Sustainable Rural Communities: Comparing migrant receptivity and the revitalisation of two rural towns in Spain and Ireland | Iris Egea (Vrije Universiteit Brussel)
We provide dessert for the break after the seminar. Please register if you want to join and/or enjoy the dessert!
In response to the decline of European rural areas, governments, and scholars gradually highlight the relevance of migration for rural regeneration and sustainability. However, rural areas’ limited receptivity capacity may hinder a migrant-led revival. While research recognises the local level's role in receptivity, current approaches studying the link between migrant receptivity and revival are limited. This project explores, first, the potential synergy between receptivity and regeneration in rural contexts. Second, it uncovers rural areas’ roles in multi-level migration governance. It addresses the influence of rural communities’ structural inequalities and migrants’ agency in receptivity and revival. Finally, it offers a typology of rural revival. This project applies an innovative mixed-method qualitative approach, transnationally comparing two cases of rural towns in Ireland and Spain. It follows the assumption that (1) greater migrant receptivity and openness result in broader revival processes, creating a more sustainable rural community. (2) It assumes that receptivity may be impacted by rural communities’ experiences with revitalisation and their collective memories of migration. Overall, this project describes the factors, actors, and processes relevant to receptivity and rural revival and innovatively defines “rural community sustainability”. This offers a much-needed contribution to academic and political debates on migration and the future of rural management.
In this presentation, I will introduce my first published article Regeneration, predatory inclusion, and migrant experiences in declining rural areas in Spain and Germany, co-authored with René Kreichauf. In this article, we highlight how local reception and regeneration policies often result in conditions of ‘predatory inclusion’, in which migrants’ settlement is shaped regarding their potential ‘use’ for revitalizing local economies and housing markets in exploitative terms and along racialized lines.
Building on this foundation, I will engage in my work in progress. This includes reflections on my recent fieldwork in Spain (October-December 2024); and an overview of working themes I am exploring in my writing process. I will also reflect on my future fieldwork plans in rural Ireland and the potential parallels and differences with rural Spain. Throughout the presentation, I will explore how the topics of intra-community inequalities and frictions, differential access to employment, public participation and representation, and segregation play out in a rural context. The dimensions of gender, race and socioeconomic background will be paramount for this analysis.
I hope to create a space for open discussion and innovative and collaborative thought with you all!
Iris Egea is a PhD FWO Fellow Researcher at Vrije Universiteit Brussel. Her research explores the link between international migration in declining European rural areas and rural revival. By challenging prevailing approaches to migration and rural management, Iris’s work aims to propose innovative and sustainable strategies tailored to the needs of rural communities. She applies mixed qualitative methods from a comparative perspective.
Placing rural community sustainability at the core, her project aspires to promote inclusive and equitable development and foster collaboration with grassroots initiatives to amplify the visibility and representation of rural areas in migration and development discussions. During her different ethnographic fieldwork stays, she combines research with reciprocal community engagement activities to represent the communities respectfully and avoid extractive research. Her academic interests coalesce with community cohesion, questions of race and ethnicity and postcolonial studies.