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InfoMe is an innovative research program that explores and facilitates how ethnic minority youth help members of their social networks, especially elders, with everyday life situations through information and technology.

The project employs mixed methods, iteratively using Teen Design Days and a stratified random, classroom-based survey (n = 500) in six schools, with multiple community partners in King County, WA.

InfoMe inductively demonstrates how ethnic minority youth help others with situations of daily living through information and technology.

The findings are being used to develop InfoMe applications with the youth and InfoMe Train-the-Trainer workshops for professionals who work with youth.

The research is developing a model of how ethnic minority youth engage as information mediaries in different community settings, how individuals and communities benefit; and it is contributing to our general understanding of specific concepts related to the human information experience.

Discrimination is defined as negative or harmful behavior toward a person because of his or her membership in a particular group (see Jones, 1997). Unfortunately, experiences with discrimination due to racial group membership appear to be a normal part of development for African American youth. Discrimination experiences occur within a variety of social contexts, including school, peer, and community contexts, and with increasing frequency as youth move across the adolescent years (Fisher, Wallace, & Fenton, 2000; Seaton et al., 2008). Recent research with a nationally representative sample of African American 13–17-year olds revealed that 87% had experienced at least one racially discriminatory event during the preceding year (Seaton et al., 2008). Most of the research on the consequences of youths’ encounters with racial discrimination has focused on mental health outcomes (Cooper, McLoyd, Wood, & Hardaway, 2008), with surprisingly little work examining whether and through what mechanisms discrimination affects achievement motivation.

This research explores the educational participation, cultural identification, and linguistic practices of Middle Eastern refugee youth in Vancouver, Canada. Twenty refugee youth aged 15 to 30 participated in this critical ethnography that provided new information about the impacts of pre- and post-migration experiences on their educational attainment, language, and identity construction. Evidence reported here indicates that refugee youth are subject to institutional challenges in both their home and host countries. The youth experienced educational assimilation, biased curriculum, and language discrimination with devastating impacts on their educational participation and overall well-being. In response, this study indicates that young people resist assimilation and racism in educational and wider social settings. This study further suggests that refugee youths’ educational experiences, linguistic practices, self-identification, and well-being should be examined in relation to their pre- and post-migration experiences, and the dominant meta-narratives of their home and host countries (e.g., nationalism).

This chapter reports from a qualitative study on how identity categories, including gender and ethnicity, are experienced and constructed through video gaming among immigrant youth in Norway. The aim here is to explore the manifestations and contestations of gendered power and hegemonic practices among the young immigrant girls and boys. This chapter builds on research about everyday media use especially video games, and our analysis is based on theories of hegemony, power, gender, and ethnicity. Three key findings are observed from the study: (a) video games acting as a bridge between ethnic minority boys (not so much with the girls) and ethnic Norwegians, (b) hegemonic gendered practices, emphasizing the “otherness,” in particular for girls adhering to the category of gamer, and finally, to a lesser degree, (c) marginalization within video games on the basis of being a non-Western youth in a Western context. As such the study simultaneously not only confirms but also challenges dominant discourses on video games by suggesting that, although some positive strides have been made, the claims of a post-gender neutral online world, or celebrations of an inclusive and democratic online media culture, especially video gaming, are still premature.

Immigrant and second generation youth face distinct challenges adapting to school environments in the host society. Young people’s popularity is often influenced by style-based subcultures. This research investigates how students from diverse ethnic and linguistic backgrounds in Israel, a multi-ethnic society with a large proportion of immigrant youth, adopt subcultural identities, and the effects this has on popularity attainment.

This study makes use of a nationally representative quantitative survey of Hebrew instructed high schools. Results are analyzed through Structural Equations Modeling.

Results highlight how youth who have less tenure in the country and preserve indigenous languages are increasingly drawn toward delinquent subcultures as a means toward gaining popularity in school. Differences based on ethnic belonging are also discussed.

In order to create a more conducive environment for immigrant children to make friends with locals, educators require knowledge about the causes of social conflict. Immigrant youth are often drawn toward delinquent subcultures as a means for attaining social acceptance, which can lead to perpetual inequalities.

