Abstract
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.
Introduction
This article draws together arguments for an interdisciplinary ‘spatial turn’ within sociology (Massey, 1999; Thrift, 2006) to analyse the subjectivities and biographical imaginings of rural young people. In this, the article responds to discussions of the contemporary significance of the imagination (Appadurai, 1996) for understanding social change, situating this literature within emerging critiques of the metrocentric and ‘place-less’ nature of sociological theory (Gieryn, 2000), as well as calls for more attention to the spatial dimensions of young people’s identities as a way of understanding the structures and cultures of youth (Farrugia, 2014; Shildrick, 2006; Shildrick et al., 2009). In a disciplinary area in which studies of the urban metropolis are too often taken as emblematic of youth as such (Cuervo and Wyn, 2012), a focus on rural young people allows the exploration of a hitherto marginalised perspective which speaks in new ways to the contemporary meaning of place in young people’s lives, as well as demonstrating different ways in which young people’s identities are ‘stretched’ over the ‘glocalised’ (Bauman, 1998) spaces of contemporary youth culture.
The article begins by establishing the significance of attention to rural youth identities for moving forward in debates about the consequences of globalisation and individualisation for identity, invigorating these discussions with an interdisciplinary focus on the spatial dimensions of contemporary subjectivities. After a discussion of research site and methodology, the article takes narratives from rural young people speaking from different social, spatial and structural locations as case studies for analysing the spatial contours of contemporary youth identity. The analysis discusses the relationship between place and the spatial reach of young people’s identities, as well as the constitution of the local through the cultural resources of a globalised youth culture. The article concludes with a discussion of the significance of a porous and heterogeneous analysis of place for understanding young people in a globalising world.
Theorising rural youth identities
Influenced by wider trends in sociological theory, discussions of youth identities have increasingly focused on the meaning and significance of terms such as globalisation and individualisation for the way that young people construct identities and navigate biographies. Drawing on theories of social change such as Beck (1992), Giddens (1991) and Bauman (2000), youth sociologists have described a disembedding of youth identity, or a decline in traditional or ‘given’ modes of identity construction in an increasingly globalised world (Ball et al., 2000; Furlong and Cartmel, 2007; McLeod and Yates, 2006), characterised by the disjunctive relationship between cultural flows and collectives tied to class or place (Appadurai, 1996). The origins of these changes are located in the global, focusing on the fragmentation of collective classed identities in a global post-Fordist service economy (Beck, 1992) and the increasingly global nature of flows of cultural symbols, creating a transnational ‘youth culture’ or style (Katz, 1998; Miles, 2000). In the Global North, these processes have resulted in the breakdown or fragmentation of traditional pathways from youth into adulthood (Dwyer and Wyn, 2001), creating the conditions for individualised subjectivities that relate to the world reflexively, governing their futures according to an ethic of individual self-actualisation.
These theories have been critiqued for creating ‘a utopian sense of open possibilities, generating new kinds of romantic constructions of youth and neglecting the materiality of lives’ (McLeod, 2000: 280). In response, new approaches have emerged which re-theorise the role of structural conditions in shaping the forms of reflexive identity mobilised by young people. While this regrounding has taken place in relation to gender and class (Adkins, 2002; Farrugia, 2013; Threadgold, 2011), sociology has been slower to come to terms with the significance of place highlighted by previous research on young people outside of youth studies’ traditional metropolitan focus (Ansell, 2004; Ansell and Van Blerk, 2007). The idea of place has been marginal to the history of sociological theory (Gieryn, 2000), due in part to the limitations inherent in the taken-for-granted concept of a single bounded ‘society’ as the basic empirical object of the discipline (Urry, 2000). The historical development of sociological theory has until recently positioned rural places in the past, and associated rurality with traditional, pre-modern, static forms of social life less sociologically significant than those in urban metropolitan centres (Cloke, 2005; Lockie, 2001; Thomas et al., 2011). As much youth research contributes to metrocentric definitions of ‘cool’ focused on the glamour and sophistication of the urban metropolis (Farrugia, 2014), there is a risk that rural young people’s lives may be marginalised from new theoretical developments in the study of youth inequalities (although see Ansell, 2004; Jones, 1999). This may be addressed by a more spatialised and emplaced understanding of young people’s identities in a globalised world.
