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Our analysis of young people who have stayed in rural communities contributes to a ‘relational turn' in youth studies that rejects substantialist approaches to make visible the range of relationships beyond simply educational qualifications and employment that inform youth life projects. This relational turn recognises that ‘youth' is a product of classificatory struggles that become routinised into taken for granted concepts. Our analysis challenges the tendency to see geographical mobility as a normative component of contemporary youth transitions; and rejects the assumption that geographical immobility for rural youth is necessarily associated with disadvantage. Drawing on Yuval Davis' concept of belonging we use longitudinal survey and interview data from rural Australians that left school in 2006 and who stayed in rural locations. Drawing on this data we employ a biographical approach that focuses on their everyday practices and narratives of life projects to explore the dynamics of belonging to place and community over time. Our qualitative analysis of youth narratives supports a relational analysis of belonging to reveal significant similarities between the life projects of rural ‘stayers’ and those who moved to urban areas emphasising belonging through relationships to place, work, family and friends and the personal recognition these elements bring. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID‐19 crisis has brought into sharp relief the precarious employment situation of young people, precipitating a raft of academic and public claims of an unprecedented crisis that has disrupted young lives. Our study contributes to research on youth labour and transitions with new longitudinal empirical analysis. Our analysis challenges the "newness" of the precarity highlighted by COVID‐19, focussing on employment. It draws on longitudinal mixed methods data from a research project tracking the transition to adulthood of young Australians. We make use of the concept of liminality to analyse the labour patterns for this group of young adults for the past 5 years. While we acknowledge the impact of COVID‐19 on young people's lives, our analysis reveals a precarisation of labour conditions for a significant proportion of participants that precedes the pandemic crisis. We conclude that the tendency in some youth research and in public discourse, to depict contemporary events as heralding "new" crises for young people, obscures the deeper structural arrangements that continually position the young to take the brunt of social and economic policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]