Moving in through and out of place

Drawing on Merleau-Ponty, we consider young people’s practical, bodily engagement with the world; the body’s practical capacity to act. These bodily modalities or vocabularies are reflections of the way people live and move their bodies in, thorough and out of place. Place is central to our study, specifically what physical, geographical and institutional places make available to young people. Our intention is to map the opportunities to create meaning within the locality in which young people live, move and do things. The relationship between movement, space and meaning can be made by calling on new developments in mulitimodality semiotics (Kress et al, 2001). The ‘overwhelming world’ (Valsiner, 2006) becomes organised through noticing specific configurations of signifiers that act as hybrid assemblages. These in turn open up or close down meanings through lines flight or ubiquitous associative links available in culture. Methodologically, we have used video-audio-and movement data (video footage of walking tours and physical activities). We shall present four contrasting video clips of young people moving through and in various spaces. Our analysis then investigates the way place sets up possibilities and limitations in the formation of young people’s consciousness and specifically why some young people in post-industrial places manage to find ways to imagine themselves forward and think positively about their futures while others do not