Carving out collective spaces : Exploring the complexities of gender and everyday stressors within rural youth leisure

Sammanfattning: Background: The reasons why young people are increasingly suffering frommental health problems, and the opportunities to turn this development aroundare globally debated. Stressors such as education, relationships, futuretrajectories of housing and employment all constitute important factors affectingyoung people’s mental health, leading to stress and achievement pressureespecially among girls and young women. The need to reduce individualization ofyoung people’s health problems, and instead encourage spaces for collectivesupport, action, and change has been called for in previous studies. Leisureparticipation has the potential to be such a collective space where young peopletogether can respond to stressors experienced in their daily life. Apart fromstudies on individual behavior change, leisure participation has been anoverlooked arena within public health and within research on young people’smental health and stress in particular. The complexity of youth leisure, especiallyin relation to gender and spatiality, calls for further investigation, exploring thesocial places of leisure that young people create themselves.Aim: The aim of this thesis is to understand how places of youth leisure areperceived and collectively constructed as social factors of youth mental health,and to analyze the strategies developed within these places to handle and respondto the everyday stressors experienced by young people.Conceptual framework: The analysis builds on four conceptual sections: (i)The stress process model explores stressors as situated in a wider social context,where social factors shape both the stressors that affect mental health, theresources to handle those stressors as well as the mental health outcomes. (ii) Thesocial practice theory highlights how social practices within places of leisure canbe identified as resources in relation to responses to stressors. (iii) The thirdsection of the framework takes on the relationship between stress, leisure, andpost-feminist perspectives on gender and successful femininity. The final section(iv) outlines leisure as a spatial (re)construction; emphasizing rural space andplace in relation to gender, stress, and precarity.Methods: This thesis builds on two sub-studies, generating three papers. SubstudyI is based on data from individual interviews with eight adult leaders fromdifferent leisure organizations (paper 1), and sub-study II (paper 2 and 3) is basedon an ethnographic multiple-case study with 16 girls (age 14-21) from two leisureorganizations. The setting for both sub-studies is rural northern Sweden. Thematerial from the ethnographic study was collected through participatoryobservations and focus group discussions using photo elicitation. For the first andsecond paper, thematic analysis was used as an analytical strategy, while a4discursive psychology approach (interpretative repertoires) was used for the thirdand final paper.Results: The first part of the results concerns how girls and adult leadersperceived and experienced daily stressors within the context of youth leisure.Such stressors were represented by the high demands girls face in relation toachievement pressure and time management, school, gender norms andexpectations, but also in relation to their leisure engagement. The second partexplores how the girls and adult leaders developed and negotiated strategies torespond to stressors, within the context of leisure. Responses were constructedthrough daily social practices within the context of leisure e.g. through sharingexperiences of stress with each other, based on a sense of belonging and trust. Inthe final part, rurality holds a central position in how place and space werediscursively constructed by the participants, in relation to leisure, gender, andstressors. Here, one of the main results in the third part was the complexity ofhow the participants’ constructed leisure as a place of wellbeing. In order to buildand maintain a space that enabled responses to stressors, the girls constantlyneeded to invest time, engagement, achievements, and emotions. In addition,places of leisure needed to be constructed in certain ways to be perceived asbeneficial and ‘positive’, for example as a place marked by respectability and selfdevelopment.This illustrates the precarity of youth leisure where educational andlabor-market opportunities have changed how young people now understand freetime as something that should be ‘productive and meaningful’. The metaphor of‘carving out spaces’ speaks for the effort the girls had to make in order to createand sustain such places; not only in relation to a successful femininity, but alsoin relation to the rural community and the survival of rural places of leisure.Conclusions: This study contributes to a better understanding of youth leisure,and how to build sustainable and inclusive places of leisure from a gender andrural perspective. Places of leisure and civic engagement are perceived asimportant social factors of youth mental health, and needs to be taken intoconsiderations when young people’s stress and mental health are discussed.Places of youth leisure are spaces where responses to everyday stressors can becollectively developed. At the same time, youth leisure is also precarious,demanding, and contributes to the reproduction of gendered discourses onrespectability and responsibility, both in relation to a successful femininity, butalso in making it work for the rural collective.