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In this article we analyze the formation of different identity models of Italian young people experiencing mobility. The article contributes to study the link between youth mobility and identity. It does so through the development of a theoretical perspective that combines Butler’s post-structuralism with Bourdieu’s category of embodied cultural capital. Drawing on this theoretical framework, we analyze the identity formation of young Italians who emigrated to Australia in the last 10 years. The data show the emergence of an identity made up of a complex set of interconnected levels, composed of an incorporated dimension that constitutes the basis of their roots and the performative part that represents the mobile dimension subject to transformation in the course of life evolution. This interpretative lens enables the understanding of how the process of incorporation is connected to the performative and self-transformative one of identity, but also how the different combination of fixed and mobile aspects defines different profiles of identity and a different way of perceiving being Italians.

Geographical mobility has become an integral element of the biographical trajectories of young people from rural areas. In this paper, we contend that theories of rural-urban inequality tend to unduly homogenise rural social groups and are insufficient to understand rural youth out-migration as a selective rather than universal practice. We draw on a statistical analysis of the social differentiation of rural youth mobility in Australia to argue that sociologists gain from further theorising the social differentiation of rural society. Empirically, we find that classed resources and stratified dispositions toward one’s future life are important properties associated with outward mobility. Theoretically, we propose the concept of rural social space to make sense of these patterns. Rural social space describes the material and symbolic hierarchies that structure the social differentiation of rural society. We conclude by suggesting how future research could refine the conceptualisation of rural social space proposed in this paper, by further considering the opportunities, practices and representations that distinguish the lives of different groups of rural young people.

The recruitment and retention of teachers in regional, rural and remote areas of Australia remains a persistent challenge. Greater awareness of and experience in regional, rural and remote schools is a common strategy adopted by initial teacher education providers to mediate this challenge. This paper examines the quality of connection between preservice teachers and a regional community developed through a multi-university placement program. The program adopted a multi-faceted approach to building quality community connections—fostering preservice teacher connections to a cohort of preservice teachers, to regional schools, and to a regional area. Findings suggest this tripartite approach enhanced the quality of all connections, positioning the program as a useful model for developing a pipeline of preservice teachers to regional schools struggling to find teaching staff.

Access to social housing is becoming more selective with allocation criteria requiring applicants’ stronger financial capacity or, conversely, proving their state of extreme vulnerability. This seeming contradiction results from two contrasting trends in social housing governance and management: a push toward adopting quasi-market privately funded models, on the one hand, and ongoing residualization processes on the other hand. Such polarization of social housing supply increases pre-existing divisions between insiders and outsiders. Young people are increasingly seen as outsiders in housing markets, a condition that exacerbates the risk of social exclusion and undermines the transition to adulthood. However, in the wake of changing approaches to the provision and management of social and affordable housing, new tenures are being used to improve access for young people while promoting greater involvement in community-oriented actions. Such tenures rely on a specific understanding of conditionality whereby units are allocated at below-market rates to young people in return for their commitment to engage in solidarity activities and help tasks for vulnerable neighbors. This chapter discusses this idea of conditionality and its effects on young people’s relationships within local communities. It shows that such relationships are shaped by complex, dynamic, and strongly context-dependent assemblages of individual human capital (e.g., capabilities, pro-social motivations, and attitudes), available spatial resources and conditions, and the fundamental direction and discretion of housing managers and practitioners. This conceptualization of conditionality discloses aims of tenant responsibilization toward both individual dwelling and community, redefining young people’s identities as resourceful tenants.

For over 30 years, the Journal of the Society for Provision of Education in Rural Australia has reported research and practice discourses associated with rural, regional and remote education, with the aim of impacting policy and practices relating to education in rural Australia. The journal, originally named Education in Rural Australia, commenced in 1991 and, with an increasingly international focus, changed to the Australian and International Journal of Rural Education in 2012. This article critically synthesises the content of the Journal, which includes 500 unique contributions. The articles were placed into an NVivo project and coded using themes derived from word frequency counts. The critical analysis identifies nine perennial themes that appear regularly throughout the 33 volumes: aspiration, success and achievement; community and relationships at the centre of rural education; curriculum, pedagogy and assessment; deficit discourses; equity, rights and justice; parents and family; resourcing and funding; rurality and place, and teacher preparation. In addition, the analysis identifies trending issues, which wax and wane over the Journal’s life. This article highlights the Journal’s important and sustained contribution to research evidence for rural education. From the perennial and trending issues, it is possible to see the interconnections and influences between themes, but also the absence of discourses in certain areas that calls for future research. The analysis has policy implications for education stakeholders, particularly given that some of the concerns raised by the articles in the Journal remain largely unanswered more than 30 years on. This article calls for change and challenges policy makers to address issues that we already know exist and have provided possible solutions.

