Young rural lives: strategies beyond diversity

Abstract

The experience and competence of rural young people has been increasingly recognized in a range of social sciences over the past decade. Research in a variety of different settings is demonstrating the diversity of young people's lives, but recently calls have been made to retain this acknowledgement of heterogeneous youth while working towards more generic or integrated understandings of youth geographies and so forth. This special issue draws together a range of contemporary work focusing on the lives of young people in different rural environments and cultures. This Editorial article discusses the papers and reports in relation to a set of strategies that may guide further development of rural youth studies. It is noted that a good deal of youth research has undertaken the important initial step of documenting the varied conditions of young people's lives. However, more integrated and conceptual understandings of rural youth can look to identify generic dimensions and processes that shape their lives in rural cultures, economies, societies and spaces. A framework is proposed to assist in more explicitly theorizing the notion of young people; the contexts in which young people live; and the negotiations and multiple relations young people engage in while constructing dynamic (often creative and sometimes contested) understandings and experiences of their worlds.