Subcultures are widely recognized as playing an important role in one’s choice of friends, but hitherto little research examined the mediating role that subcultures play for immigrant youth, especially in the Israeli context.

The article discusses some general features of the dominant discourses of ethnicity and culture, their historical roots and relations to contemporary forms of multiculturalism. It compares different expressions of cultural belonging in European societies taking Sweden as an example. Departing from the complex meaning of culture the problems of essentialism inherent in concepts of culture and ethnicity are discussed. Sweden, as well as other European multiethnic societies, is undergoing a division along ethnic lines. Social inequalities tend to be understood in terms of cultural difference. Culture is usually connected with ethnicity and race and understood as pure, as an “essence,” as related to some original and eternal ethnic core. In this way important aspects of cultural dynamics in the multiethnic society, not least among young people, are left unobserved. What are usually not recognized are cultural crossings and the emergence of composite identities and their relations to social structure.

A strong relationship exists in many cultures between ethnic identity and educational success. This study was conducted at a teacher training university in Southwest China in 1997. It examines how ethnic minority students, through a series of micro-level interactions, construct “scholar selves” within their families, villages, and schools. The study also looks at how macro-level structural supports, built into the Chinese education system, help minority students overcome obstacles to academic success. These supports include special schools and classes for ethnic students, training teachers for nationality areas, financial support for minority education and additional points awarded on national examinations. The chapter suggests what scholars and practitioners might learn from an educational system that demonstrates the characteristics of flexibility, inclusiveness and cohesiveness.

Purpose – Latino and African-American children and families in Washington, DC, face difficult circumstances, including high poverty, crime, and teenage pregnancy rates coupled with lower educational attainment. This chapter describes empirically supported approaches to positive development within and between the Latino and African-American communities, highlighting those utilized by CentroNía, a community-based, multicultural learning community in Washington, DC.

Approach – Community psychology promotes strength-focused, evidence-based practices shown to enrich child, family, neighborhood, and societal development among disenfranchised groups. This community psychology framework is used to examine CentroNía's work in support of the Latino and African-American communities of Washington, DC.

Findings – CentroNía espouses many of the tenets of community psychology. Its systematic efforts include the promotion of cultural unity and development, preventive interventions in early childhood and during the after-school hours, and context-enhancing practices at the family, school, and city levels.

Social implications – As the neighborhood of Columbia Heights becomes gentrified and the cost of living increases, Latino and African-American families find it increasingly difficult to remain in the community they have established together over the past 25 years. The consequences for low-income children, youth, and families, along with the evolution of CentroNía in this rapidly changing context, are discussed.

Using in-depth interviews with 30 working class and poor, minority adolescents, students were asked to describe their daily interactions and perceptions of peers in a neighborhood high school in NYC over two years. Among the key findings, students consistently expressed their distrust of “bad kids” who they blamed for many of the school's problems. Three themes based on students lived experiences are described: (1) a neighborhood school with a stigmatized reputation for low academic achievement housed students who displayed anti-academic behavior; (2) students developed normative behavior and informal rules to avoid hostile interactions with peers; (3) perceptions of “bad kids” was racialized and stereotyped. The discussion develops the idea of collective dis-identification, a reverse process from collective identity, where students learned to disconnect from their peers by racially and ethnically segregating.

The school-to-prison pipeline is a term used to describe the pathway traveled by students from public schools to incarceration in secure juvenile detention and correctional programs. It begins with students who are marginalized by the education system because of their academic and behavioral issues. The pipeline leads from school failure and disciplinary exclusion to involvement with the juvenile justice system. Youth who are ethnic minorities (especially those who are African-American or Hispanic) as well as those with educational disabilities (especially those with learning and behavioral disorders) are significantly overrepresented in data sets representing key points along the pipeline (e.g., students with poor academic achievement, high rates of suspension, expulsion, and dropout) as well as their high rates of incarceration. From his personal perspective and experience with the juvenile justice system, the author attempts to explicate the pipeline, and to describe efforts to impact it positively.