Thesis

Extended travel in youth populations has dramatically gained popularity as new

generations look abroad to gain perspective on their own developing identities. The
unfamiliarity associated with such travel poses philosophical and psychological questions
that help to guide young adults towards new paths of self-discovery without necessarily
creating cause for the commonly perpetuated concerns of lack of stability, viability, or a
sense of belonging.

Argumentative structure:
● Developmental contribution - primary argument
○ Travel functions as an ego-constructive process (Kearns)
■ Travel offers a theoretical framework to explore liminal spaces
■ Loss of convention, exploration of completely new settings (mental
and physical) heavily contributes
○ new self-identities are very commonly formed in young travelers (Desforges)
■ Expand on the study conducted on first-time long-haul British
travelers where identity-related questions were asked before and
after their expeditions
○ newfound capacities for change are discovered as well (Amit 2)
■ Transformative capacity of liminality as it relates to rites of passage
● How is travel a rite of passage?
■ “Ongoing oscillation between structure and anti-structure”
● Secondary points (to help guide the overall tone of the work from informative to
hopeful and encouraging):
○ Viability - secondary point to help guide the overall tone of the work from
informative to hopeful and encouraging
■ Lifestyle migration - what is it, how is it beneficial, is it viable (Benson
& O’Reilly)
■ What costs follow extended travel? What barriers are common or
exclusive for youth travelers?
● reprioritization
○ Changing norms
 ■ Youth travel begs the question of redefining adulthood (Amit 1)
● This is due to:
○ Increased societal emphasis on individuality
○ The shying away from a series of “fixed stages and
roles” highlights a diversity and fragmentation of paths
○ Increased barrier to entry into more conventional paths
(ex. competition in college/job landscapes)
■ Brings up the question of priotization — what
about these things matter?
■ Lifestyle migration will become an important part of various societies
and even potentially a movement (Benson & O’Reilly)
○
● Summarizing conclusion
○ Travel relates to the development of identity how?
○ What misconceptions surround travel and are these just barriers to be
hurdled?
■ Yes - viability, stability, belonging
○ End on some note of hope - “get out there!”

Guiding question

My Senior Capstone project asks questions about what prevents young adults from full-
time travel and how these barriers can be overcome. It seeks to answer how long-term
travel affects lifestyle stability and someone’s sense of belonging, as well as in what ways
travel is developmental. I love the idea of traveling full-time after or during college and I
want to test the waters in terms of viability, discovery, stability, and belonging, intended as
a sort of pre-trail research. To narrow the scope of my project, I’ll ask the contextual
subquestions of “What factors, in the context of travel, contribute to someone's sense of
belonging? How does this affect them?”, “How are peoples' views towards full-time travel
perpetuated? How are they changing?”, “What effects are created by the instability of long-
term travel, and how do they affect one's ability to rejoin a "stable" lifestyle?”, and “In what
ways is travel developmental?”. I hope this project gives me a sense of what I am looking
for in my future excursions and allows me some extra initial wisdom to apply to my plans.

Bibliography:
Top 5 Sources (+1):

Kearns, Emily. “TRAVEL, SELF, AND OTHER: EXPLORING TRAVEL AS RITUAL, EGO LOSS,
AND RECONSTRUCTION.” Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review, vol. 18, no. 1, 2006,
pp. 67–67. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23566013. Accessed 9 Feb. 2024.

This excerpt is a brief review of a[n] (currently unidentified) intellectual paper that
articulates the theoretical framework for examining travel as a space to reanalyze
subjective constructs such as self and identity. The review articulates that an analysis of
Carl Jung’s work in the context of travel suggests that travel can function as an ego-
constructive process similar to the development of the self in a child from a
psychoanalytical perspective. The excerpt also discusses how it is valuable to examine
tourism, pilgrimages, and “ritual literatures” as mediums of transformation because they
are able to offer a certain liminal headspace that is stimulative of growth.

My topic has a lot to unpack from a psychological perspective, and it is up to me how much
focus I want to allocate toward this specific discipline compared to others. It has a great
mix of solid evidence and reasoning that don’t just limit it to psychological analysis, but
also is only a review of another paper so it serves more of a purpose of providing insight
and direction than it does for any kind of supporting evidence for my finished thesis. This
excerpt is extremely relevant to my topic and could be very helpful if there were more to
unpack from this resource (which I will keep trying to do).

Amit, Vered. “‘Before I Settle Down’: Youth Travel and Enduring Life Course Paradigms.”
Anthropologica, vol. 53, no. 1, 2011, pp. 79–88. JSTOR,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/41475731. Accessed 9 Feb. 2024.

