Sticks and smoke

Abstract

This article focuses on a relatively unexplored aspect of youth mobility and transitions: the impact of urban middle-class family migration from the city to the countryside. In a context in which the material experiences and the symbolic currency of the urban and the rural are becoming ever more mixed, the article explores the role of the ‘push/pull’ effects of the urban and the rural as both material and symbolic resources in the construction of such young people’s identities, their structural transitions and their orientations. It does this from a particular perspective - rather than defining the ‘ideal typical’ aspects of such young people’s life course, it draws on biographical data from an ongoing qualitative longitudinal study of young people’s transitions to adulthood, primarily focusing on the biographies of two young women sharing notable consistencies in their backgrounds but stark contrasts in their trajectories and outcomes.