No abstract

The study investigates a common assumption from previous decades of educational sociology: Educational resistance seems to go hand in hand with strong local identity and belonging. In the early 1990s, the Norwegian sociologist Gunnar Jørgensen (1993) analysed how young people developed certain social roles in interactions with school and the local community. Based on school survey data from 2018, we present a quantitative analysis where we compared school rootedness and local community rootedness among students according to their educational resources. The study population consisted of students in upper secondary schools in Telemark, South-Eastern Norway (N=3510). Research questions: 1) Do students with less educational resources express less school rootedness and more local community rootedness compared to students with more educational resources? 2) Do students with less educational resources participate more in e-leisure, compared to students with more educational resources? The analysis showed that students with less educational resources expressed less school rootedness compared to students with more educational resources. Contrary to common assumptions as well as findings from Jørgensen's study, students with less educational resources expressed less local community rootedness compared to other students. Furthermore, such students had higher frequencies with heavy e-leisure participation compared to other students, and more of them had friends with whom they only stayed in touch through the Internet. We discuss results in relation to "the schooled society" thesis (Baker, 2014), youth culture, and place theory. Finally, we question whether the classic geographical term placelessness (Relph, 1976) is appropriate to describe young students in lack of educational resources.

The purpose of the article is to explore the role of participation in organized leisure activities in young teenagers' emotional place relations. Data from a survey of students in lower secondary schools were analysed using multivariate linear regression models to address the research questions concerning whether participation in organized leisure activities was associated with more positive community assessments in youths in line with early Nordic welfare theory and the role played by socioeconomic hardships and gender in the association. The results showed that for boys there were no indications of a general positive association between participation in organized leisure activities and community assessments, while for girls the association was modest. Students who experienced socioeconomic hardships had more negative assessments of community compared with well-off students, even when they participated in organized leisure activities. The author discusses the results according to a welfare theory approach to emotional place relations, supplemented by other theoretical perspectives. From a theoretical perspective, the findings point to social exclusion and inclusion dynamics instead of early Nordic welfare theory approaches to leisure participation. The author concludes that gender, class and school relations are strongly associated with young teenagers' emotional place relations.