Journal of Youth Studies

Østergaard, Jeanette; Pless, Mette; Blackman, Shane; MacDonald, Robert

doi: 10.1080/13676261.2024.2404919pmid: N/A

This Special Issue on Youth, Rural Places and Marginalisation, brings together nine papers from six countries – Australia, England, Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden – to explore young people's experiences of living in rural locations. We focused on rural youth for two main reasons: firstly, there are relatively few sociological studies of young people's experience of rural life and, secondly, academics and policymakers have tended to frame discussions about young people and rural places in negative terms. Together the papers here use a wide range of methods – quantitative and qualitative longitudinal approaches, questionnaire surveying, face-to-face and online qualitative interviews, ethnography, visual methods, ‘mobile probes', ‘walk-along' and ‘drive-along' interviews – in order to understand young people's everyday life. We were particularly interested in the stories of young people who appeared to resist ‘the mobility imperative' and chose to stay rather than leave their rural homes. Our introduction focuses on ‘rethinking concepts of staying'; ‘gender and the risks of staying' and ‘geographies of rural opportunities'. We conclude with a call for a sociological imagination of rural youth that avoids romanticizing narratives of ‘the rural idyll’ or which paints rural places and populations as backward or lacking.

Ristaniemi, Helena; Vehkalahti, Kaisa; Pöysä, Ville

doi: 10.1080/13676261.2024.2305895pmid: N/A

This article explores what staying rural means for Finnish young people who envision, or consider, a future in sparsely populated regions. The article draws on a qualitative longitudinal study of youth from three different regions. They were followed through qualitative participatory research methods since the age of 15 (2015–2022). The article opens new perspectives on the processes of staying rural by drawing on new materialist framework. The article suggests that staying should be viewed as a dynamic process in which different temporalities, materialities, and agencies intra-act, and which is marked by continuous decision-making and movement. The article introduces the concept of material-discursive practices of staying to highlight that staying is not only about individual or even human conditions but an intra-action of matter and meaning. Particular attention is paid to three material-discursive practices of staying by Finnish rural young people: (1) transgenerational practices of staying, (2) educational and career-related practices of staying, and (3) the outspoken tendency of ‘going against the grain’ in relation to urban youth cultures and normative expectations.

Østergaard, Jeanette; Pless, Mette; Blackman, Shane; MacDonald, Robert

doi: 10.1080/13676261.2024.2352716pmid: N/A

Research and policy analysis often presumes a ‘mobility imperative’ in respect of rural youth; to ‘get on’ they have to ‘get out’. Those who stay, therefore, tend to be depicted as socially and economically deficient, backward, lacking agency and ‘left behind’. The aim of our paper is to provide a corrective to this sort of thinking. We present new, extensive, qualitative, longitudinal research conducted with fifty young men and women who have chosen to stay in rural, ‘Peripheral Denmark’. Our sample were doubly marginalised; by the lack of opportunities of their localities and by their lack of progress and achievement in their school-to-work transitions. We found that young people practised an intriguing and complex emotional reflexivity about staying. Our analysis documents their entangled feelings of ‘stuckness’ (e.g. in relation to lack of transport and services, isolation from typical youth leisure, in on-going family commitments) and of ‘stillness’ (e.g. in the serenity of nature, in family belonging and in educational support). In conclusion, we suggest that the concept of ‘reflexive stayers’ captures these young people’s lived experiences of ‘stillness’ and ‘stuckness’ and could be beneficial to future research and policy analysis on rural youth, mobility and marginalisation.

Cuervo, Hernan; Maire, Quentin; Wyn, Johanna

doi: 10.1080/13676261.2024.2343702pmid: N/A

Our analysis of young people who have stayed in rural communities contributes to a ‘relational turn' in youth studies that rejects substantialist approaches to make visible the range of relationships beyond simply educational qualifications and employment that inform youth life projects. This relational turn recognises that ‘youth' is a product of classificatory struggles that become routinised into taken for granted concepts. Our analysis challenges the tendency to see geographical mobility as a normative component of contemporary youth transitions; and rejects the assumption that geographical immobility for rural youth is necessarily associated with disadvantage. Drawing on Yuval Davis' concept of belonging we use longitudinal survey and interview data from rural Australians that left school in 2006 and who stayed in rural locations. Drawing on this data we employ a biographical approach that focuses on their everyday practices and narratives of life projects to explore the dynamics of belonging to place and community over time. Our qualitative analysis of youth narratives supports a relational analysis of belonging to reveal significant similarities between the life projects of rural ‘stayers’ and those who moved to urban areas emphasising belonging through relationships to place, work, family and friends and the personal recognition these elements bring.

Keating, Avril; Benchekroun, Rachel; Cameron, Claire; Whewall, Sam

doi: 10.1080/13676261.2024.2337932pmid: N/A

This article focuses on the role of place in shaping the (im)mobility aspirations of young people in coastal towns. In the Global North, youth mobility has become a normalised part of the journey to higher education and ‘cosmopolitan’ adulthood. However, we argue that this is only part of the story for young people in coastal towns in England. Many of these coastal towns now face persistent socio-economic and infrastructural challenges. Against this backdrop, many coastal youth feel that they are marginalised within their towns, and that the town itself is on the margins - culturally, economically, and geographically. This sense of marginality simultaneously propels youth out-migration and stigmatises those that stay behind. The stigma associated with staying overlooks the fact that some young people do not aspire to be mobile, preferring instead to stay because of their familial, social, and place-based attachments. To make this argument, we draw on qualitative data we co-produced with young people in two coastal towns in North East Lincolnshire. In these data we identified three types of mobility narratives (Movers, Returners and Stayers) that help us to contribute to the existing literature on youth (im)mobility aspirations and place-based sociology of youth.

