Stay or Go? Reading Identity Through Young People’s Lives in Rural Places

The relationship between place and identity is at the heart of this chapter. The data is drawn from a study of young people who grew up during the time of New Zealand’s neoliberal reforms in the late 1980s and 1990s (Nairn et al., Children of rogernomics: a neoliberal generation leaves school. Otago University Press, Dunedin, 2012). These young people, who were in transition from school in the mid-2000s, drew on discourses inflected by neoliberalism to craft meaningful narratives of their lives in the context of family, friends, places, education, employment, leisure, and spirituality. The focus here is on four case studies of participants living in a small provincial town who were interviewed for over two (in some cases, three) years. Each one of this group had to consider whether to stay in their town post-school or to leave to pursue tertiary education or employment elsewhere. To many who had just left school, leaving town was perceived as “making it” in the wider world as though mobility and where one lives (or moves to) were physical manifestations of a “successful” transition to adulthood. Those who stayed “behind” were often perceived as unambitious. But this dualism belies the complex ways in which the relationship of these young people to their town developed during their immediate post-school years. Many left, but not all. Some stayed in spite of their desire to leave, others stayed because they could not imagine living anywhere else, while others left but returned after a year or so away. The chapter explores the intersections between place, biography, and wider social changes wrought by neoliberal policies, particularly those promoting higher education as the next step after high school.