2025/12/16 by Peter Erlandson, Ninni Wahlström, Anne Kjellsdotter +1
Agricultural and Biological Sciences · Social Sciences · #Education in Rural Contexts #Indigenous and Place-Based Education #Rural development and sustainability
paper · doi:10.1016/j.ijer.2025.102893
openalex publication_date 2025/12/16 · openalex created_date 2025/12/17 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/25
The aim of this article is to synthesise and advance current knowledge on the conditions and challenges of rural education in contemporary Sweden, with particular attention to how processes of digitalisation and globalisation shape educational practices and possibilities in rural communities. Drawing on qualitative data material, the study shows how place functions as an active force shaping educational opportunities: organisational closeness creates cohesion but also dependence, social embeddedness provides continuity yet limits aspirations, and geographical distance both constrains and stimulates innovation. Digitalisation appears as a pragmatic tool, a generational condition, and a structural response to isolation, offering new opportunities but also reinforcing inequalities when infrastructures fail. Culture is revealed as contested, oscillating between municipal strategies of high culture and families’ everyday practices that shape children’s belonging and place-based forms of belonging and recognition (Massey, 1994, 2017). Structural inequalities – of resources, geography, and technology – emerge as decisive conditions rather than temporary barriers. Using Massey’s relational notion of place, including her concepts of power-geometry and spatial divisions of labour (Massey, 1994), the study concludes that rural schools must be understood as situated arenas where local and global processes intersect.