Existing research with what Pilkington and Johnson (2003) describe as ‘peripheral’ young people can be situated as part of this move. In the cases of Liechty (1995) in Nepal, Pilkington (2004) in post-Soviet Russia and Rye (2006) in rural Norway, young people growing up outside the metropolitan centres of the Global North are positioned as peripheral to a modernity that is going on ‘outside’. The meaning of this outside becomes a resource, drawn upon in order to make sense of and construct the local. As emphasised by Rye (2006) and Haukanes (2013), young people in less deprived rural areas may construct themselves through a valorisation of the local, whilst disadvantage can create a yearning for utopic visions of a commodified modernity that transcends the boundaries of place (Liechty, 1995). The identities of peripheral youth are significant sites for analysis of the spatial dimensions of youth subjectivities, and as one of the exclusions that have contributed to the placelessness of much current sociological work, a rural and regional focus is one way in which to work towards this goal.
The production of the spaces and places of Australian rural youth
Many accounts of the spatial dynamics of late modernity focus on the ‘production of space’ (Lefebvre, 1991) through the increasingly dense concentration of economic activities in transnational networks of ‘global cities’ and the concomitant rise of the cultural power of ‘the city’ as centres of consumption, excitement and cultural sophistication (Harvey, 2006; Sassen, 2012; Thomas et al., 2011). These processes have also reshaped rural environments, as the manufacturing and agricultural economies that formerly sustained these places retreat or are taken over by global agri-businesses (Bourke, 2001; Brett, 2007). The outcome of these changes has varied depending on the way that local communities have responded to global pressures. While some places have been rebranded as tourism and service economies, others have suffered economic decline, leading to high levels of youth unemployment and a lack of services exacerbated by neoliberal policy regimes (Alston and Kent, 2009; Kenway et al., 2006; McGrath, 2001). Outmigration from rural areas has become a significant theme in sociological explorations of rural young people (Alston, 2004; Gabriel, 2002, 2006; Jones, 1999, 2004) as educational and employment opportunities are increasingly located in cities (Cuervo and Wyn, 2012), and definitions of ‘success’ are often based on mobility (Looker and Naylor, 2009). In this context, rural young people must ‘tame’ space (Haukanes, 2013) and time (Cuervo, 2013), managing a future that bears little resemblance to the social conditions faced by their parents.
An emerging literature has begun to demonstrate the impact of these changes on rural youth identities (Matthews et al., 2000). Shucksmith (2004) describes rural European young people mobilising individualised subjectivities as they plan for their future biographies (cf. Siebers and Vonderach, 1990) and Geldens and Bourke (2008) argue that new rural inequalities make a reflexive attitude to life more important for young people. Leyshon (2008, 2011) describes a changing relationship with the cultural signifier of ‘the city’, with some young people valorising traditional rural pursuits such as walking or hunting in opposition to the perceived decadence of urban youth cultures, whilst others maintain cultural identifications with the city in ways that make them feel ‘out of place’ at home. These issues parallel in important respects the ‘spatial turn’ addressed by Smyth (Smyth and McInerney, 2012, 2013a, 2013b; Smyth et al., 2008, 2013) in relation to resources and opportunities rural young people have to engage with in navigating educational identities for themselves. Even in a globalised world, ‘[t]he rural locality as a social, cultural and geographical background constitutes a repertoire of symbols that individuals use in different ways in creating their desired identity … kinship, nature, rural lifestyle, class, gender and so on constitute the basis for diacritical signs’ for identity construction (Wilborg, 2004: 429). Rural young people’s lives are embedded within social and economic changes that reshape their localities whilst escaping a purely local analysis. It is for this reason that we adopt a spatialised perspective.
