Understanding Lifestyle Migration Theoretical Approaches to Migration and the Quest for a Better Way of Life

by Benson, Michaela; Osbaldiston, Nick

• ISBN13: 9781137328663
• ISBN10: 1137328665
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2014-05-28
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

Understanding Lifestyle Migration contributes to the wider turn towards understanding migration through the lens of social theory. It is the first volume to question how lifestyle migration and related phenomena can be understood contributing to this rapidly expanding field of research, and moving beyond definitional considerations to engage deeper understandings of such migrations. It thus aims to set a new and challenging research agenda that brings together researchers from a range of disciplines and geographical locations working on related forms of migration. The chapters engage theoretically with themes and debates relevant to contemporary social science such as place and space, social stratification and power relations, production and consumption, individualism, dwelling, imagination and representations, and community attachments and belonging.

Author Biography

Michaela Benson is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London, UK. She has written extensively on lifestyle migration, co-edited the collection Lifestyle Migration, and is author of The British in Rural France which was shortlisted for the 2012 British Sociological Association Philip Abrams Memoral Prize.
 
Nick Osbaldiston is Lecturer at Monash University, Australia. He has written on lifestyle migration and culture including Seeking Authenticity in Place, Culture and Self and The Culture of the Slow. Nick is currently an executive committee member for The Australian Sociological Association (TASA).

Table of Contents

1. New Horizons in Lifestyle Migration Research: Theorising Movement, Settlement and the Search for a Better Way of Life; Michaela Benson and Nick Osbaldiston
PART I: CONSTRAINTS AND OPPORTUNITIES
2. Lifestyle of Freedom? Individualism and Lifestyle Migration; Mari Korpela
3. Negotiating privilege in and through lifestyle migration; Michaela Benson
PART II: REVISITING ASSUMPTIONS
4. Theorising the 'Fifth Migration' in the United States: Understanding Lifestyle Migration from an Integrated Approach; Brian Hoey
5. Jumping up from the Armchair: Beyond the Idyll in Counterurbanisation; Keith Halfacree
PART III: SPACES OF IMAGINATION
6. Migrating Imaginaries of a Better Life… Until Paradise Finds You; Noel B. Salazar
7. Britons in Berlin: Imagined Cityscapes, Affective Encounters and the Cultivation of the Self; David Griffiths and Stella Maile
PART IV: STILLNESS AND SEDENTARINESS
8. Beyond Ahistoricity and Mobilities in Lifestyle Migration; Nick Osbaldiston
9. No Man can be an Island: Lifestyle Migration, Stillness, and the New Quietism; Phillip Vannini and Jonathan Taggart
PART V: LOOKING ONWARDS AND OUTWARDS
10. The role of the Social Imaginary in Lifestyle Migration: Employing the Ontology of Practice Theory; Karen O'Reilly