In this issue of the Australian and International Journal of Rural Education, our authors explore the importance of giving voice to people whose lives and learning journeys are entwined with ‘the rural’. The articles reflect the concerns of Australian First Nations students and researchers, of young people and medical students on a vocational pathway, and of Nigerian people navigating risks in post-secondary education. They also reflect the voices of researchers who have contributed to the Journal for over 30 years.

This chapter brings together the fields of youth studies and theory of justice with the aim to open up a space within which it is possible to draw on different theoretical traditions and work from different places and cultures. It draws on political and social theory to outline the development of the relationship between social justice and youth in the last few decades. From a political theory approach, it states a critique of universal and neutral theories of social justice based on liberal democratic traditions that have tended to construct universal and impartial criteria to identify social wrongdoings and injustices, including those that directly affect the lives of young people. From a sociological perspective, it analyzes current and recent debates about social transformations and their capacities to create new vulnerabilities for young people. The chapter argues for a relational approach that renders visible the social, economic, and cultural context of young people’s lives. This approach also opens the idea of the pluralization of social justice in the field of youth studies to include claims of redistribution as well as recognition and participation and to challenge the western-centric construction of theoretical and empirical youth work. Ultimately, it is argued that a broader and more inclusive account of cultures and ideas can only benefit those interested in understanding and addressing social inequalities.

Attracting teachers to rural schools continues to be a problem in Australian education. Debates on how to remedy staff shortages are based on a better distribution of financial and material resources. This emphasis on distribution has sidelined the role of recognition theory in understanding the challenges of rural staffing. I draw on the social justice frameworks of Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth to argue that rural staffing challenges are anchored not just on matters of distribution but on issues that lead to the cultural misrecognition and disrespect of teaching and learning in rural places. Using data from a qualitative research project with pre-service teachers from a metropolitan university who undertook a six-week placement in a rural school, I explore how Fraser’s and Honneth’s frameworks contribute to illuminate that a resignification of the cultural value of rural education is critical to understand the root of the problem of rural school staffing.

In this research report we explore how youth from regional, rural and remote (RRR) areas experience higher education in a metropolitan institution. We are interested in their university experience, how it is shaped by the institution, as well as how students’ rural subjectivity and identity fits, adapts or is challenged in this new environment. Rather than focusing on issues of learning and academic progression, which are more commonly found in the existing literature, we approach RRR students’ university experience from the standpoints of welfare and their subjective experiences of feeling connected, or not, to their new environment. As they move to a metropolitan university, RRR young people are required to live away from their home and need to construct new spaces of sociality with other students and the university community. We examine the identity work that RRR young people, some of them also from a low socio-economic status background, have to do to negotiate new institutional values, norms and discourses, and social relationships.

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.

In this issue of the Australian and International Journal of Rural Education, the contributing authors explore the impact of partnerships and purposeful engagement in attracting and retaining professionals to regional and rural communities. Attracting and retaining a well-prepared workforce for regional and rural communities is developed through a range of partnerships and strategies and through a range of institutions – such as schools and universities. Small schools play a pivotal role in regional and rural communities and need to be proactive in maintaining their important status. Equally, universities also have a role to play in the development of a professional workforce outside the metropolis. Providing undergraduates with regional experience is a widely used regional recruitment strategy. Overall, these articles provide a fresh outlook and ideas to strengthen regional and rural schools and communities.

