‘Nothing happens here, but that’s ok’: reflexivity, immobility and staying among young people in marginalised rural locations

Research and policy analysis often presumes a ‘mobility imperative’ in respect of rural youth; to ‘get on’ they have to ‘get out’. Those who stay, therefore, tend to be depicted as socially and economically deficient, backward, lacking agency and ‘left behind’. The aim of our paper is to provide a corrective to this sort of thinking. We present new, extensive, qualitative, longitudinal research conducted with fifty young men and women who have chosen to stay in rural, ‘Peripheral Denmark’. Our sample were doubly marginalised; by the lack of opportunities of their localities and by their lack of progress and achievement in their school-to-work transitions. We found that young people practised an intriguing and complex emotional reflexivity about staying. Our analysis documents their entangled feelings of ‘stuckness’ (e.g. in relation to lack of transport and services, isolation from typical youth leisure, in on-going family commitments) and of ‘stillness’ (e.g. in the serenity of nature, in family belonging and in educational support). In conclusion, we suggest that the concept of ‘reflexive stayers’ captures these young people’s lived experiences of ‘stillness’ and ‘stuckness’ and could be beneficial to future research and policy analysis on rural youth, mobility and marginalisation.