2014/07/08 by David Farrugia, John Smyth, Tim Harrison · 56 citations
Agricultural and Biological Sciences · Social Sciences · #Aesthetics #Argument (complex analysis) #Children's Rights and Participation #Epistemology #Gender studies #Globalization #Identity (music) #Late modernity #Modernity #Narrative #Place identity #Political science #Reflexivity #Rural development and sustainability #Sense of place #Social science #Sociology #Youth Education and Societal Dynamics
paper · doi:10.1177/0011392114538959
published in Current Sociology 62(7), 1036-1054 (SAGE Publishing)
openalex publication_date 2014/07/08 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/25
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.