Outsiderness or exclusion?
To change systems, I think we need to start talking more about exclusion. While outsiderness (in Norwegian: utenforskap) describes where people are, exclusion draws attention to what puts them there.
Category:
Reflection
Author:
Audun
Location:
Oslo
Date:
From the EU debate to youth outsiderness
In Re:Structure, we’ve received research funding to explore how to prevent youth outsiderness. That is our goal, and we want to achieve it by changing the systems that shape young people’s lives, rather than young people themselves. But something about this ambition increasingly does not quite sit right with me. I’ve developed a nagging unease about the project’s purpose. Something about the language we use feels off. I think it’s because outsiderness draws our attention first and foremost to the people on the outside. It locates the problem with them, even when our ambition is to understand and change the systems around them. Earlier this year, Hjemdahl and Sørensen published an article tracing how the Norwegian term utenforskap (outsiderness) has evolved as a political concept in Norway. What I read surprised me. In the 1990s, the term wasn’t used to describe people who lacked a place in important communities. It was used by the pro-membership side in Norway’s EU debate to warn of the economic, political and cultural consequences Norway could face if we voted against membership. In that context, it was clearly negative. It was also the consequence of a choice we could make for ourselves. About a decade later, Jens Stoltenberg used the term when discussing the consequences of being out of work. Outsiderness was no longer a shared consequence of a political choice. It was something individuals experienced. Preventing those consequences meant pursuing an effective policy of getting people into work, with employment seen as the key to participation in society. Since then, outsiderness has become increasingly prominent in public debate. It is used to describe people who find themselves outside various communities because of illness, a lack of education, poverty, a different cultural identity or loneliness. The same heading brings together quite different situations. What they share is a logic in which some people are on the inside, and others are on the outside, with serious consequences for those in the latter position.
Many of the young people who have worked with Re:Structure say that outsiderness doesn’t feel like a particularly relevant term to them. This echoes findings from Perspektivmelding Ung, in which none of the more than 1,600 young people surveyed described themselves as experiencing “outsiderness”.
Yet outsiderness has become an increasingly important policy category. Substantial resources are devoted to understanding, preventing and reducing it.
Last year also saw the launch of one of Norway’s first national missions. Called No child or young person left outside!. The mission aims to mobilize a broad range of actors to significantly reduce outsiderness among children and young people by 2035.
Like Re:Structure, the mission is concerned with systemic change. Still, I wonder whether the way the problem itself is framed pulls us in a different direction. The problem is that too many children and young people are on the outside, and the solution is to get better at preventing and reducing that outsiderness.
Even though the ambition is to change systems, the stated goal is for fewer young people to be on the outside. I think this way of talking about the problem makes it easier to focus on young people, but harder to see what pushes them out.
To change systems, I think we need to start talk more about exclusion. While outsiderness describes where people are, exclusion draws attention to what puts them there.
Focusing on the mechanisms that push people out opens up questions such as: Which norms and expectations make it difficult for young people to participate? What roles and communities do we offer them? And how do we need to change services so that financial circumstances or cultural background don’t stand in the way of everyone contributing?
Re:Structure, like the national mission, aims to bring about systemic change. We should therefore use language that makes the system itself a more explicit part of both the problem and the solution.
If the problem is that many young people experience outsiderness, it’s natural to want to prevent them from ending up there. If the problem is exclusion, we also have to ask what we need to stop and what we need to change. There is a difference between preventing outsiderness and stopping exclusion. Perhaps we could also turn our attention to creating inclusion.
So I’m going to start talking more about exclusion. Not because the word itself solves anything. But because it helps me focus on what we actually need to change.
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