ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at how informants' sense of isolation during university is symptomatic of the discomfort they feel in social spaces outside Bankstown and with young people from non-Arab backgrounds. It considers a case study approach with two Arab-Australian young men enrolled in creative arts degrees, Usama and Ibrahim, to reveal how they become marked as outcasts during their time in university. In both of these case studies, the primary aim has been to show how university is experienced as a filtering site, where confrontations with weirdness and class privilege results in a retreat to the familiarity of Bankstown and an Arab-Australian local community. The prejudices directed towards the young men in the chapter, as well as their own internalised sense of cultural remoteness, are part of a 'class struggle made from the relationship between people and objects'.
