iCeGS Annual Lecture 2025
Presented by Dr Sanna Toiviainen
Date: Tuesday 9th December at 3.00pm Location: University of Derby – Kedleston Road
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Rethinking and reconnecting career guidance: Localism and relationality as ways forward?
We are living through an age defined by political division, ecological strain, and accelerating technological and social change. In such a context, many experience a sense of disconnection from others, from place, and from the systems that shape their lives. This lecture considers how career guidance might respond to these conditions by turning towards localism and relationality as ways of rethinking practice.
Localism invites us to attend to people’s lived realities, to listen to stories and perspectives that are often marginalised within dominant career theories, and to recover forms of knowledge rooted in everyday life. It is a move towards understanding how meaning, value, and aspiration take shape within specific communities.
Relationality challenges the idea of careers as the product of autonomous individuals. Drawing on research with young people and migrant women, this perspective views careers as continually formed through connections with others, with material conditions, and with wider social and structural forces.
The lecture argues for a more reflexive and connected practice that recognises how our concepts, methods, and interventions actively participate in shaping the world. It calls for approaches that nurture connection, responsibility, and care within the intertwined human, social, and ecological systems that make up our working lives.
About Sanna
Dr Sanna Toiviainen is an Associate Professor at the University of South-Eastern Norway, Department of Culture, Religion, and Social Studies, where she teaches in the Master’s programme for Career Guidance. Her research has focused on educational, youth, and integration policies from a career guidance perspective; guidance interventions for young people not in education, training or employment (NEET); and career and integration support taking shape in migrant community settings.
She is particularly interested in issues of ex/inclusion, advancing relational and context-embedded approaches in career research and guidance, drawing on sociological, post-structural, and feminist perspectives, including the posthumanist and relational ontologies of Haraway and Barad.