Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book discusses how the young adults recognise and deal with diversity in their day-to-day lives, and especially on how race shapes their encounters. It examines how the young adults describe a set of competencies for dealing with difference, which, they claim, is learned through growing up and living in multicultural urban spaces. The book addresses questions of identity by engaging with the young adult's routine experiences of being positioned as 'different'. It considers the implications of discourses that silence race for how people can talk about their own experiences, and the challenges this presents for being able to name racism when racialised difference is widely conceived as if absent of meaning. The book sets the scene of the research by introducing the multilayered and conflicting narratives that make up Manchester's various spaces.