Youth, Place, and Social Class

Since ‘the spatial turn’, questions of space and place have been devoted still greater attention in childhood and youth studies, resulting in an increasingly rich literature on how class and place intersect in young people’s lives. This chapter explores three key concepts in relation to this: aspiration, identity and belonging. First, it focuses on the connection between place and aspiration to explore both subtle and more overt ways in which class and place intersect to inform young people’s educational choices and broader aspirations. Second, it considers how identities that are both place-based and classed are constructed and how place-based stigma are actively used in this process. Third, it explores how young people work to construct a sense of belonging in the context of disadvantaged locations. These three focal points should be seen as starting points for further explorations of the role of place and space in young people’s lives. Such explorations can attend to both the micro and the macro levels: how young people make sense of, or actively construct places and spaces around them to how spatial inequalities are (re-)produced in for instance educational policy, global development policies.