(Re)constituting the past, (re)branding the present and (re)imagining the future: young women’s spatial negotiation of gender and class

The themes of mobility and transformation occupy centre stage in many sociological accounts, where ‘movement’ references people and places in ‘new’ times, often without situating how movements may actually be embedding or reconstituting inequalities, spatially, culturally and materially. Attention to how gender and class may be reconfigured queries straightforward notions of change, even ‘crisis’, pointing towards the reshaping of exclusions and their intersecting dimensions. Based on interviews in the North-East of England, this article aims to explore younger women's spatial negotiations in the context of change and continuation, where regional efforts on regeneration can be conceptualized against the backdrop of de-industrialization and (urban) rebranding; the ‘past’, ‘present’ and ‘future’ sit uneasily in these (re)imaginings. These reconstitutions force consideration of the different forms and consequences of social transformation, negotiated in the dis-identifications made by women where, for some, their presence was marked as distinctly out of place, as opposed to others who could more easily claim a movement and placement compatible with the sense of regional change and mobility.