YOUNG

This article looks at how young people construct belonging over time in rural places in Australia. It draws on the intersecting ideas of theorists and youth researchers whose work supports the view that in order to understand young people’s lives, we need to seek a thicker, richer conception of the interplay among identity, place, mobility and performativity. We illustrate our argument using data from a two-decade longitudinal study of young Australians to provide a more nuanced understanding of place and belonging in rural settings. A longitudinal gaze over the lives of members of this generation alerts us to the manifold transitions and forms of making a life that are patiently constructed over time and through non-spectacular routine practices. The article contributes to a more robust spatialized sociology of youth by rendering visible the complex and intersecting registers of subjective and structural elements in young lives over time.

In recent years, a paradox has emerged in the study of youth. On the one hand, in the context of the processes of globalization, neoliberalism and precarity, the patterning of leisure and work for young people is becoming increasingly convergent across time and space. On the other hand, it is clear that young people’s habits and dispositions remain deeply tied to local places, with global processes filtered and refracted through specific cultural contexts. Against this backdrop, drawing on an Economic and Social Research Council/Research Grants Council (ESRC/RGC)-funded study of contemporary youth in Glasgow and Hong Kong, this article seeks to explore the role of the city as a mediating lens between global forces and local impacts. Utilizing both historical and contemporary data, the article argues that despite parallels in the impact of global forces on the structure of everyday life and work, young people’s leisure habits remain rooted in the fates and fortunes of their respective cities.

This article argues for a need for spatial analyses in the study of youth cultures and youth subjectivities. With this aim, we propose a theoretical framework drawing on concepts from cultural class analysis and human geography. Empirically, the article is based on 10 focus groups with young people (n = 80) in four different parts of Denmark. The interviews included a photo elicitation exercise and the analysis in this article focuses on one particular picture of two young ‘hipster’ men. By using the figure of the hipster as an analytical case, the article illustrates how individual and spatial identities are co-constructed, not just alongside each other (relationally) but also hierarchically. Hence, ‘place-making practices’ are also ‘people-making practices’ and vice versa. Through this, the article engages with discussions in youth studies as well as in human geography about the importance of paying attention to structural inequalities.

This article explores the concept of belonging in understanding how working-class young people construct themselves as ‘subjects of value’ in historically high-poverty areas now undergoing complex social class unsettlements and changes in visual repertoires. Dramatic changes to space and place raise questions for our participants regarding belonging as well as the boundaries of respectability and authenticity. Drawing upon empirical data from two case studies, we conceptualize belonging as a process of sense-making tied to place and value. We find that social class identity and locality play a vibrant role in the shaping of young people’s identities. In seeking to understand how social experiences of young people are lived within classed, ethnic and gendered life worlds, we draw on sociological scholarship of youth, place and space. We explore young people’s lived experiences in South East London and how they explain these experiences as influencing their subjectivities and sense of belonging.

Based on an ethnographic multi-sited fieldwork, this article analyzes alternative rhythms of youth culture. The aim is to illustrate how young people improvise and organize rhythms in the city as a part of their place-making. I develop the concept of a spatial jam session, which provides a framework suitable for analyzing spatial dimension of contemporary youth culture. Developing Henri Lefebvre’s rhythm analysis through empirical material, a phenomenological understanding of place and jazz theory contributes an analytical framework that takes bodily, material, spatial and temporal dimensions of the place-making practices of young people into account. Using the concept of a spatial jam session, I argue that a central aspect of young people’s place-making is being able to improvise through materiality, sociality, cultural norms and musical expression. I illustrate how young people create spatial and temporal obstructions in order to maintain a practice of improvising, which to these young people is a way of constructing meaning in everyday life.

This article argues for the utility of phenomenology in accounting for the manner in which spatial methods yield insights into the everyday lived experiences of young people that are not as easily accessible through more traditional qualitative methods such as interviewing. Spatial methods, defined as methods that focus on the everyday spatial experiences of young people and methods that ask youth to position themselves in space, have been used by the author in a variety of research projects, and also incorporate certain visual methods. Phenomenological concepts such as the spatial perspective, the web of relations and opaque subjectivity are helpful in understanding not only that these methods work well but why they are so effective. The article also addresses Pierre Bourdieu’s critique of phenomenology, responding to his concern that phenomenology might be susceptible to ignoring or overlooking the social and political contexts that shape experiences.