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This essay reconstructs the normative core of the recent European riots, when young rebels reacted to the disregard for their civic claims to equal treatment. Referring to the available data and facts, the essay uses the example of the two biggest riots in contemporary French and British history to show that prevailing analyses only grasp certain aspects of these events: these riots were primarily neither ‘race riots’, ‘issueless riots’ nor ‘riots of defective consumers’. Nourished in particular by experiences with the police and the school system in the urban districts from which the rioters recruited, rage was directed against the symbols and embodiments of a state that has failed to live up to its promise of equality. It is the everyday undermining of the principle of their equality as citizens and the physically experienced violation of minimum constitutional standards that best explain the motivations of those participating in the riots.

The normative aim of childhood studies is to show that children are and should be recognized as active shapers of their lifeworlds. In this article, we discuss which concept can best be used to accomplish this. Our thesis is that the agency concept ubiquitous in childhood studies only inadequately advances the field’s normative agenda. Mostly containing some hidden normativity, its meaning remains primarily descriptive. Indeed, children always have some kind of agency, regardless of the conditions they live in. They may exercise agency while still being manipulated or otherwise rendered incapable of acting as autonomous human beings. Against this backdrop, we first delineate the deficiencies of the notion of child agency and try to show why it should be replaced by that of autonomy in order to preserve and make explicit its hidden normative impetus. Second, we seek to clarify which understanding of autonomy is able to fulfill our aspirations. We oppose individualistic notions of autonomy and, by the same token, draw on criticism of the insufficient attention often paid to structural social factors. Eventually, we aim to develop a social concept of child autonomy that takes into account the relationality of human existence and replaces the asymmetrical relationship between children and adults with an equal appreciation of differences.

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This article examines the symbolic order of the relationships between various social groups in disadvantaged neighborhoods and shows that ethnicity is the main reference point of derogatory designations or 'negative classifications'. Using two districts in German cities as examples, the semantic patterns of mutual negative classifications among autochthonous individuals and their Turkish neighbors are reconstructed. Upwardly mobile individuals of Turkish origin are the most frequent targets of stigmatization. This fact is explained by the existence of a deep symbolic dimension of social inequality that conceives of ethnicity in terms of kinship relations. The socially inclusive or exclusive effects of negative interethnic classifications and the related classification struggles depend on three factors: the internal, i.e. gradual or categorical logic of the classification patterns; the form and process of conflict resolution; and the social contexts in which negative classifications are used. While the disintegrating effects of negative classifications are curbed by institutionalized norms in local politics and economic life, there only exist informal performative norms of interaction in the life-world, and here these classifications can more easily lead to social exclusion and ethnic separation. Copyright (c) 2006 The Authors. Journal Compilation (c) 2006 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd..

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