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This paper critically engages with the spatial assumptions that underpin migration studies, highlighting a shift from an absolute view of space to a relational spatial perspective, influenced by transnational and translocal migration studies. While the latter emphasises the interconnectedness of migrants across borders and the fleeting translocal links involved in the production of places, this paper argues that a timeplace perspective, which sees places as products of temporally entangled, partially inertial and plastic connectivities, material objects, and discursive practices, can contribute to overcome dichotomies between process and product in migration studies. Using the case of Åsele municipality in northern Sweden, the paper illustrates how a timeplace perspective can enrich the understanding of migration dynamics, and potentially reconcile tensions between essentialist and fluid worldviews in migration scholarship. Ultimately, it suggests that a plastic and contextual understanding of space might be the next logical step for migration studies. 

Reappraisal of the local and living a rooted life are often highlighted by international advocates for sustainable and environmentally conscious lifestyles. The purpose of this study is to explore and theorize downshifters’ lifestyle changes, with a particular focus on their living environments and sense of place, and we draw on a theoretical framework that combines insights from previous research on downshifting and voluntary simplicity. We conducted 30 life story interviews with individuals in Sweden who consider themselves downshifters or advocates of a simpler life. These materials were analysed along the dimensions of (1) spatial adaptation and appropriation; (2) local and global scales; and (3) temporality of place. Our results emphasize the non-linearity of lifestyle changes towards simplicity where, whereby commitment to sustainability varies while personal goals rely on the previous experiences and everyday practices, values and knowledge that can improve both individual and global sustainability. Our analysis shows that sense of place is a dynamic process influenced by mobilities and flows, spatial inertia and context, and memories and emotions. Our research contributes to the recent more than- relational view on space and place with concepts from humanistic geography that further assist in understanding individuals’ sense of place.

This paper aims to examine the residential trajectories of immigrants that intersect rural areas in Sweden. It adds to the literature on new immigration destinations (NIDs) and addresses the need to include migration routes intersecting rural areas, immigrants’ secondary migration patterns and temporal dimensions of migration, as well as the multiplicity of migrants in such destinations. We examine whether NIDs have emerged in Sweden and immigrants’ subsequent internal mobility from such areas and its determinants. Employing sequence analysis to full-population register data, we identify typical migration pathways. According to the results, NIDs are an emerging phenomenon in rural and small-sized cities in Sweden. We find limited support for the Swedish discourse that the diverse groups of rural migrants leave soon after arrival; also, those leaving are not doing so for labour market–related reasons, nor are they heading for metropolitan areas. We suggest that NIDs offer an important contribution to understanding migration patterns.

Recent geopolitical and economic crises underline the need for a European transition towards a more sustainable food system. Scholars and policymakers have called for a re-territorialization of food production to strike a better balance between local, regional and global value chains. This paper explores the role of re-territorialization through an analysis of the emergence, development and current transformation of the Swedish wild berry value chain. The analysis combines the multi-level perspective on sustainability transitions with a socio-techno-ecological system approach and draws on interviews, informal conversations, participant observations and a range of secondary sources. The resulting case narrative shows how processes of de-territorialization may result in regimes that fail to address sustainability potential and problems. It also highlights that processes of re-territorialization challenge established regimes by promoting niches that represent different, albeit complementary, value chain configurations. Apart from a rich empirical narrative that brings useful knowledge to stakeholders to the Swedish wild berry value chain, the paper contributes to the theoretical understanding re-territorialization, shows how the ecological dimension can be accounted for with the multi-level perspective on sustainability transitions and presents a number of general policy implications.

This article analyses how employer federations, trade unions and the Swedish state symbolically construct seasonal migrant workers to work in the green industries, specifically in agriculture, forestry and wild-berry picking. Work tasks and skills become ethnicised where certain groups are constructed as ‘fit’ for certain work tasks. Through symbolic constructing, boundaries are drawn in relation to Swedish workers in general but also hierarchically within the group of seasonal migrant workers and in relation to specific groups in Sweden, typically un-employed youth and newly settled refugees. This paper is based on interviews with unions and employer organisations as well as secondary text-sources and legal texts. The analysis shows that while employers construct seasonal migrant workers as vital for agriculture, forestry and wild-berry picking, arguing that their line of business could not be sustained without them, the union side portrays this as an ‘artificial demand’. Within a system that to a large degree is based on employers’ demand for inexpensive and flexible labour, symbolic boundaries of seasonal migrant workers are not only performed by the employers’ side, but are also co-constructed with and sanctioned by the state; while partly contested by the unions.

This article focuses on migrant labour in Nordic agriculture, wild berry picking and food processing. The starting point is the fear of a food crisis at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic (2020) because of the absence of migrant workers. The question was raised early in the pandemic if food systems in the Global North are vulnerable due to dependence on precarious migrant workers. In the light of this question, we assess the reactions of farmers and different actors in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden to what looked like an unfolding food crisis. In many ways, the reactions in the Nordic countries were similar to each other, and to broader reactions in the Global North, and we follow these reactions as they relate to migrant workers from an initial panic to a return to business as usual despite the continuation of the pandemic. In the end, 2020 proved to be an excellent year for Nordic food production in part because migrant workers were able to come. We discuss reasons why the Nordic countries did not face disruptions during the pandemic, map out patterns of labour precarity and segmentation for migrant labour in agriculture and food production in the Nordic countries and propose questions for further research.

Neoliberalisation processes have long permeated Western societies, including a common direction towards neoliberal migration regimes. This paper combines the perspective of variegated neoliberalisation with the recent literature on migration industries, to investigate the neoliberalisation of the Swedish labour migration regime and how it affected and interacted with the wild berry migration industry. It shows how neoliberalisation as a historical and spatially contingent process resulted in the distinct phases of intertwined policymaking and enactment of the industry. The ‘roll back’ phase included mutual interests and ‘intimate relations’ between state and industry, which both empowered and increased the number of private actors, creating structures that remained during the regular restructuring phase of ‘roll out’ neoliberalisation. While adding the perspective of variegated neoliberalisation, the paper deepens the analysis of migration industries by pointing at neoliberalisation as a spatial and temporal process, where the interplay between state and industry, an enlarged number of intermediaries and the increased responsibility of private actors are central cornerstones. The Swedish case shows how the role of intermediaries in the wild berry migration industry was reconstructed in order for the neoliberal migration regime to regulate a previously irregular migration industry. It is concluded that strong but spatially contingent links exist between neoliberal political economies, migration regimes and migration industries.