Youth Beyond the City

Abstract

The purpose of this book is to situate the place beyond the city as an epistemological vantage point for researching youth. Existing frameworks about young people privilege large urban centres or ‘global cities’ and create forms of marginality that are at once spatial and epistemological. This book interrogates and moves beyond these boundaries, turning the margins into a unique position for understanding youth and examining forms of difference within and between urban and rural spaces. The book is organized into four sections: inequalities, focusing on the structural and cultural divisions shaping the margins; materialities, focusing on sensory embodiment and the lived environment; identities, focusing on place attachment and mobility; and temporalities, focusing on the history of place and the role of temporality in shaping identities and modes of place attachment. Across the book we develop this agenda through international contributions, with chapters across the global north and the global south, and including East and South-East Asia, Northern and Western Europe, and Australia. The margins therefore emerge as a complex topography of identities, modes of embodiment and processes of social change that cross spatial and epistemological divisions.