Emerging Adulthood in the Time of Pandemic: The COVID-19 Crisis in the Lives of Rural Young Adults in Finland

Abstract

This article discusses changes introduced into the everyday life and lifecourse dispositions of young adults in two sparsely populated regions in Finland during the COVID-19 lockdown period of spring 2020. By the age of 20, many of them had already spent some years living independently during their school years. Due to the pandemic, many had to move back to their rural home regions. This article shows that the sudden advent of the pandemic as a global risk and the restriction measures that followed affected these young, emerging adults in many ways, even though there were no infections in their immediate environments. Special attention is paid to their relationships with their remote home regions, which suddenly gained new, positive meanings in comparison to the global and national COVID-19 hotspots. The analysis is based on interviews conducted with 30 young adults in May 2020 and pre-existing longitudinal data from the same participants.