Studying Empowerment in a Socially and Ethnically Diverse Social Work Community in Copenhagen, Denmark Line Lerche Mrck Abstract In this article I analyze empowerment in Copenhagen’s ‘‘wild’’ social work community and I develop the role of expansive learning to understand how to transcend marginalization. The notion of expansive activity devel- oped by Engestro ¨m and Holzkamp contributes to the further development of Cultural-Historical Activity Theory. I use a social practice theory of boundary communities to analyze empowerment as a dialectic between individual and col- lective movement. I define boundary communities as communities that overlap two or more groups and thereby offer potential for border crossing and collaboration among communities. I analyze the personal trajectory of a social street worker, Anas, focusing on dilemmas and possibilities for expansive learning. The ‘‘wild’’ social work community to which he belongs is constituted by an overlap of different groups in Copenhagen such as the social street workers, professionals from the ‘‘established welfare system,’’ and local street communities of young men with ethnic minority and Muslim backgrounds. Social street work is analyzed at the time of the street riots that occurred in Copenhagen in February 2008; social street workers facilitated meetings of opposing factions, parties who usually do not enter into dialogue. I discuss how boundary communities may support empowerment of individuals and groups by moving these parties in expansive directions. [empowerment, young ethnic minority men, social work, boundary communities] My fear in using the expression ‘‘empowerment’’ is that people may think that such a practice simply empowers the students, and then everything is finished, our work is done, over! FIra Shor and Paulo Freire, 1987 This work is about the role of expansive learning in transcending marginalization. To address this issue I start with the perspective of Paolo Freire, who developed a theory of how to liberate oppressed people of the world through education. He states: ‘‘I will go beyond, not too much beyond, in trying to explain better my comprehension of empowerment as ‘social class empowerment.’ Not individual, not community, not merely social empowerment, but a concept of ‘social class empowerment.’’’ (Shor and Freire 1987:111). Like Freire, I see empowerment as a social act related to social-class empowerment: ‘‘The question of social class empowerment involves how the working class through its own experiences, its own construction of culture, engages itself in getting political power. This makes ‘empower- ment’ much more than an individual or psychological event’’ (Shor and Freire 1987:112). Although anthropological empowerment studies often are concerned with the empower- ment of women in ‘‘the third world’’ (e.g., Scheper-Hughes 1995) in this article I move the Journal of the Society for Psychological Anthropology STUDYING EMPOWERMENT 115 ETHOS, Vol. 39, Issue 1, pp. 115–137, ISSN 0091-2131 online ISSN 1548-1352. & 2011 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1352.2010.01174.x.