“I don’t hate living here, but…”

Cultural images of young people’s lives in the city and rural areas are characterized by polarization and hierarchization. The city is often portrayed as the natural centre whereas rural areas are positioned as periphery. This trend is supported by much contemporary sociological theory, where modernity is linked to urbanity and life in the city, whereas rural areas often are portrayed as ‘backwards’ or traditional (Farrugia 2013, Bloksgaard et al 2013, Paulgaard 2002). Farrugia underlines that the sociology of youth tend to theorize youth through ”…theoretical frameworks based on urban experiences which capture neither the lives of rural young people nor the spatial dimensions of the structures and cultures that make up contemporary youth.” (Farrugia 2013:295). By this, youth sociology tends to focus on young lives in urban areas, while there has been little attention pointed towards how young people experience life in rural areas (Bloksgaard et al 2013:188). Drawing on a research project focusing on young people’s lives in rural Denmark, in this paper we explore how dominant storylines (Davies 2000, Søndergaard 2002) of urbanity can be traced in young people’s narratives of youth, place and belonging. At the same time however, in the young people’s narratives there are also traces of alternative storylines where young people re-articulate and ’talk back’ at dominant storylines, and in the paper we focus on these elements of ‘talking back’ with the aim of reconceptualising the relationship between the city, rural areas and youth. References: Bloksgaard, L;. Faber, S. T. & Hansen, C. D. (2013): Drenge i udkanten – køn, stedstilknytning og uddannelse, I Jørgensen, C. H. (ed): Drenge og maskuliniteter i ungdomsuddannelserne, Frederiksberg: Roskilde Universitetsforlag Davies, Bronwyn (2000): A Body of Writing 1990-1999, AltaMira Press Farrugia, David (2013): Towards a spatialised youth sociology: the rural and urban in times of change in Journal of Youth Studies, 17:3, 293-307 Paulgaard, Gry (2002): Local identities in a ’globalised world’? Young 10:3/4, 95-107 Søndergaard, Dorthe Marie (2002) Poststructuralist approaches to empirical analysis, I Qualitative Studies in Education, vol. 15, no. 2, pp. 187-204 Sørensen, Hansen & Pless (2014): Unge i landdistrikter og yderområder. Et kvalitativt studie af unge i fire lokalområder i Danmark. Kbh: Center for Ungdomsforskning