Umeå universitets logga

In research, policy, and the media, urban young people have been a symbol of the future. However, rarely have young people living in rural areas been seen as such; rather, rurality has been portrayed as old-fashioned, backward, and associated with the past (Farrugia & Ravn, 2022), particularly if they stayed and imagined building a life where they grew up (Østergaard et al., 2024; Vehkalahti et al., 2024). In this chapter, we unfold young people’s future imaginations and compare among those who grew up in different rural areas in four Nordic countries: Finland, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. We reveal how they imagine their future and also how this imagination affects them, not only in terms of their future lives but also their everyday lives (Adams, Futures imperfect: A reflection on challenges. Sociology, 57(2): 279–287. https://doi.org/10.1177/00380385221113478, 2023; Adam & Groves, Future matters: Action, knowledge, ethics. Brill, 2007; Beckert & Suckert, The future as a social fact. The analysis of perceptions of the future in sociology. Poetics, 84. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.poetic.2020.101499, 2021).