Teen Diaries: The Structural Dynamism of Young People’s Experience of the Countryside

This multimedia participatory project explores how public space is central to rural teen agency in Stroud, UK. Against a background of neoliberal parenting, where the city is framed as a place of possibility, this project focuses at the ‘eye-level’ of school-age young people in the countryside. Debates on youth agency and structure are examined through findings which detail experiences of safety/boredom counterposed with danger. Binary thinking, often dismissed as too essentialist, helps to convey how young people navigate space, but these classifications are dynamic: they shift over time. Theories designed to grapple with the dynamism of the teen subject can lead to abstraction and foreground the importance of empirical research. Through participatory workshops I have formulated a new taxonomy of space, named structural dynamism, which informed an understanding of the relationship between the landscape and youth. Through practice-led research, I explored how young people instrumentalise public space in their own independence-building. The research acknowledges the significance of rural outmigration in the futures of younger teens and describes how they look backwards to younger childhood and forwards towards emancipation, potentially away from the countryside. The significance of oppositions was also evident in the participatory project methodology, which promotes agency, but reveals a counterintuitive outcome: constraint. Experiences of curtailed agency signal openings for autonomy, however. Accepting the possibilities of the counterintuitive affords an alternative narrative of maturing teens, who are both pushing back against rural structures and being carried along by them. The ‘messy methods’ (Law, 2004) employed are designed to engage with the dynamism of the teen self and the co-produced digital and analogue artefacts have been formed into an interactive documentary titled ‘Teen Diaries’. The fragmentary nature of teen experience is produced and explored through the structure of the i-doc and reinforces the importance of the relationship between methods and data (Lury and Wakeford, 2012).