Emplacing young people in an Australian rural community : An extraverted sense of place in times of change
- Authors: Farrugia, David , Smyth, John , Harrison, Tim
- Date: 2014
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Journal of Youth Studies Vol. 17, no. 9 (2014), p. 1152-1167
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- Description: This paper explores the identities of young people in an Australian rural town in relation to contemporary discussions of place and social change. The paper responds to dominant narratives in youth studies which position individualised, reflexive subjectivities at the centre of a homogeneous, placeless modernity with an emplaced analysis of contemporary youth identities. Young people's narratives reveal an attachment to place created in community activities and day to day farm life, articulated in the language of the ‘rural idyll’. Narratives about imagined future lives articulate classed and gendered competencies and dispositions acquired in and through place, reflexively mobilised in life planning practices. Therefore, whilst substantial social changes are reshaping youth identities across rural places, young people's responses to these changes are forged in the way that identities are emplaced, as well as articulated in reflexive orientations towards their future lives. © 2014, © 2014 Taylor & Francis.
Rural young people in late modernity : Place, globalisation and the spatial contours of identity
- Authors: Farrugia, David , Smyth, John , Harrison, Tim
- Date: 2014
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Current Sociology Vol. 62, no. 7 (2014), p. 1036-1054
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- Description: This article draws together arguments for an interdisciplinary ‘spatial turn’ within sociology to analyse the subjectivities and biographical imaginings of Australian rural youth. It draws on a theoretical dialogue between theories of social change, and developments in socio-spatial theory in order to analyse the spatial contours of young people’s narratives, making a case for the significance of an ‘extraverted’ and porous sense of place for understanding rural youth identity. After a theoretical argument about the contemporary meaning of place for theories of globalisation and individualisation, the article presents two theoretically driven sets of case studies. The first discusses rural youth whose identities speak to the importance of place and ‘the local’ as resources for identity, while the second describes young people whose identities are ‘stretched’ across multiple spaces and locales. The analysis speaks to the importance of place for understanding the forms of reflexivity that rural youth mobilise in constructing their place in the world, and speaks to new ways in which to re-embed sociological analyses of youth within the spatially complex social landscapes of a globalised world.