From Inclusion to Indifference

This paper studies cultural openness as a cultural resource of Dutch urban youth. Young urban inhabitants navigate encounters with diversity on a daily basis, and often have a multicultural background themselves. This research consists of 20 in-depth interviews with urbanites aged 18 to 20 years old, using a topic list, dilemmas, and a newly developed visual method. Building on research on cosmopolitanism, boundary making, and city culture, it develops its own framework of situational forms of cultural openness. Interaction with otherness is found to be at the core of cultural openness. The way young people experience otherness is addressed by uncovering social and symbolic boundaries between friends and school groups, and in the public sphere. The findings show cultural openness as a layered urban repertoire that can take the form of inclusion, acceptance and respect, or indifference. These forms of openness differ in their handling of boundaries: indifference ignores boundaries, acceptance and respect acknowledge boundaries, and inclusion stretches boundaries. This repertoire of cultural openness fits an urban environment where a highly diverse and dense public space is combined with private niches of similar people. In the public realm indifference gives others space and avoids cultural conflict, while in more personal encounters inclusion bridges differences. Urban youth experiences boundaries differently in various layers of social organisation: the private, parochial and public realm. Relationships between social and symbolic boundaries are suggested to often be implicit, with unconscious connections between social categories and symbolic boundaries. The interviews display how the visceral part of detecting boundaries is easier for respondents than the literal part of explaining them. They display cosmopolitan actions and preferences without the reflexive capacity to explain them, or the moral discursive resources to express them in cosmopolitan ideals. Respondents in this research use both emotional and rational arguments in their reasoning about cultural openness. The latter is slightly more frequently used by youth with a migrant background and by female respondents. These findings ask for caution with research on cosmopolitanism based on argumentation, and for more attention to practise- oriented research, the visceral experience of boundaries, and different forms of reasoning behind cultural openness.