Acceso usuarios
Camille Hamidi
Though recent studies have shown that ethnicity plays an increasingly important role in shaping identities and social relationships in French suburbs, it is still unclear how ethnicity impacts political behavior. On that head, ethnicity is often treated as an independent variable, which does not help in figuring out the process by which it informs political behavior. This paper explores that process based on interviews of youths of non-European descent in Vaulx-en-Velin, a suburb of Lyon. It pro- poses a typology of the ways in which people draw perceptual maps and symbolic boundaries and construct identities according to geographic, ethnic and social criteria. It then examines how those distinctions translate into personal politics.
