Belonging, identity and place: Middle-class Tasmanian rural young people in urban university

Informed by neoliberal ideologies, middle-class rural young people are encouraged to take responsibility for their own lives by actively engaging in higher education and its associated social opportunities, but are also having to negotiate a place for themselves as they transition from rural communities to urban university environments. Drawing on the concepts of responsibilisation, urbanormativity and mobility, we aim to better understand how middle-class rural young people negotiate place-based identities and belonging as they relocate to the urban environment. We draw upon data from a qualitative study using story completion methods to explore discourses surrounding relocating to urban areas from rural communities. Our data suggest that middle-class rural students can describe a narrative that reflects developing a sense of belonging within urban university with relative ease. However, most notably within our data are three outstanding themes that recur within students' stories: coming of age narratives, perceived advantages of city living, and the significance of social connections for developing belonging. Our findings suggest that rural students are negotiating place-based and social identities alongside and through structural, discursive, and affective facets of the mobility imperative, whereby responsibilisation and urbanormativity ideologies influence students’ understandings of place and mobility.