I avhandlingen skildras vardagslivet hos en grupp unga som bor på landsbygden. Medan vardagen i regel ses som grå och trist visar avhandlingen hur unga gör den till något särskilt, meningsfullt och roligt, hur de gör förhöjd vardaglighet. Genom att studera ungas vardagsliv med etnografiska metoder och teoretisk nyfikenhet når studien kunskap bortom de problembeskrivningar som vanligtvis skildrar såväl unga som landsbygderna. 

Avhandlingen visar hur unga gör förhöjd vardaglighet genom utfärder i vardagens vidgade rum, genom att skapa och bemästra osäkra situationer samt genom sällskap och samvaro med människor, djur och prylar. Kunskaper och lärande framträder som en genomgripande dimension av förhöjd vardaglighet, och ofta förbisedda vardagskunskaper uppmärksammas. Avhandlingen lyfter fram värdet av det invanda och alldagliga och visar på behovet av att socialt arbete och liknande praktikområden uppmärksammar vardagslivet och förhöjd vardaglighet.

Today, the terms ‘young people’ and ‘rural Sweden’ are automatically associated with problems. Young people are associated with various worrying issues, such as mental illness, stress, pressure at school, or internet risk. Being young and living in a rural community is often regarded as especially problematic. Rural life is thought dull, and bracketed with isolation, lack of meaningful activities, and being inferior to urban spaces. In this thesis, these well-known problematics are set aside in favour of studying young people’s everyday lives in a broader sense.

This thesis investigates how young people in rural areas do everyday life in interaction with their wider surroundings. Young people’s doings are interpreted against those of adult ‘interveners’, the professionals and volunteers who work with the young and intervene in their activities and places. Applying a symbolic interactionist approach, youngsters’ everyday activities and their doing of everyday life were investigated by ethnographic fieldwork in a Swedish village. The thesis is based on data from observations and interviews with young people and interveners in the village. The thesis introduces an analytical framework for interpreting everyday life. A ternary framework, it comprises three dimensions of everyday life: heightened everydayness, unnoticed everydayness, and dull everydayness. The framework has been created in response to the study’s empirical material, and serves as an analytical lens throughout the study.

The results show that young people and interveners portray everyday life in the village differently. Interveners focus primary on the problematic aspects of rural life. Youngsters instead highlight heightened everydayness. In accordance with young people’s representations of everyday life, the thesis thus focuses on heightened everydayness. The analysis shows how youngsters accomplish heightened everydayness by being on the move, physically and virtually; engaging in indeterminate or problematic situations; and being with cared-for people, animals and things. Based on the study’s results, it is found that everyday knowledge emerges as crucial for heightened everydayness. The thesis concludes that everyday life is valuable. Contrary to general understandings of everyday life as grey and dull, the study shows everyday life as rich in content, meaningful, and fun.