Space, place and imagination
From an empty background that merely contains societies, space is increasingly understood as socially produced by what Massey describes as a heterogeneous ‘power-geometry’ (Massey, 2005) of temporalities: qualitative, heterogeneous, permeable and in flux with the social relationships that contribute to their production (Massey, 2005; Thrift, 2006). Alongside this, the concept of place theorises the ‘densely woven unity of life as lived’ (Malpas, 1999: 193). Bringing to mind terms such as ‘neighbourhood’ or ‘locale’, place is about meaning, daily life, habitation, belonging and intersubjectivity (Thrift, 2003). However, given that rural places have often been seen as idyllic sanctuaries from the pressures of modernity (Cloke, 2005), Massey (1993) argues for an ‘extraverted’ sense of place, drawing attention to the way in which places are embedded within processes that escape their lived boundaries. The interconnected nature of spaces and places raises what Smith (1993) and Ansell (2009) describe as the politics of scale. Smith describes multiple interconnecting spatial scales, from the intimacy of the local, to the regional, transnational and global. Ansell emphasises that young people’s lives are lived in the day to day of the local, but reflect global processes as they shape and reshape immediate social environments. Localities are open to the global and constitutive of the dynamics of a globalised modernity (Appadurai, 1996).
These theories encourage a view of subjectivity as embedded within immediate intersubjective contexts, but nevertheless spatialised in complex ways. Subjectivities may emerge through multiple relations and meanings that come from elsewhere, influencing how place is constructed and experienced. This leads Appadurai to position the ‘imagination’ (1996) as a site at which the spatial complexities of social and cultural life can be analysed. Dovetailing with this emphasis on the spatial complexity of subjectivity, Sneath et al. (2009: 14) describe ‘technologies of the imagination’, or the situated material and cultural practices that create ‘the particular vistas on which that which is imagined assumes its form’. Evidence from studies of rural young people reassert the importance of these technologies for constructing the local (Aitken et al., 2008; Geldens and Bourke, 2008; Panelli et al., 2007), especially when geographical inequalities exclude rural young people from the promises of a globalised youth: If peripheral youthful ‘choices’ are restricted at the material level, we also need to raise questions of mental and emotional horizons, of active fantasy, of planning, but also of hope and despair. (Pilkington and Johnson, 2003: 276)
The research
The narratives drawn upon in the remainder of this article were collected as part of a research project exploring rural youth identity in two Australian rural towns. Both towns are considered ‘disadvantaged’ by government statistics, and both have a large demographic gap in the ages between 15 and 35. Both towns reflect previous literature on the position of young people within rural communities: young people discussed the significance of close and supportive communities, whilst also lamenting the absence of ‘things to do’ (Evans, 2008; Glendinning et al., 2003). They are instances of Pilkington and Johnson’s (2003) ‘peripheral youth’. This article presents analysis of qualitative data collected through interviews with 46 young people aged 14–18 recruited through schools, employment agencies, youth services and community contacts made during fieldwork. This age group represents a period in which most young people are protected from future uncertainties by family, but are nevertheless under pressure to construct identities and plan for their future lives (Geldens and Bourke, 2008). Questions discussed many aspects of young people’s identities and lives, including their views on their communities, experiences of education, important relationships, different spaces and places that participants identify with, interests and tastes, and their plans for their futures.
The analysis speaks to theoretical problems surrounding the spatial reach of young people’s narratives and the way in which this reflects the local/global dynamics shaping and reshaping their lives. Data are presented as a series of case studies exploring the possibilities of a spatialised analysis of rural youth identities in a global context. This approach has been chosen because it preserves the coherence of the biographical narratives related by participants and, by highlighting the resources and relationships drawn upon in the articulation of each narrative, provides a means by which the spatial reach of young people’s identities can be understood as part of their relationship to their communities. Case studies are chosen as representations of theoretical possibilities that emerged in data analysis. As indicated in the analysis that follows, each case study is representative of possible combinations, articulations and reconstructions of ‘the local’ and ‘the global’ on the level of rural youth identities. Cases are analysed in terms of the technologies adopted, possibilities enacted, and the future research directions suggested by these young people’s practices. Thus the aim of our analysis is not simply (or only) to represent quantitatively dominant tendencies within the data, but to explore new ways in which rural youth subjectivities can be embedded within the local/global dynamics of youth.
