La construction identitaire à partir d’expériences de rue à Montreal : une tension entre marginalité et conformité

Abstract

Identity construction starting from street’s and peer’s experiments in Montreal : a tension between marginality and conformity. This article synthesizes a work started in a master thesis related to the identities’ trajectories of “street youth2”. Its purpose is to understand how their trajectories are influenced by the “margin” and the “center”, two entities one might at first regard as paradoxical. We present this fragment of reality according to typical categories of identity, resulting from various logics of action chosen by the actors. The analysis of these identity trajectories invites to moderate the more “traditional” approaches of situations in the street, taking into account the delinquency and the deviance of certain young people. It is relevant to wonder about the issues which rise from this different conceptualization of their street experience. Indeed, without denying the negative effects of life in the street, we try to put forward the positive of this experience in terms of a marginalize socialization in the street.

Keywords

• identity
• street youth
• marginality
• assisting peers
• socialization
• social intervention