The 'Spatialising Career Interventions for Inclusivity and Sustainability' (SpaCIIS) project aims to address rural sustainability through the unusual perspective of career education and guidance. Existing research shows that rural career education and guidance practices can encourage young people to leave their rural communities and the project aims to ask whether provision can be reimagined to more fully meet the needs of rural young people and their communities. The project takes an interdisciplinary approach applying insights into place-conscious practice, and place and social justice, developed in the field of rural education to rural career education and guidance.

The project involves three Danish island communities: Bornholm, Mors and the Southern Funen archipelago. Utilising participatory action research, specifically Research Circles, the project engages career guidance practitioners, educators and others from these three communities in researching the needs of their communities and the young people within them and co-designing innovative place-conscious career education and guidance interventions.

The project contributes to scholarship by developing a new conceptualisation of social justice for career education and guidance which includes consideration of spatial aspects of inequality. It also aims to develop a new model(s) of place-conscious career education and guidance. The project contributes to rural development scholarship by exploring the specific role of career education and guidance in economic and population sustainability of rural communities. And it contributes to rural education schlolarship through exploring the role of career education and guidance provision within community-education linkages and the value of Research Circles as an innovative way to bring together different perspectives and generate community led innovations in this provision.

Practical outputs also include the development of tools for delivering place-conscious career education that can be adapted for use across different rural communities, careers services and practitioners. Through these outputs the project seeks to improve the quality and efficiency of rural career education and guidance services.