The spatial contours of identity
Working from an understanding of subjectivity as a spatialised phenomenon, below we analyse the spatial contours of the narratives that rural young people in these towns told about themselves and their imagined future lives. The analysis is divided into two sections, each of which contains two narrative case studies representative of ways in which young people’s subjectivities may be spatialised. The first discusses the significance of locality as a resource and the consequences of its absence. The second problematises the local, showing how its meaning is articulated as part of subjectivities and imaginaries that are ‘stretched’ over multiple locales and transnational spaces. In both instances, analysis foregrounds the way in which spatialised meanings and resources are articulated as constitutive dimensions of identity, highlighting the relationship between these spatialities and the social conditions faced by rural young people in late modernity.
The significance of locality: Sam and Daniel
Two discourses surround contemporary understandings of the meaning of place and ‘the local’ for young people. One assumption, which drives disembedded conceptualisations of youth, is the association of contemporary privilege with mobility (Urry, 2007) alongside the disadvantages and exclusions of being ‘chained to place’ (Bauman, 1998: 45). Following this trend, Ball et al. (2000) describe contemporary privilege as associated with a ‘global’ perspective, and position an emphasis on the local as a narrowing of horizons due to disadvantage. Another predominant theme is the significance of ‘community’ – a term which young people from rural areas emphasise when describing their attachments to their local places (Rye, 2006), but which can often obscure inequalities and marginalisations through a vision of the ‘rural idyll’ (Valentine, 1997). With these thoughts in mind, the first two narratives presented here speak to the contemporary significance of locally emplaced resources and social relationships for the narratives that rural young people are able to mobilise in imagining their lives.
The first narrative is from Sam,
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who lives on his family’s farm just outside Littleton. Whilst changes in the viability of family farming has had a serious impact on both of our research sites, Sam’s family continues to operate a large farm that he describes as well established in the local area. Sam feels that he has established position within the local community, although he is representative of most other young people in his locality in describing his local community as both close and welcoming, as well as sometimes isolating. Sam is involved in the day-to-day activities available to young people in Littleton such as sporting teams, an important aspect of community life and belonging for rural young people also described by Tonts (2005). He is also involved in the work of the farm and feels attached to this place: … I feel pretty comfortable on the farm – there is always stuff to do there as well … Rousing, help out with the feeding and shearing and all that of stuff, it’s a bit of everything – we have cattle and crops. We go around the sheep when they are lambing.
Sam is invested in a range of cultural pursuits, and his discussion focuses in particular on playing music. In his account of the development of this interest, Sam positions himself in relation to an ongoing family history and his engagement with local opportunities for developing this interest: Well we’ve always had a piano at our house and so I just started playing that even though it was out of tune, I couldn’t play anything and I used to enjoy that – my Mum plays and so does my Grandmother so I got onto that and there is a local teacher down out there and I get the bus over there every Tuesday night and I performed in a lot of good shows like the one this week, in the talent quest and the concert Thursday night I’m playing in …
Sam’s approach to the future is representative of a tendency for young people to foreground a relationship with their family’s local history in imagining their future lives. The influence of this local history persists for those young people whose families have maintained secure ties to the local area, and the social relationships it provides constitute the most substantial resource available to Sam in orienting himself towards the future:
So what would you like to do in your future?
I want to be a teacher.
Why?
My Mum is a teacher as well as my Grandmother. So it’s pretty hard to get out of it when your family is teaching. But I just think with all the things that I enjoy they all tie in like art, music and history and they all tie in I want to be a history teacher, an art teacher or a music teacher, it just seems something I can do.
What do your parents think about your choice of teaching?
They both encourage it. They are really good – Mum helps me work out where I could be going and all that sort of stuff and helps me she has all these tips for me that I could be doing and she helped me with Grandma and teaching tips as well. Dad also likes it as well.
What does your Dad like about it?
Well he says that it … ties in with everything I enjoy and that it’s not just about the money so it’s all good and if I enjoy what I do.
This is a highly reflexive narrative, emphasising the fulfilment of personal ambitions according to an ethic of individual self-actualisation. Nevertheless, it is constituted by technologies made available in the local, including the practices and relationships that allow Sam and his family to maintain an ongoing material relationship to the local community. Sam thus narrates a located and socially emplaced imagination of self and biography that draws upon and articulates dispositions and interests acquired within an immediate local and family context. The practices and relationships through which Sam is taming time and space indicate that his relationship to his locale is not a chain which limits his possibilities, but rather is constitutive of the technologies that he mobilises to successfully imagine his life.
The importance of localised resources is thrown into sharp relief when Sam’s narrative is considered in relation to Daniel’s, an incomer to the same local area who lives with his father. Daniel has experienced substantial movement throughout his life, but this has been due to his family’s search for cheaper accommodation in a context of financial hardship: We moved out of [an outer metropolitan suburb] for some reason, I’m not too sure, and we moved to [a nearby town] and rented out this house and the lease or whatever stopped and we had to move to another house and we didn’t have a lot of money so we took the easier option …
Daniel’s narrative calls to mind Cresswell’s (2006) distinction between movement, mobility and displacement, in which movement is made meaningful as either privilege or forced dislocation. Daniel is displaced, feels marginalised from the local community, and uncomfortable in his place: It’s kind of like hard … the only way you are going to fit in is like if you join the football or are a big drinker or anything like that … Me and my family are like ghosts in the town … The only people I meet are the ones I meet on the bus when I go to school … We don’t socialise that much, we just hang around our own house, that’s about it. I would like to socialise a bit more just I’m just not that comfortable in socialising and stuff.
Absent from Daniel’s narrative is any participation in the local day-to-day activities described by Sam and other participants as leading to an emplaced sense of belonging. Nor does he discuss any significant relationships as resources for thinking about who he might be and where he might go. Lacking the kind of family history and community relationships available to Sam, Daniel is unable to imagine a future described in the same self-actualising terms. His discussion of his future is more akin to what Nilsen (1999) describes as dreams, narratives which lack any social, spatial or temporal anchors and are thereby unable to provide the basis for meaningful practices: I’ve thought about a few things … when I was a bit younger I thought about being a stunt double for a movie. And someone told me that since I play video games so much I should help tell them what is good and help design them and all that. I’ve always wanted to be a little bit of a bullfighter.
These dreams are articulated from a position that is doubly peripheral, both from the urban metropole and from the locally situated resources that other young people (such as Sam) were able to build lives around. While Daniel has experienced substantial movement, this has made him what Bauman (1998) describes as a vagabond: welcome nowhere and lacking the resources of place. Unlike other peripheral young people described by Liechty (1995) and Pilkington (2004), Daniel’s transience and lack of community relationships mean that he is unable to connect with the outside in order to reposition himself within the local. His narrative describes the narrowing of personal horizons in the context of transience and rural poverty. For Daniel, mobility is not a reflection of privilege, but a form of displacement which forecloses possibilities and leaves him feeling like a ‘ghost’.
Together these narratives speak to the importance of place and the local for situating the technologies that young people draw upon in imagining their lives. Our next section complicates this by demonstrating how attachment to locale is reconstituted as young people draw upon the ‘outside’ to move beyond the possibilities of their local place, creating subjectivities that articulate connections to multiple places across transnational digital spaces.
Stretched subjectivities: Emma and Michelle
This section explores the possibilities available to young people in constructing identities and imagined selves that cross traditional spatial boundaries. To situate these practices socially we note Pilkington and Johnson’s (2003) observation that occupying a position ‘peripheral’ to the Northern metropole forces young people to draw upon and position themselves in relation to an ‘outside’, the meaning of which is implicated in the construction of the local. For young people in Littleton and Goldtown, this imperative is strengthened by widening inequalities between the city and the country, creating a consensus amongst many young people that the resources for managing the future will come from outside. The wide availability of ‘youth culture’ that valorises the urban metropolis constitutes a technology for this spatialisation, allowing a reconstitution of the local through the appropriation of popular cultural symbols and narratives. The two case studies here are representative of practices through which young people reimagined the local through a relation to the outside, and show ways in which this may take place for young people with few locally available options.