Eriksen, Ingunn Marie; Andersen, Patrick Lie

doi: 10.1080/13676261.2023.2270523pmid: N/A

The rural youth exodus has mostly been explained with the pull of the city. In this mixed-method study, we explore whether young people also experience a push to leave the rural community due to a lack of psychosocial thriving. The quantitative analysis of the Ungdata-survey among young people aged 13–16 years (n = 141,058) shows that girls imagine leaving more than boys, and also fare worse on many indicators for psychosocial well-being. There is a linear decline in girls’ psychosocial well-being the less centrally they live. We call this the gendered district effect. Contrary to expectations, we find that rural girls without higher education aspirations are those who least want to stay in the rural community. It is likely that a lower degree of psychosocial well-being is part of the reason that more girls in rural areas wish to leave their homeplace. The qualitative analysis of the rural village of Smallville (n = 21) explores this, showing that girls commonly wanted to leave to escape a toxic social environment, which also offered few status-filled work opportunities in the village. The girls were more affected by the rural community's restricting social norms, leaving girls with poor self-images and the wish to leave.

Wenham, Aniela; Jobling, Hannah

doi: 10.1080/13676261.2023.2283513pmid: N/A

Foregrounding the voices of young women in a deprived coastal context in the UK, this paper explores the intersection of place, class, gender and marginalisation. Drawing upon participatory qualitative research, the paper focuses on the following key themes: (1) how young women navigate perceptions of ‘risk’ through the everyday realities of the locale, (2) experiences of sexual violence and abuse (3) and finally, how normative depictions of ‘risky behaviour’ correspond to the accounts of women’s (sexual) agency. By rooting the analysis of place-based inequalities through a gendered lens, the findings help illuminate the complex relationship between structural context and the regulation of gender and sexuality. The paper also draws attention to the structural factors that reproduce class-based stigma for people who are deemed ‘at risk’ in places that are characterised as ‘left behind’. In doing so, the paper provides alternative agendas for policy and practice that aim to support young women who experience place-based marginalisation.

Areschoug, Susanna

doi: 10.1080/13676261.2024.2314502pmid: N/A

In the wake of deindustrialization, many rural areas in the Global North face challenges such as an ageing population, declining welfare systems and limited job and educational opportunities, problems that have been enhanced by decades of depopulation. Young people have left the countryside for careers in larger cities, contributing to stigmatization of those who stay in rural areas. In Sweden, however, statistics show a slow but steady trend of remigration to rural areas, which is described in municipal and state discourse as positive and necessary to ‘save’ the countryside. This paper examines the perspective of rural youth who feel differently about such counter-urbanization. Based on a yearlong ethnographic fieldwork with youth, the article shows how young men involved in Swedish greaser culture perceived the influx of urban (re)migrators as a threat to their rural lifestyle and the rural place where they wished to stay. This is interpreted as an expression of subcultural, place-based and temporal resistance towards urban and neoliberal ideals that simultaneously reinforce white, masculine values. As these young men will be part of a rural future, they must be considered in the formulation of sustainable politics for rural areas.

Rönnlund, Maria; Tollefsen, Aina

doi: 10.1080/13676261.2023.2259323pmid: N/A

This article addresses young people’s school-to-work transitions. The analysis draws on data from a Swedish ongoing qualitative longitudinal project spanning over 10 years. In this article, we focus on eight young people who grew up and still live in a small rural inland town in North Sweden where the regional labor market is going through a process of rapid reindustrialization after decades of industrial decline and welfare state retrenchment. The aim of the study is to explore the young rural ‘stayers’ transitions in a region characterized by strong economic growth, yet with long-standing challenges in terms of social reproduction, focusing on what kind of work they end up with and their speed of establishment on the labor market. At the time of the latest interview all but one of the 8 participants in this study had employment in local or regional industries, however, how fast they had managed to establish themselves on the labor market varied between them. Further, their staying on locally depended largely on regional mobility. We discuss their transitions in relation to the ongoing re-industrialization process in North Sweden but also what implications young stayers’ school-to-work transitions might have in relation to the wider social reproduction in the region.

Herslund, Lise; Paulgaard, Gry

doi: 10.1080/13676261.2024.2347980pmid: N/A

This paper investigates how young refugees settled in rural Norway and Denmark experience their new places of residence. We find inspiration in the idea of ‘contradictions of space’ (Kinkaid [2020]. “Re-encountering Lefebvre: Toward a Critical Phenomenology of Social Space.” Society and Space 38 (1): 167–186.) in exploring how young refugees navigate issues in rural life from housing, education, work and social life to their material surroundings, including the weather. Which experiences result in feelings of meaning and orientation, and which spur feelings of disorientation and contradiction? The empirical material is based on fieldwork and qualitative interviews with young refugees and local volunteers in rural Norway and Denmark. Despite several differences between rural areas in the two countries, young refugees’ experiences from within show many similarities and common experiences between them. The harsh weather, empty streets, lack of familiarity with the more formal community life in rural areas, long distances from sites of education, etc. create feelings of disorientation and contradiction, while socializing with other refugees provides feelings of community and belonging. Taken together, the two aspects drive their decisions to stay in or leave the rural area.