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Moving to the Countryside ... and Staying: Lives beyond Representations
Author(s) -
Halfacree Keith H.,
Rivera María Jesús
Publication year - 2012
Publication title -
sociologia ruralis
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.005
H-Index - 84
eISSN - 1467-9523
pISSN - 0038-0199
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-9523.2011.00556.x
Subject(s) - relocation , rural area , destinations , action (physics) , sociology , event (particle physics) , everyday life , migration studies , gender studies , political science , law , computer science , tourism , physics , quantum mechanics , programming language
Migration towards rural areas – pro‐rural migration – is a lively, diverse, well illustrated research area. However, interest tends to stop with spatial relocation, with migrants' subsequent lives in rural places much less examined. Such imbalance reflects a more general bias in favour of studying distinctive actions, such as migration, at the expense of non‐actions, such as staying put. This article challenges this situation. It argues for regarding migration in a more contextual, biographical and distributed manner, even potentially attaining some characteristics of what is known in non‐representational theory as an ‘event’. While pro‐rural migration is usually initially a contemplated ‘representational’ action, the significance to the migrant of the resulting relocation does not end here, requiring attention to be paid to everyday entanglements with (rural) place. Becoming event‐like, some experiences may be unanticipated and unexpected rather than foreshadowed. This sensitivity is applied in the article through introduction of an interpretative map for exploring why and how pro‐rural migrants subsequently stay in their destinations. Proceeding through the map, concerns with representations of the location are increasingly left behind in favour of becoming more attentive to life course issues and more‐than‐representational rural experiences shaping the migrant's ‘line of growth’.