Towards a cordial dialogue between lifestyle migration/mobilities and rural tourism geographies

Abstract

This article introduces the special issue Changing dimensions of lifestyle mobilities in turbulent times: impacts of COVID-19 outbreaks and multiple crises. It aims not just to understand the individual drivers and consequences of mobility but their interactions with local manifestations of spatial (in)justice in various meaningful places. This editorial synthesizes the four studies of population flows in proximate and remote rural areas in Europe, and puts their contributions to the fields of lifestyle migration and mobilities in context. We introduce the lifestyle migration hub meeting that inspired this special issue and a mobility spectrum around which the article revolves. We then indicate common interests of lifestyle migration and rural tourism geographies, focusing on the contributors’ use of human geographic perspectives and aided by observations from ongoing ethnographic work about the demographic future of small villages in northern Sweden. A discussion of multiple disruptions, precarity and vulnerability is linked with a review of the papers before elaborating on destinations and communities as meaningful but vulnerable places. The conclusion outlines how concerns with people’s and place’s vulnerability and precarity in multiple disruptions to mobility flows can be further explored in cordial dialogue between scholars of lifestyle migration/mobility and tourism geography.