Australia’s regional and rural towns and cities are experiencing significant social and cultural transformation, with young people front and centre of these changes. Today youth from diverse migration and class backgrounds are forging rural pathways across the country and making a home for themselves, their families and communities. This includes young people from humanitarian refugee backgrounds, those who have moved to Australia as labourers, students and family members, and others from local intergenerational migrant and settler backgrounds. At the same time, rural Australia has undergone profound social, economic and environmental change, all of which impacts on the types of rural futures that young people imagine, pursue, and are able to sustain.

Under these conditions, this project examines how young people are building and sustaining relationships with people and places as they build a life in regional and rural locales. It draws on qualitative research with participants from diverse economic and cultural backgrounds in one rural city of Victoria over a two-year period and hears from young people themselves about what it’s like to grow up in rural Australia today.

Funded by the Australian Research Council, Young People’s Mobilities, Relationships and Place-Making in Rural Australia is led by Dr Rose Butler, Senior Research Fellow in Sociology at the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation at Deakin University.