Towards a spatialised youth sociology: the rural and the urban in times of change

Abstract

This paper responds to critiques of the metrocentric nature of contemporary youth studies, situating both major traditions of youth research within a geographical framework with the aim of moving towards more spatialised youth sociology. The paper demonstrates that young people outside of major metropolitan centres have been marginalised from the dominant theoretical perspectives that frame both the transitions and the cultures traditions in youth studies, and explains this in terms of the metrocentric nature of sociological theory from the earliest theories driving work in the discipline. From the perspective of social change, the paper then situates the transitions and cultures of young people within a spatial perspective, demonstrating ways in which attention to the spatial dimensions of youth enriches analyses of both urban and rural youths. The transitions, and cultures, of young people in both urban and rural places are connected by macro-level processes which create the structural and cultural environments that young people from different places are negotiating. The paper concludes with a call for a more spatialised youth sociology that is sensitive to macro-level connections between different places, as well as the local ways in which young people are responding to social changes that shape the contemporary youth period as a whole.