Rural exposures: Youth visual narration of place and identity in Québec

This article examines how place-conscious and place-based orientations can position the lived experiences of rural youth as meaningful sites of curricular inquiry, while engaging critiques of romanticised place and community. Responding to enduring concerns that mandated curriculum privileges metro-normative, decontextualised knowledge, the study explores how visual narrative inquiry centres students’ relationships to place as legitimate sources of curricular meaning-making. Within a mandated culture and citizenship course in Québec (Canada), a curricular intervention invited Grade 7 and 8 students (ages 12–13) in one rural, post-industrial mining town to represent their experiences of growing up ‘rural’ through photography and written narratives. Thematic analysis revealed rurality as layered, relational, and at times contradictory. Students moved between idyllic portrayals of tranquillity and belonging and ambivalent narratives of isolation, decline, and uncertainty. Intergenerational traditions, rural labour, extraction landscapes, and coming-of-age experiences emerged as significant dimensions of their social worlds. Students' community emerged as at once nurturing and normalising, their landscape the artefact of translocal forces, affirming why place and community must be engaged as contested constructs rather than unquestioned ideals. The findings suggest that visual narrative inquiry can create space for rural youth to theorise their own lived realities, disrupting dominant curricular imaginaries while interrogating the conditions shaping their places and possible futures.