KU Eichstätt-Ingolstadt
Am Marktplatz 2
85072 Eichstätt
Franziska.Imhoff@ku.de
Franziska joined ‘Practicing Place’ in April 2024. She studied Economics and Cultural Studies at the University of Passau and Tourism and Sustainable Regional Development at the Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt. She also completed a degree in Tourism Geographies at the University of Oulu in Finland.
As a research associate at the Chair of Economic Geography (KU Eichstätt-Ingolstadt), she worked on young people’s practices of cultural self-organization and on public funding practices for youth cultural activities in structurally weak rural areas. In her PhD project, Franziska aims to extend the scope of this research to delve deeper into the geographies of rural youth.
Affective Geographies of Rural Youth: (Trans-)forming Places and Placings
My research explores the affective geographies of rural youth and the processes through which rural youths (trans-)form rural places. Situated in the Dreiländereck region — spanning northern Bavaria, southwestern Saxony, and southern Thuringia — this study investigates the affective attachments and socio-material practices of young people as they navigate the ambiguities of rural life. I seek to understand the impact of rural places on perceptions of self, community, and future in the urban-rural nexus. Contrary to a theory of modern alienation of the subject from place, my work emphasizes the enduring affective intensities of place and belonging to place, especially in a youth context.
Employing an ethnographic approach, my research aims to engage with the embodied, affective labor of place-making. I seek to emphasize the relational, dynamic, and often ambivalent attachments to rural hometowns, exploring themes of potentiality and diminishment – oscillating between belonging and isolation.
To conceptualize the relationality of youth, rurality, and place, I suggest drawing from assemblage theoretical thought. When places are thought of as assemblages, they become the focus of interest as an entanglement of discourses, practices, and materialities that foster highly affective processes of constantly (re-)assembling socio-cultural and material relations. This conceptualization also sharpens a perspective on rurality and rural youth as complex socio-material networks, while at the same time considering the discourses and narratives that reproduce rural youth and examining the extent to which these narratives are enacted, altered, or rejected by the subjects involved.