The betweeness of being a rural youth: inclusive and exclusive lifestyles

Abstract

In this paper I demonstrate the ways in which young people imagine, define and create discourses of the countryside, in particular how they envision both the place of the countryside and their place in the countryside. I focus on how rural youth situate themselves within discourses of the rural and in so doing, I challenge previous constructions of the relationship between young people, the rural idyll and cultural marginality. Specifically, I assess the role and importance of place-myths and practices in the formation of identity. In particular, this paper offers a more developed account than previously conceived of how rural youth identity is formulated in and between complex social and material relations predicated on difference. My analysis takes account of the ways in which young people actively produce culture and experience and understand belonging and not-belonging, their different views of rurality, their production of an ‘intensive-self’ and the extent to which the countryside is, on one hand, enabling and nurturing (inclusive), and on the other, restrictive and prohibitive. This paper makes an important contribution to the geography of youth by presenting a framework for understanding young people in the countryside that is predicated on exposing conflicting and sometimes contradictory feelings of inclusion and exclusion.