Belonging, place and entrepreneurial selfhood

While research considering young adults’ experiences of place has been marked by a variety of approaches, within this diversity there are two focal points. The first concerns the relationship between place, education and employment, while the second concerns immaterial aspects of place such as experiences of belonging and attachment. Previous research has worked across these focal points considering, for instance, how young people invest in education and training as a means of enabling them to remain in or return to places in which they experience belonging (Cuervo and Wyn 2012), and how symbolic and immaterial factors can inform their mobility choices (Farrugia 2016). In this chapter we build upon such work by considering how a sense of belonging or attachment to place can be used as an integral part of the formation of occupation-based identities, using the concept of the entrepreneurial self (Kelly 2006, 2013) to conceptualise this. Specifically, we draw on longitudinal qualitative data to explore how some young adults have remained in meaningful places not just by undertaking specific education and training, but by developing an occupational identity or personal brand that is intrinsically tied to a specific place.