Our first case study is Emma, who lives in Goldtown. Emma’s family are incomers, having moved to Goldtown from an outer suburb of the state capital, a large metropolitan ‘global’ city. Emma’s father holds a nursing qualification and works as a clinician at the local prison, whilst her mother is a chef at one of the local pubs. Emma begins the interview describing herself as a ‘gamer’, drawing a distinction between those who might play games casually, and those who spend a lot of time on games, to the point where involvement in gaming becomes a significant aspect of their identity. Emma’s involvement in video games, and other online practices to be described below, began through playing games with her father. Through increasing immersion, this now constitutes the main activity she shares with friends. Emma is part of a small group of gamers in her local town, although her significant relationships extend beyond this place.
Emma’s discussion of the significant practices and relationships that make up her identity problematises the social context of ‘the local’: discussing her local place, Emma does not discuss the availability (or lack thereof) of activities for young people in the town, and her discussion of significant relationships in her local place focuses on a small group of other gamers who she is in daily contact with at school. Emma’s most significant involvement is in ‘massive online multiplayer’ games with a significant social element. The game Emma plays (‘League of Legends’) boasts 32 million active players, 12 million of whom play daily (McManus, 2012). Online games of this kind provide many opportunities for social interaction between players and have been described as increasingly significant sources of social capital for young people (Steinkuehler and Williams, 2006). Emma describes significant friends who live in the nearby state capital who she has met through online games, saying that a lot of her life is online, and that she is usually online when not at school. In this sense, while Emma lives her day-to-day life within the physical confines of Goldtown, the relationships which appear as significant in her own sense of identity and belonging extend beyond her locale.
As well as online games, Emma spends a lot of her time creating digital art:
Well recently, actually, I’ve been doing concept art for a comic online and my name’s just been put in the credits so I’m pretty proud of myself.
That’s great. What’s the comic?
It’s called [name] and it’s about a little girl who’s out in the post-Apocalyptic world and she’s fighting zombies. She just met up with a gang of pirates.
Emma came across this comic whilst watching online digital art tutorials made by the author, a former artist for the company who runs League of Legends. While this artist lives in the United States, Emma has formed an online connection which began with creating art related to his comic. She did not seek these tutorials out with an instrumental purpose in mind, but rather became involved in these practices and communities through immersion in them over time, beginning with her gaming and moving forward into digital art inspired by games and online comics. Emma now has an ongoing credit as the concept artist for this digital comic and imagines a future in this area: [The creator] does a lot of tutorials online for art and I was watching them and he was teaching me. Then he started up this comic and he was looking – he really enjoyed people doing fan art and I did quite a bit for him. I came up with a few ideas that he really liked so he invited me to do some concept art for him. I’m hoping [this will] be ongoing. He isn’t really as financially stable at the moment, as he’s just started but he has offered me a position as an actual concept artist when he can pay me. But right now I’m just volunteering and it’s a lot of fun. I have a couple of friends online that are starting with game development and my boyfriend also likes to code, so he’s been doing a couple of games and I’ll do the art for them … I love doing concept art and I’m hoping to be able to do something like that as a job.
Emma says that she has invested most of her future hopes in a job with this online comic. Her parents are supportive, and have the financial means to provide her with the electronic equipment and programs required to make digital art. Nevertheless, she is under pressure from her parents to go to university, and does describe this as a fallback option. This will require her to travel, and the mobilities she is currently willing to contemplate are circumscribed by her attachment to her family and local place:
Next year I would love to get further with my art. I’m not really interested in doing uni the first year but I would really like to go to uni and actually take a course in Art so that I do have something to fall back on.
