Urban practices of high school students from working-class neighborhoods: what experiences of otherness?

Summary This thesis is part of the debate on the "ghettoization" of French working-class neighborhoods. In order to move forward in this debate, it is necessary to take into account all the daily experiences of their inhabitants. To do this, the urban experiences of Vaulx-en-Velin high school students, both in the central public spaces and within the social microcosm that is the high school, are questioned and compared with their social representations. These adolescents, who are not marginalized but are stigmatized by the media, categorize the social world according to different dichotomous processes. The intersectional approach is mobilized in order to analyze the intermingling of spatial, social, ethno-racial and moral dimensions that underlie their representations. The reflection is based on qualitative surveys conducted with teenagers from the Robert Doisneau high school in Vaulx-en-Velin and the Juliette-Récamier high school in Lyon. The high school students progressively broaden their practices along a continuum from their neighborhood of residence to downtown Lyon. The search for autonomy, anonymity and social diversity guides the discovery (often accompanied by peers) of the different urban spaces frequented. More specifically, downtown Lyon, characterized by a regime of public sociability, allows adolescents from Vaulx-en-Velin to experience indifference. The experience of the norm of equality specific to this type of public space remains, however, subject to the adoption of a certain number of social codes of the dominant society.