Young Peoples' Life and Schooling in Rural Areas

Rural-urban disparities in Sweden, as in many other countries, have been somewhat of a blackspot--one that seems to have both diversified and expanded in recently. Schools are often fighting to survive in rural areas which are losing value in terms of wealth and cultural capital and rather than offering a route to social mobility and equality, they risk reproducing inequality and future life difficulties.

First, there are distinctive differences between various types of rural area, their education, and the responses and resistance to the present situation by those living there. Second, despite these differences we can still point to consistent patterns. Third is the issue of mobility into and between rural areas. Different social groups and places have different and distinct mobility forms and patterns, and educational availabilities are amongst the factors involved. Some are effectively imprisoned in their now increasingly depleted areas and experience intense alienation and flight instincts. Fourth, the introduction of market politics is also an important contextual feature in rural education and school experiences. This travelling package of metro-centric policies cuts very differently in rural areas compared with urban, as it also does in respect of rural towns compared with other kinds of rural area.

Professor, Department of Education and Special Education, University of Gothenburg. Her research focuses on power processes and democratic participation, and gendered and classed relations at different levels of education. This includes studies of sub/urban schooling, the importance of local context for relations in school, patterns of segregation, and young people's understandings of power and how they would act to create change. These issues are also central to the research group which I am part of (PAGE - Power and AGency in Education).

Professor of Education at the Department of Education and Special Education at the University of Gothenburg, and the Academy of Library, Information and Educational Science and IT at the University of Borås. Together with Professor Elisabet Öhrn he is involved as co-applicant and co-leader on a project examining aspects of rurality and education policy in Sweden; and he is also independently conducting meta-ethnographic analyses concerning educational justice and marginalisation in relation to transnationalist identity and global diaspora