I’m hoping I can find a good course at [a nearby regional university] but I haven’t looked at it very thoroughly in that area but I know that there are some at different unis – there are actually online courses and stuff that specialise in this game art and digital art.
I would like to stay as close to home as I can because I’m not exactly ready to move out and I will miss my parents, so I don’t want to be too far away from them.
So you’ve got quite an active online life which takes you all the way to Utah but you’re also quite connected to here. Do you like Goldtown?
I do, I really do.
What do you like about it?
Just the closeness of the community – it’s a small community so you know everyone really and if you smile at someone down the street, they’ll smile back. You don’t really get that in Melbourne.
So while Emma’s interests, plans, aspirations and day-to-day life in large part revolve around a number of online communities, she remains invested in a very traditional vision of the benefits of life in a regional community, constructed against an image of an impersonal, anonymous urban. Whilst there are few ‘local’ resources to support this imagination, her plans are facilitated by a financially supportive family and a group of friends involved in the same digital communities. Participating in artistic and gaming communities that span the globe, she is able to invest herself in the meaning of her local place, itself constructed through an urban/rural dichotomy that valorises the local. Emma’s imagination can be located across multiple places, rearticulating relationships across spaces that transcend the usual distinction between ‘the rural’ and ‘the urban’, whilst nevertheless constructing these distinctions when making sense of her local place.
The same is true of Michelle, our next case study, although in this case the role of the local and the meaning of the rural participates in the metrocentric economies of ‘cool’ discussed above. Michelle lives in Goldtown. Her father is a miner and her mother is a cleaner. Asked about Goldtown, Michelle does not describe any attachment or investment in her locality, and distances herself from others in the town:
[I live in] Goldtown … Near the pony club … It’s alright … I don’t know it’s just where I live.
Do you like living in Goldtown?
Yeah – oh not really … It’s so boring … Nothing to do – the sort of people here are a bit weird … Drug takers and all that sort of stuff.
Michelle is similarly unenthusiastic when discussing her schooling, but becomes more animated when discussion turns to her music tastes. Her music tastes are cultivated largely individually, through music downloaded from the internet and consumed alone due to what she sees as the more ‘mainstream’ or ‘pop’ sensibilities of her friends (‘I don’t really tolerate the music played around them’, she says), although she sometimes travels to the state capital (two and a half hours’ drive) in order to attend concerts with friends that are unavailable in her locality. Michelle’s engagement with digital media is driven by her desire to cultivate these tastes and practices in the future:
Do you mind going to school?
It’s alright. I have to go because I have to go … I’m going to University too.
What are you going to study?
A Music Producer … I love rap music and if I could I was talented I could be a rapper – but I’m not talented so I thought making different beats to songs would be fun.
Michelle spends time planning and thinking about the future, but like her engagement with music, she does this alone, and local resources do not feature strongly in her narrative. She describes plans to study and to move out of Goldtown to the state’s capital, and dreams of one day moving to the United States:
I don’t know, I think a lot about my future, so I just like to think like I would look for places to live, University courses, yeah.
Where do you want to live?
Melbourne.
Why?
It’s more a bit closer to where my course is and [it’s] what I want to do.
So you have been to Melbourne a bunch then?
Yeah.
And you like it there?
Yep … It’s just that mainly everything is there like Universities – there are not that many Universities around here … I think if I got a bit of money I would go to America and find like a music studio there …
I really love America. I don’t know just everything about it seems awesome.
While her local place is ‘just where she lives’, Michelle is invested in the idea of an urban metropolitan life, and she repeatedly draws on and articulates the meaning of these places in her narrative. She reads biographies of rappers and other famous global figures, and fantasises about moving to the United States, a place that she has never visited. In this Michelle participates in the ‘transnational burgeoning of desire’ (Katz, 1998: 131) for an urban cosmopolitan existence also documented by studies of peripheral youth in the Global South (Evans, 2008; Liechty, 1995). This desire is Michelle’s main ‘anchor’ for imagining a place beyond her alienation from the local, and provides her with a sense of optimism and security:
I was really stuck on what to do in the future – like I had crazy ideas of things to do but listening to rap music and stuff like really thinking, I really want to do something with music.
