Rurality and education relations:Metro-centricity and local values inrural communities and rural schools

School lunch is in general regulated through policies and agendas constituted by the perspectives of adults. In this article, we focus on children's lived experiences of school lunch with a special emphasis on emotions and how they relate to social and physical dimensions. This study draws on empathy-based stories written by 10-11 year olds (n = 171) from schools in Sweden. We identified three themes: Interaction and exposure, Routines and restrictions and Food and eating. The children's lived experiences of school lunch and the emotions attached to them are closely associated and intertwined with the socio-spatial dimension of school lunch. A pleasant meal experience seems to require harmonization between the physical and social space whilst negative experiences contain tensions between them, something that actors working with school lunch and school lunch environments should take in consideration when resourcing, planning and scheduling school lunch, and also when designing new school restaurants. ARTICLE HISTORY

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This study contributes to a body of literature that addresses relationships between space, place and identity, and their effects on young people’s ‘spatial horizons’. Drawing on ethnographic data from Sweden, it analyses youths’ identification with home place and how it relates to their imagined spatial futures in terms of staying ‘local’ or migrating. The findings indicate that locality strongly influenced the identity-processing of youths, but there was no straightforward relationship between identification with home place and willingness to stay in that place. Rather the home place’s perceived and narrated relation to other places, as well as its material conditions, social relationships and practices, contributed to the youths’ articulated views of their spatial futures.

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