and criminal legal systems.