So overall when you think about the future do you feel nervous or do you feel good, optimistic?
I feel excited because like I think big, in the future to be working for some really big record company and all that sort of stuff like being famous and everybody wanting to come to me to do their music.
The spatial contours of Michelle’s identity transcend any simple distinction between the urban and the rural, or the local and the global. In one sense, her narrative stretches across multiple places, articulating an identity anchored in her consumption of hip hop, her experiences of the urban and an idealised (although vague) vision of the ‘awesome’ United States. In this sense, the practices and meanings that Michelle foregrounds in describing herself and her imagined life are drawn from metropolitan youth and popular cultures with very little to do with day-to-day life in her local place, the meanings of which are articulated from a position that she intentionally distances from the rest of her town. Whilst they provide her with hope for the future, these practices also position Michelle as one of the ‘peripheral youth’ (Pilkington and Johnson, 2003), excluded from metrocentric economies of cultural distinction (Farrugia, 2014) in a place where ‘nothing happens’. In this sense, her narrative rearticulates traditional distinctions between the urban and the rural from within an imagined global community in which ‘the city’ is constructed as the place where modern social life takes place, and ‘the country’ is understood to be unsophisticated and lacking excitement. Like Emma, Michelle’s narrative stretches across these dichotomies whilst nevertheless reinstating them as the basis for her investments in place. However, unlike Emma who has strong material and interpersonal support for her imagined future, for Michelle a strong investment in the idea of an urban lifestyle means alienation from her local place.
Discussion: Relocating the local
The case study approach taken here has enabled us to explore possible ways in which the local and the global are rearticulated and reimagined through the situated technologies available to young people in these two regional communities. Growing up in places that are peripheral to the cultural ideal of a globalised metropolitan youth culture, these case studies demonstrate different ways in which rural young people’s imaginations may be spatially embedded. Central to this is both the repositioning and reconstruction of the local as a site for identity construction. This is the case even for those young people who draw on globally available cultures to imagine a place beyond the local. For Sam, his family’s ongoing connection to the local and viable family farm mean that he is able to reflexively situate himself in a space and time that is not constrained by the idea of himself as peripheral, whilst Daniel’s displacement situates him as a ‘ghost’ lacking the resources to imagine this future. Whilst Emma and Michelle both work at transcending locally available opportunities, the global technologies they draw upon necessitate a rearticulation of the local in line with the material and interpersonal resources available to each. These technologies (cf. Sneath et al., 2009) reposition young people within a peripheral site that is negotiated through participation in transnational cultural spaces. In each case, young people’s imaginations are constituted through spatially complex practices that draw reflexively on available technologies in responding to the cultural demands of late modernity.
We have shown examples of ways in which rural youth may reflexively mobilise the technologies of place, drawing on local resources to relate to the outside and reconstituting the local on the basis of the economies of cultural distinction provided by a globalised youth culture. In this, young people in rural Australia participate in the construction and contestation of the periphery also documented by studies in Asia, Africa and Russia (Katz, 1998; Liechty, 1995; Pilkington, 2004). As emphasised by contemporary spatial theorists, the places that peripheral young people occupy are permeable and heterogeneous, imbricated within the global dynamics that produce the cultural and economic influence of the urban metropolis as well as the meaning and significance of ‘the rural’. This permeability is reflected in the forms of reflexivity that young people mobilise in constructing their place in the world, and speaks to new ways in which to approach the contemporary significance of place for rural young people in a globalised modernity. As emphasised by Appadurai (1996), the imagination is a site for the negotiation and contestation of cultural distinctions within globalisation, and the spatial contours of these young people’s subjectivities emerge from new and creative articulations of local resources and global cultural flows. Situating rural and regional young people’s imaginations within these processes demonstrates new dimensions of old inequalities, and suggests the importance of a more spatialised understanding of contemporary youth subjectivities.
Footnotes
Funding
This research was supported by an Australian Federal Government ‘Collaborative Research Networks’ grant.