The transitions young people make from school to work or further study have become increasingly complex, fragmented and non-linear over the past two decades. In part this is because economic and political forces have enabled the boundaries between school and work to become blurred: many high-school students are now engaged in the labour force part-time and many who have left high school can only find casual work rather than full-time employment. Young people undertaking further study at university are also often balancing this with a part-time job. In addition, an increasingly precarious labour market demands from young people and young adults a lifelong learning approach to be successful in the employment spere of their lives. As a result, the pathway from school to work is not a simple one-way street or linear process. Many young people may decide at a later stage to re-enter education or training, and many may change direction completely after making their initial career and /or study decisions. All of the decisions that young people make during this transitional process tend to have long-term consequences: for themselves, for their families and communities, and, in a broader sense, for the economy and society.

The concentration of COVID‐19 cases and restrictions in metropolitan areas in 2020 resulted in a re‐emergence of the concept of the ‘rural idyll’ in Australia, with rural and regional areas coming to be associated with a safe and uninterrupted way of life. Implicit in this notion is the assumption that those living in rural and regional areas found their routines and experiences of belonging uninterrupted. We critique this narrative by drawing on qualitative longitudinal data collected from 2006 to 2020, which allows us to examine our participants' experiences of belonging in rural and regional areas both before and during the pandemic. We find that although our participants' experiences of belonging were largely undisturbed by the pandemic, this was not because their lives were not affected more broadly, but because their sense of belonging was established through everyday routines and practices that were maintained during the pandemic.

This research report examines the labour, financial and material impact of COVID-19 on members of cohort 2 (aged 33) of the Life Patterns program. It does so by drawing on data from a 2021 survey question related to the impact of COVID-19. This open-ended question asked the participants to consider the impact of COVID-19 in terms of their work, income, and ability to pay living expenses. The survey was completed by 470 participants, and 71 percent wrote a response to this question. Of the total cohort, almost a third decided not to respond to this open-ended question (29%), a third (31%) mentioned being negatively impacted by the crisis, another third (30%) stated no impact, and 10 percent commented that COVID-19 had impacted them positively (mostly through their ability to save money, although a small number also commented on the benefits of working from home, including having their partner helping in the house and with their children).

Society is about to undergo another significant and transformative change–a Fourth Industrial Revolution, according to Klaus Schwab (2016), founding director of the World Economic Forum and Professor of Economics: “we stand on the brink of a technological revolution that will fundamentally alter the way we live, work and relate to one another”. How the technological revolution of this forthcoming revolution will change the way we work, and the future of work more generally is becoming an increasing concern of governments, policymakers and the academic community writ large.

This new important book, Rural teacher education: Connecting land and people. Edited by Michael Corbett and Dianne Gereluk, the book interrogates the multiple intersections between people, land, rural spaces and education in Canada. While the contributors to this volume examine the perennial problem of rural school staffing and the importance of teacher education (as the title of the book suggests), the book goes beyond this topic to offer a robust engagement of the connection between land, rurality and people

Regional, rural and remote (RRR) tertiary students’ unequal access to, participation in and completion of higher education when compared to their metropolitan peers is a key area of policy focus for the current federal government. This focus led to the recent (2019) launch of the National Regional, Rural and Remote Tertiary Education Strategy focused on improving the participation and outcomes of RRR students in post-secondary education, along with a suite of regional measures intended to commence in 2021. However, while the strategy identifies finding and financing appropriate accommodation as a challenge for RRR students who relocate to pursue tertiary study, it does not include measures that fully address this challenge. This area of relative silence is echoed in the scholarly literature about Australian higher education, which similarly does not address the accommodation needs and experiences of diverse groups of RRR students who relocate to pursue tertiary study. This report presents the findings of a study designed to begin to address this dual gap in policy and scholarly literature.

The new and distinctive social and economic conditions that are explored in the chapters in this book demand new ways of conceptualising the role and significance of family relationships in young people’s lives, including viewing this support as a two-way stream and beyond financial realm to include emotional sustenance. Against traditional views of families as critical actors in the process of social repro-duction of inequalities or a youth transition approach that establishes a binary independence/dependence in youth-family relationships, this chapter extends the call for a more relational analysis of youth that includes their engagement with family to more fully understand how young people make their lives. We draw on longitudinal data from participants in cohort 1, that left school in 1991, to illustrate the relevance of family support against a background of declining institutional structure, and data from cohort 2 participants who left secondary school in 2006 to place the experiences of these participants against two central contemporary issues in social life: the rise and widespread of precarious labour and the crisis of housing affordability affecting in particular young adults. Further, we provide evidence of intergenerational practices of mutuality between cohort 2 participants and their parents. Ultimately, while these youth-family relationships show the complexity of transitions in late modernity and an interdependence and mutuality, they also bring into sharp relief the resilience of old and the generation of new patterns of inequalities, dimensions that are shaping a new adulthood.

