From the perspective of the Swedish education system, rural knowledge does not seem to be particularly important. Many young people in rural areas have deep and important knowledge that is invisible in school and during school time, both to teachers and to the young people themselves. This paper examines knowledge used in agriculture and animal husbandry, a type of knowledge that is particularly useful in rural areas but mostly invisible in the education system. Through observations and interviews with students and their teachers in rural Sweden, the paper provides a detailed account of the everyday social processes by which such knowledge is produced as 'nothing' (cf. Scott 2019) and occasionally as 'something'. The empirical basis of the paper is ethnographic data collected during a year and a half of fieldwork in a small village and village school in southern Sweden. The invisibility of young people's knowledge is understood here as the result of active practices. Invisibility and nothingness are thus not properties, but outcomes of social processes (Scott 2019). Some knowledge is made invisible, unnecessary and unimportant, while other knowledge is made visible, necessary and important (Burke 2023; Lässig 2016; Proctor & Schiebinger 2008). This paper shows such social practices as they unfold in the everyday lives of young people in rural areas, in and out of school.

References

Burke, Peter (2023) Ignorance: a global history, Yale University Press, New Haven

Lässig, Simone (2016). The history of knowledge and the expansion of the historical research agenda. Bulletin of the GHI Washington, 59 (Fall 2016), 29–58.

Proctor, Robert N. & Schiebinger, Londa (red.) (2008). Agnotology: the making and unmaking of ignorance.Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press 

Scott, Susie (2019). The social life of nothing: silence, invisibility and emptiness in tales of lost experience. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge