Abstract
Hernan Cuervo and Johanna Wyn (2012) Young People Making it Work: Continuity and Change in Rural Places. Carlton, Australia: Melbourne University Publishing. 208 pages. ISBN: 9780522860979.
Australian and Melbourne-based Youth Research Centre is recognized for its dynamic contributions to empirical and theoretical discussion within Anglophonic youth studies. For this review, I have chosen two books written by researchers of the YRC and published by the Melbourne University. While both of these books focus on the lives, opportunities and challenges of Australian youth, they cover issues that are universal in youth studies and provide a mirror that helps to reflect the state of Nordic youth and youth research.
In her book ‘Imagining Futures’, Helen Stokes employs the concepts of identity and identity narratives to investigate young people’s contextualized understanding of their futures. While looking at the conventional transitional stages, for example, from compulsory to post-compulsory education, the author criticizes transition as being an outdated concept. Instead, she employs a broader, youth-centred reading of transitions by taking into account different conditions and contexts in which identity work takes place. She focuses particularly on work-related contexts and identifies the types of work young people engage during their studies—part-time work, work placements and traineeships—as important sites for young people to construct their career, life style and student identities. The book draws on interviews conducted with young people, providing a revealing micro level reading of young people’s own understanding of the limits and possibilities concerning their transitions. This reading is counterpointed by a critical discussion of neoliberal tendencies in education as well as in society at large that promote a future of infinite possibilities, ethos of enterprise, free choice and individual responsibility. One of the key questions of the book is, ‘to what extent is the only future that young people can imagine that of a neoliberal subject?’ The answer to this is many-sided. On the one hand, young people are embracing neoliberal rationalities and accept the responsibility for making successful transitions towards future. On the other hand, they acknowledge the structural constraints placed on them and emphasize the importance of community and family relationships in regard to their post-school decisions.
Part of Stokes’s book deals specifically with young people living in rural Australia and illustrates how geography and family relations play an important part in their ways to imagine future for themselves. Hernan Cuervo and Johanna Wyn continue and broaden this discussion in their book ‘Young People Making it Work’. The outspoken aim of the book is to make the life of young people living in rural areas visible in a framework that does not reduce their life as ‘the other’. They quite rightly criticize the urban-centric understanding of youth as well as the naive categorization of ‘rural youth’ being too fixed to recognize the fluidity of new subject positions available for young people living in rural areas. As they state, their aim is to ‘explore the ways that young people live in or are connected to rural places and to understand how they construct their lives, rather than to attempt to define category of “rural youth”‘ (p. 46). Thus, while the focus of many earlier studies has been in examining why young people leave rural areas, it is equally important to illuminate the decisions of those who choose to remain connected to rural places and relationships. The discussions in the book move around four broad theme areas: age, biography and location; belonging; a distinctive generation and social justice.
Cuervo and Wyn summarize plenty of earlier studies and draw on quantitative and qualitative data produced in the longitudinal Life Pattern Research Project to illuminate the structural changes that have taken place in the Australian countryside and that have had an impact on the lives and opportunities of young people since 1980s. Many of these structural changes resemble the radical agro-rural changes in Europe due to the EU policies. While the authors acknowledge the common concerns of young people living in rural and urban areas, they highlight the particularities that stem from the significance of place and space. For example, the educational policies emphasizing the necessity to gain further educational credentials have affected all young people. However, for those living in remote places, education carries specific meanings as being a ‘personal infrastructure’, instrument that enables them to escape.
There are several connecting threads in these books. To name a few, first is the critical reading of the neoliberal policies, second is the focus on imagined futures and third is the research result on centrality of family and personal relationships and resources. Fourth shared point of reference is the criticism towards the notion of youth as a transitional stage as well promotion of the concept of generation in youth studies. Wyn, in particular, has previously examined the notion of generation as a concept that grasps the experience of youth in a way that contextualizes the experience within its social political and economic milieu (Wyn and Woodman, 2006). She and Cuervo continue employing the notion of generation in their book by comparing two life cohorts (generations X and Y) to illustrate changes experienced by youth living in rural places. Also Stokes suggests that ‘young people located in a marginal rural area, could be the beginning of an environmental generation’ (p. 66) affected already by climate change and the long-term drought. Most youth researchers agree with the criticism towards transitions, but there are those who say that we cannot afford to discard the concept either, and that the problem with the concept of generation is that it sweeps the differences between groups of people aside. However, as both of these books demonstrate, the societal conditions may be shared among young people even if they have varying resources to ‘make it work’.
From a Nordic and Finnish point of view, both of these books are recommended reading and give a lot of empirical and conceptual knowledge about how locality and biography are connected, how future is imagined in contemporary Western world, and how it is important to take a relational approach to understanding youth. Cuervo and Wyn’s book could have benefited of more rigorous editing, since there is slight repetition in the text, but the contents of the book are still thought-provoking. Considering the vast rural areas particularly around the Cap of the North and Eastern Finland, there is certainly a need for Nordic youth researchers to tackle the absence of youth living in rural areas in policy and research. Also Stokes’ book offers plenty of observations that resonate with the issues discussed within Nordic youth studies concerning imagined futures and strategies to make them possible. For the Finnish readers, the concept of identity may first appear alien since it suffered from inflation after being the buzzword in the early 1990s. However, as the book demonstrates, being interested in how young people see themselves and taking identity not as a fixed entity but as ‘becoming’, non-linear and multiple, the concept has a well-deserved place in youth studies.