Conference Program

Neighbourhood effects related to education are well documented in both Nordic and international research (Berg, 2021; Borgen & Zachrisson, 2025; Galster & Sharkey, 2017; Ljunggren & Orupabo, 2020; Markussen et al., 2024; Markussen & Røed, 2022, 2023; Mikkelsen & Agdal, 2024; Nieuwenhuis & Hooimeijer, 2016; Sharkey & Faber, 2014). Despite longstanding ambitions of equal educational opportunities (Blossing et al., 2014; Corall-Granados et al., 2025; Elstad, 2023; Mikkelsen & Agdal, 2024), socioeconomic inequality and urban segregation are increasing in Nordic cities (NOU 16:2020; Tunström & Wang, 2019). We explore how youth and professionals understand neighbourhoods for educational opportunities.

This paper draws on qualitative interviews with young people living in low-socioeconomic-status (SES) neighbourhoods in a Norwegian city, and with professionals working with youth in the same areas. While most of the professionals live in other parts of the city and therefore do not encounter the neighbourhood in the same immediate way as the youth living there, they are familiar with these areas through their professional practice and voluntary engagement. There are significant differences in how professionals understand and perceive youth’s living conditions. Some professionals occasionally invite youth to tell about issues such as racism and criticize other professionals for relying on assumptions rather than youths’ own accounts and lived experiences.

Although some professionals actively ask questions, they nonetheless have knowledge about the youth’s lived experiences. While the youth themselves emphasize racism, violence, and poverty as central features of their everyday lives, professionals often frame these conditions differently. Poverty is frequently silenced, and assumptions about parents do not always correspond to the youth’s own accounts. Whereas professionals tend to highlight language-related challenges, the young people describe the precarities of poverty and parents who are often unavailable because of unpredictable and unfavourable working hours. Professionals thus appear to orient themselves through pre-existing assumptions that may themselves be marked by antagonistic contradictions. Hesitation or discomfort in approaching these lived realities may cause them to miss crucial aspects of young people’s experiences.

Drawing on Paulo Freire’s pedagogy (1970), we argue that this gap is not simply a matter of different perceptions, but also of which experiences are recognised as valid in pedagogical practice. Freire’s understanding of dialogue, participation, and critical consciousness, highlights the need to move the relationship between professionals and youth from a subject–object to a subject–subject relation. From this perspective, the task of the professionals is to explore youth`s situation together with them. By starting from generative themes grounded in everyday life, youth and professionals may develop a more situated understanding of how structural conditions shape educational opportunities. Seen through Freire’s pedagogy of hope, the problem is not only misunderstanding, but of pedagogy itself. When professionals do not see the concerns voiced by young people, they risk reinforcing alienation and closing opportunities for the development of critical consciousness. A more dialogical approach, grounded in young people’s own lived experiences, may instead create conditions for less alienation and greater possibilities for action, choice, and transformation.