Class, place and mobility beyond the global city: stigmatisation and the cosmopolitanisation of the local

This paper draws on a multi-sited qualitative study of youth in regional Australia to explore the contemporary relationship between class, place attachment, and the imperative towards mobility and cosmopolitanism. The paper shows how local classed identities shape how young people situate themselves and their localities in relation to the rest of the world, and how experiences of mobility produce classed attachments to place. Here, place is made meaningful within the broader cultural politics of inequality in neoliberalism, in which the moral denigration of figures of the working class come to stand for the disadvantage currently associated with regional places. However local classed histories offer some young people the capacity for resistance, whilst others are unable to reframe their localities in positive terms. Moreover, whilst cosmopolitanism is a mode of classed distinction across the two research sites, this can be enacted either through practices of mobility, or through the repositioning of the local in cosmopolitan terms through the identity practices of middle-class youth. The paper therefore reveals new ways in which local social and economic histories offer young people different ways in which to relate to notions of mobility as well as to reconstruct the meaning of their home.