MdM Keynote Speaker Series: "Migrant relations and Rural Environments: Shaking up the Sleeping Viking" by Prof. Seema Arora-Jonsson

Prof. Seema Arora-Jonsson, from the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, will be giving a keynote talk on “Migrant relations and Rural Environments: Shaking up the Sleeping Viking”.

 

MdM Keynote Speaker Series 2024

Title: “Migrant relations and Rural Environments: Shaking up the Sleeping Viking”

 

Speaker:  Prof. Seema Arora-Jonsson, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences

 

Date: Friday, 4th of October 2024 
Time: from 10:00 to 11:00 
Venue: Sala Montseny (Room Z/023 - Z/022) ICTA-UAB
 

This talk is also part of the 19th GRM Seminar Series on Migration, organized by UAB Arts and Humanities Faculty and UAB Geography Department, and coordinated by Dr Ricard Morén-Alegret.
 

Working sustainably entails taking into account interconnections of social, environmental and economic aspects and questions of social justice in all development work. While environmental and economic dimensions have received attention, a corresponding attention to the more difficult aspect of the social – and, in particular, to ongoing demographic change is often lacking in planning sustainable development. In many parts of Europe, international migration and intra EU mobility to rural areas have increased in past decades while the number of locally born residents has consistently decreased with important implications for sustainability. This is very much the case in Sweden that in many ways presents a microcosm of these debates on sustainability. In this talk, I draw on past and ongoing research on international migration to Sweden to examine how different migrant groups are embedded in highly contested debates on sustainability. I focus in particular on three groups of people in rural areas (often largely disregarded in rural policymaking) – 1) European ‘lifestyle’ migrants who have moved to rural areas in Sweden to set up farms and nature-based activities, 2) Immigrants from the global South, many of them asylum seekers from Africa and Middle East, and 3) seasonal workers – and forest labour in particular, I reflect on how these heterogeneous groups together contribute to the changing demography and social-economic and environmental relations in rural areas. On the face of it all three groups are on the periphery of rural society. But in many different ways, they are, as one migrant put it, ‘Shaking up the Sleeping Viking.’
 

Seema Arora-Jonsson is Professor of Rural Development at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences. She works with questions of sustainability and justice in relation to environmental and climate politics, migration and rural development. Her work is shaped by the need to decolonize development and environmental governance in particular contexts and importantly within wider transnational currents and relations. Feminist thinking and questions of gender, race, ethnicity, class and geography are central to her analyses. Participatory research and ethics and analyzing environmental questions in a North-South perspective in the globalizing context of environmental governance are central in her work.