Rural education and spatial struggles in a digitalised community

This paper examines how rural education is shaped through the interaction of local traditions, demographic change, and global digital influences in a small rural community in Sweden. The study forms part of a larger project aimed at advancing rural studies by addressing persistent gaps in research on rural schooling. Using an ethnographic approach, it provides an in-depth analysis of everyday practices in a single school and its surrounding community. The theoretical framework draws on Doreen Massey's relational understanding of place, highlighting how rurality is produced through the convergence of multiple social and spatial trajectories rather than through fixed or bounded identities. The findings illuminate four interconnected areas of tension: conceptions of land, conceptions of education, engagements with digital spaces, and imagined futures. Together, these tensions show how teachers, families, and students navigate uneven spatial positioning within the rural municipality, while children assemble aspirations shaped simultaneously by local attachments and globally circulating digital cultures. The study contributes to rural education research by demonstrating how contemporary rural schooling is embedded in the relational and political production of place, generating both constraints and new possibilities for young people's futures. • Uneven power relations influence education, land use, and future imaginaries. • Rural schooling is shaped through contested spatial relations in contexts of rural change. • Place is produced through the intersection of local traditions and digital trajectories. • Digitalisation reshapes spatial horizons without dissolving rural attachments. • Aspirations emerge from relations between local place and global cultural flows.