The everyday life in a “waiting room”: connecting situated inequality to institutional conditions of societal and political change

The purpose of this article is to explore how young people’s possibilities of participation are connected to institutional conditions that enable the social processes that promote and prevent situated inequality. To do so, empirical examples from a school located in a marginalized residential area in Denmark with young people aged 12–14 are analyzed. This draws on a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods, including participant observations, situated interviews, and explorative statistical data. By zooming in and out on everyday life at school, the analysis connects young people’s situated experiences to wider structural and institutional conditions beyond the immediate classroom context. The article illustrates how societal and political changes taking place, such as the transformation of a local residential area, take on concrete and situated meanings for young people’s conditions of participation in everyday school life. With this, the article contributes to developing a social psychological perspective on inequality, focusing on the situated processes through which unequal conditions for young people’s participation develop – and possibly can be transcended.