"Most of the People My Age Tend to Move Out"

Abstract

Universities are as a means of leaving for the city for young people living increasingly precarious and mobile lives. This article explores how male university students (aged 18-25) talk about, and belong to, the places they inhabit in Greater Manchester, England. Drawing on mixed-methods data collection from survey responses and in-depth semi-structured interviews, this article finds that while young men embrace liquid understandings of place, they express tensions between "insiders" and "outsiders." While universities appear to be significant places for male university students, only half the participants reported feelings of belonging to university communities. Consequently, this article proposes recommendations for universities, in order to ensure male university students feel they can open up to staff, thereby enabling them to feel part of a "learning community"-a key theme of the National Student Survey.The focus of this article is on young male university students in the metropolitan county of Greater Manchester, England. This interdisciplinary article works at the intersection of human geography, sociology, and sociolinguistics to investigate the places young male students inhabit, along with bringing to the fore their sense of belonging and the communities they choose to belong to during university. Male university students in our study highlighted the complexity of being "of place" or "in place," as well as "belonging to a place" and "belonging to a community," while leading rapidly changing mobile lives and navigating feelings of inclusion and exclusion. We argue, echoing Hernán Cuervo and Johanna Wyn (2017: 220), that in contexts of mobile lives, "young people build meaning through their connections with people and places over time." In this article, we open a window into the meanings constructed by these young men as they put down transient roots in the city.