This presentation draws together themes from fieldwork in six different types of Swedish rural area and their schools (Rural youth. Education, place and participation, The Swedish Research Council 2014-2017). In order to highlight variety and plurality, and to apply a relational understanding on what constitutes a place, we chose to include six rural communities/areas in our sample: both sparsely populated areas and small industrial, often ’de-industrialised’ areas, where each varied with respect to size, geographical location, labour history etc. In each of these communities we did fieldwork in one school class, grade 8 or 9, at the local school for five weeks (observations, interviews, conversations) (Jeffrey & Troman, 2004). The project draws theoretically on Marxist material spatial geography (e.g. Massey, 1994), and the centrality of studying different rural contexts in relation to each other and in relation to present urban norms (Farrugia, 2014). This also includes that participation and place must be understood together. To understand processes and experiences of participation we have had the ambition to recognize both the place itself – its’ local social relations, its’ labour market etc. and the relationships that extend the particular place (Massey, 1994). The views and positioning of different groups of students in relation to local historic and present relations are central. Key themes include youth images of places, strategies to maintain relations to place, and metrocentric criticism, school presentation of place, school values, various silences found in teaching, and school and cultural processes and change (including the special challenges and options of migration, as in the recent influx of refugees from Syria, but also of labour migrants). Social divisions, such as gender and class (including the various understandings of social background in rural/urban settings) are also considered and our findings of less stereotyped gender relations than in previous rural research are given particular attention.
