This article studies the emotional landscapes of rural youth educational mobilities with a focus on the transitional stage young people find themselves in at the end of compulsory school in rural areas of northern Finland. We attend to emotional landscapes from a spatial perspective, investigating the 'feeling rules' that constitute the space in which the young people of this study navigate and negotiate their educational mobilities. In reading across the research material, including interviews with young people, ethnographic field notes and school materials and practices, the analytical focus is on the feeling rules produced at the nexus of national education policy and social and cultural norms in a particular rural and regional setting. We discuss how these feeling rules shape how young people at this transitional stage 'should feel' and how these rules shape the emotional orientations they have toward the future. By steering attention toward the space in which young people navigate, we suggest that such a spatially attuned reading of feeling rules and emotional landscapes contributes novel insights to the fields of emotional geographies of education and rural youth studies.
Kettunen et al. (Tue,) studied this question.