This article approaches extended travel through a sociological lens and delves into the
connotations behind traditional “youth” and “adult” stages of life as they relate to the idea
of youthood as a justification for extended exploratory travel. The article states that travel
is often viewed as a vehicle for young adults to seek an escape from the conformity of
adulthood, but within that action, our definition of youth is expanded and our definition of
adulthood is further bound in conformity to certain expectations and “roles and statuses.”
Amit clarifies that “the more that the definition of youth is reworked to accommodate
changing roles and transitions, the less pressure there is to redefine the nature of
adulthood.” Redefining youth in more adjusted, contemporary terms limits the need to
redefine adulthood, implying that long-term travel is not something that must be lost with
the stability of “adulthood.”
Desforges, Luke. “Traveling the World: Identity and Travel Biography.” Science Direct, Oct.
2000, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160738399001255.
Accessed Feb. 2024.

This paper analyzes the formation and questioning of self-identity as it relates to tourism
consumption, and draws from empirical material from interviews of tourists from the
United Kingdom to look at the uses of long-haul travel within these tourists’ identities.
Narrowing the search for personhood through the medium of travel into three categories:
identity, subjectivity, and the self, the articles shifts the question towards the
commonalities and differences of these terms and how they interact with tourism
consumption. The paper explores the idea by focusing the evidence towards the moment
when the tourists’ made their initial decisions to go on their first “long-haul” trip, and the
moment of their return while considering how “touristic stories are used to present new
self-identities” (Desforges).

Amit, Vered. “THE LIMITS OF LIMINALITY: CAPACITIES FOR CHANGE AND TRANSITION
AMONG STUDENT TRAVELLERS.” Human Nature as Capacity: Transcending Discourse and
Classification, Berghahn Books, 2010, pp. 54–71.

https://books.google.com/books?
hl=en&lr=&id=LwOXCGA9G7QC&oi=fnd&pg=PA54&dq=2010+The+Limits+of+Liminality:
+Capacities+for+Change+and+Transition+Among+Student+Travellers.
+In+Human+Nature+as+Capacity:+An+Ethnographic+Approach.+Nigel+Rapport,+ed.+Pp.
+54-71.+Oxford+and+New+York:
+Berghahn.&ots=ZiJ2_yjBHA&sig=DVgp8XaB7BBddlacOIU_dto1Ots#v=onepage&q&f=false

This chapter focuses on questioning how youth and travel intersect in self-formation? Amit
says that “both youth and travel also call to mind the interaction between change as a
modality of personal as well as broader social formation,” and that even during the Grand
Tour through continental Europe of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, travel could
“serve as the basis for the cultivation of elite tastes among young British aristocrats” and
uses this to argue that youth travel has always held a fundamentally formative quality. In
this chapter, Amit dives into the transitions and demarcation of youth and how travel can
influence student travelers’ capacity for change formatively.

Benson, M., & O’Reilly, K. (2009). Migration and the Search for a Better Way of Life: A
Critical Exploration of Lifestyle Migration. The Sociological Review, 57(4), 608-625.
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-954X.2009.01864.x

“Lifestyle migration” has been a growing term to describe migration as a means of seeking
a more fulfilling way of life elsewhere. The phenomenon is quickly spreading but is
inherently disparate, and this article seeks to better understand and outline the
implications “for both societies and individuals.” The article defines the limits of the term
“lifestyle migration” while attempting to explain the growing trends in this phenomenon.
While the article has the initial intention to weigh causes and effects of lifestyle migration it
is also only the first step towards a “defining a broader programme for the study of lifestyle
migration” and notes that such reports are especially relevant today, given the economic,
sociological, and cultural impacts that such decisions can have by any end of the migratory
chain.

Stillman, Scott. I Don’t Want to Grow up: Life, Liberty, and Happiness without a Career. Wild
Soul Press, 2021.

Additional Sources:

○ Rethinking the Youth Phase of the Life-course: The Case for Emerging
Adulthood?
○ Widening the Gap: Pre-University Gap Years and the 'Economy of Experience'
○ Do Transitions and Social Structures Matter? How ‘Emerging Adults’ Define
Themselves as Adults
○ Youth Movements: Travel, Protest, and Europe in 1968
○ Mobility as Resistance: A Geographical Reading of Kerouac's 'On the Road'
○ Pilgrimage in Literature of the Americas: Spiritualized Travel and Sacred
Place
○ Edith Wharton and Travel Writing as Self-Discovery

○ https://medium.com/sojourners-heart/how-travel-affects-self-identity-
19b9cdd02440