As the Australian labour market restructures and the pace of technological advances quickens, reskilling and up-skilling are now required for sustained employability. Thus, many adults embark on further study after spending a period of time in the workforce. To examine the reasons for reengaging, and for not re-engaging with education during adulthood, we conduct analysis of longitudinal data collected from a cohort of people who completed school in 1991. The majority of the participants completed an educational qualification between 25 and 44 years and were thus, lifelong learners. Understanding the patterns of re-engagement with education and the reasons why some people choose to re-engage whereas others do not contributes to current policy debates about how education prepares Australians for life.

This research report examines the provision of higher education degrees and courses in regional Victorian campuses. It reveals the spatial inequity against regional and rural youth in Victoria due to the scarce availability of university options to study compared to their urban counterparts.

The last Australian government review on rural education reveals that staffing schools continues to be a challenge. To examine this problem, the paper draws on data from semi-structured interviews with pre-service teachers undertaking rural school placement. The aim is to address rural school staffing through a bi-dimensional social justice approach by drawing on a politics of distribution and recognition. While distributive justice has always been at the centre of the problem, it is argued that a solution might also encompass a politics of recognition that puts "place"as a significant category to understand the complexities of rural staffing.

Experimental studies of learning suggest that human temperament may depend on the molecular mechanisms for associative conditioning, which are highly conserved in animals. The main genetic pathways for associative conditioning are known in experimental animals, but have not been identified in prior genome-wide association studies (GWAS) of human temperament. We used a data-driven machine learning method for GWAS to uncover the complex genotypic–phenotypic networks and environmental interactions related to human temperament. In a discovery sample of 2149 healthy Finns, we identified sets of single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) that cluster within particular individuals (i.e., SNP sets) regardless of phenotype. Second, we identified 3 clusters of people with distinct temperament profiles measured by the Temperament and Character Inventory regardless of genotype. Third, we found 51 SNP sets that identified 736 gene loci and were significantly associated with temperament. The identified genes were enriched in pathways activated by associative conditioning in animals, including the ERK, PI3K, and PKC pathways. 74% of the identified genes were unique to a specific temperament profile. Environmental influences measured in childhood and adulthood had small but significant effects. We confirmed the replicability of the 51 Finnish SNP sets in healthy Korean (90%) and German samples (89%), as well as their associations with temperament. The identified SNPs explained nearly all the heritability expected in each sample (37–53%) despite variable cultures and environments. We conclude that human temperament is strongly influenced by more than 700 genes that modulate associative conditioning by molecular processes for synaptic plasticity and long-term memory.

Human personality is 30–60% heritable according to twin and adoption studies. Hundreds of genetic variants are expected to influence its complex development, but few have been identified. We used a machine learning method for genome-wide association studies (GWAS) to uncover complex genotypic–phenotypic networks and environmental interactions. The Temperament and Character Inventory (TCI) measured the self-regulatory components of personality critical for health (i.e., the character traits of self-directedness, cooperativeness, and self-transcendence). In a discovery sample of 2149 healthy Finns, we identified sets of single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) that cluster within particular individuals (i.e., SNP sets) regardless of phenotype. Second, we identified five clusters of people with distinct profiles of character traits regardless of genotype. Third, we found 42 SNP sets that identified 727 gene loci and were significantly associated with one or more of the character profiles. Each character profile was related to different SNP sets with distinct molecular processes and neuronal functions. Environmental influences measured in childhood and adulthood had small but significant effects. We confirmed the replicability of 95% of the 42 SNP sets in healthy Korean and German samples, as well as their associations with character. The identified SNPs explained nearly all the heritability expected for character in each sample (50 to 58%). We conclude that self-regulatory personality traits are strongly influenced by organized interactions among more than 700 genes despite variable cultures and environments. These gene sets modulate specific molecular processes in brain for intentional goal-setting, self-reflection, empathy, and episodic learning and memory.