Negotiating futures: Intergenerational narrativity and place in the imagined career paths of rural youth

The aim of this compilation dissertation is to investigate how young people in lower secondary schools in rural areas orient themselves toward their future working lives, in relation to the social worlds they inhabit, including family, friends, and the local community. In a society permeated by ideals of flexibility, mobility, and urban lifestyles, a central concern is how notions of place and space come to matter in the temporal imaginaries of rural young people. The analysis draws on semi-structured interviews with young people attending lower secondary school in southern Sweden, as well as follow-up family interviews conducted with a subset of the participants and their parents. Across three studies, the dissertation examines how occupational and geographical trajectories are imagined and narrated: Study I through individual accounts; Studies II and III through family interaction. Theoretically, the point of departure is a culturalist approach, focusing on the meanings, symbolic codes, and scripts of social life. The findings show that while young people’s occupational notions and aspirations are deeply rooted in their social lifeworlds, future trajectories tended to be framed as outcomes of individual traits, preferences, and psychological disposition. This was echoed in the family interviews, in which parents frequently emphasized ideals of self-determination and the importance of not interfering with their children’s shaping of the life course. At the same time, when discussing occupational choice and geographical mobility, parental storytelling emerged as a key vehicle through which values, social expectations, and moralizing themes were communicated. Drawing on an interactionist reading of Paul Ricoeur’s theory of narrative identity, the dissertation demonstrates how plots, characters, and other narrative elements are negotiated and transmitted intergenerationally, despite an explicit discourse of autonomy and non-interference. The dissertation further explores master narratives in negotiating the future, identifying personal development as a central theme, articulated most clearly in parents’ accounts but also present in young people’s narratives. This is conceptualized as a ‘development imperative’: A normative demand for continuous self-improvement that shape visions of both occupational and geographical futures. Spatial mobility emerges not only as a practical condition but as a culturally meaningful passage, through which young people transform themselves in accordance with ideals of successful identity construction. For rural young people with strong emotional attachments to place, geographical movement can serve as a way to enact the cultural script of personal development, after which they imagine returning to a future associated with comfort and family formation. In addition to imaginaries of occupational life as tied to the cultivation of a ‘good’ self, the dissertation reveals how cultural scripts surrounding rural and urban spaces – and movements between them – are perceived, negotiated, and constructed.