Transformative Mo(ve)ments beyond Gang Engagement and Radicalization in Denmark
from Part III - Learning from the Margins in Cross-Contextual Struggles
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 August 2026
This chapter explores the process of learning to become a good Muslim, analyzing the boundary community and relations that enabled former gang leader Oruç Fatih to move beyond gang involvement and religious radicalization. The chapter combines practice research with mo(ve)ment ethnography to explore mo(ve)ments beyond gang involvement. We analyze how expansive learning emerges through engagements with Islam and a Muslim community. The dialectics of boundary community relations and transformative movements is analyzed over time and across different spaces, including a high security prison, a forensic psychiatric ward, and a Muslim community that Oruç Fatih becomes part of. Our analysis of the differentiated and transformative process of learning in his movement beyond radicalization and gang involvement challenges dominating Danish political discourses on crossover from gang involvement to radicalized Islamic practice – especially the common belief that Islam has a negative and radicalizing influence on formerly criminalized youth.
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