Rural communities in the inland areas of Northern Sweden have long suffered from a steady population declineas young people, particularly women, have moved to the growing urban areas for education/employment.However, in recent years, alongside strategies for survival relating to tourism/hospitality industry, refugeereception has emerged as a strategy for survival whereby these rural municipalities seek to staunch the downwardspiral of decline by accepting refugees in the hope that this will provide not only job opportunities but alsosupport for local services. Using thematic analysis, we focus on media representations of rural refugee receptionin small municipalities Northern Sweden and aim to contribute to an understanding of how spatial and socialrelations are reproduced through these representations; to understand in how ‘the rural’ is constructed in relationto power relations such as race and gender and how these interact with a more explicit spatial power dimension.We are interested in understanding rural refugee reception as a contested hope for the future – a strategy forsurvival. Our analysis shows that the media highlight the stories of how the municipalities set their hopes onrefugee reception to ‘save’ the place not only by bringing in new, younger inhabitants, but also employmentopportunities. However, it also shows that refugee reception may become merely a short-term, temporary solutionand not something that challenges or changes the more general migratory patterns in Sweden.