Editorial introduction: Putting rural stayers in the spotlight

Abstract

geographic mobility has come to be characterised as a new normal. In short, modern life is mobile life. Mobility now predominates within everyday life and consciousness (Halfacree, 2012): "… it is becoming the spirit of our times—its zeitgeist" (Barcus & Halfacree, 2018: 98). Indeed, mobility has displaced fixity as the norm and includes not only residential migration but also more mundane everyday mobilities. It is a response to the functional demands of neo-liberal capitalism. … the time may be right to attack the "grand narrative" of hypermobility, modernity and dislocation and call for social and behavioural scientists to ask new questions not just about migration but also about immobility. This special issue builds on such calls by putting stayers in the spotlight. It demonstrates that immobility is not only worthy of study in its own right but also represents a rich vein of research opportunities. Justification for the special issue centres on three main critiques of the literature. First, staying has received considerably less attention when compared to the volume of research published on migration, and moreover, the attention that staying has received largely adopts a migration perspective. Too few studies focus on actual stayers and the processes of staying. Second, from a migration perspective staying is too frequently portrayed in negative terms. To stay, especially in a rural context, is perceived as being stuck or staying behind. Third, many studies ignore spatial dimensions to staying and, consequently, that place matters. Therefore, in this special issue, we chose to put rural stayers in the spotlight. Rural areas are comprised not only of distinct communities possessing strong ties and identities, but also diverse migration/staying cultures. Moreover, in depopulating rural regions especially, it is the people who stay that are important for maintaining rural quality of life and for the sustainability of rural communities. Remarkably, few studies engage directly with immobility and actual stayers (relative to the volume of publications relating to migration and migrants). This is no doubt a product of the prevalent migration perspective that has been taken, to date, on immobility. We are critical of this dominant migration perspective. First, it treats immobility/staying as a residual to migration (Thomas, Stillwell, & Gould, 2016). Immobility is perceived as little more than the absence of movement or a decline in migration behaviour: neither of which will shift the primary research focus from migration to immobility. Second, the literature on migration intentions and residential preferences (Bjarnason, 2014; de Groot, Mulder, Das, & Manting, 2011; Kuhmonen, Kuhmonen, & Luoto, 2016; Petrin, Schafft, & Meece, 2014) confirms that residential intentions do not always translate into actual moves, yet the processes of staying have attracted little academic attention. Third, migration discourse commonly devalues staying (especially in the countryside) and equates immobility to a "failure to leave" (Looker & Naylor, 2009) or to "stay behind" (Ni Laoire, 2001). Regarding rural young adults, for example, there is a culture of out-migration: parents actively encourage adolescents to leave (Tucker, Sharp, Stracuzzi, Van Gundy, & Rebellon, 2013) and communities accept "the need to move to get on" (Nugin, 2014). At the other end of the life course, those who stay are perceived as vulnerable or disadvantaged, especially when family support networks may have moved elsewhere and the area lacks the required facilities to support ageing in place (Fernandez-Carro & Evandrou, 2014). We allege that considering immobility from such a migration perspective is to view staying all too negatively. It not only ignores that several recent studies identify immobility as an emerging trend (Champion & Shuttleworth, 2017; Cooke, 2013a), with the possible exception of 16–24 year olds (Smith & Sage, 2014) but, importantly, it also ignores the agency of stayers themselves and the possible blurred character of (im)mobility. In this special issue, we call for a rethinking of immobility and staying, and take as our starting point that immobility is much more than non-migrants who simply stay-put: those who stay are not passive observers of their own fates. Accordingly, we call for the adoption of an immobility perspective: a perspective that considers stayers as active participants and staying as an active process. In other words, staying is a conscious and deliberate decision with positive outcomes. Prior studies of note include Barcus and Brunn (2009), Fernandez-Carro and Evandrou (2014), Hjalm (2014), Jamieson (2000), and Roin (2015). These distinguish between immobility as a nuanced choice (stillness) and a product of constraints (stuckness; Cresswell, 2012) and, accordingly, acknowledge structural influences and the agency of stayers in the decision to stay. Nevertheless, there is a need for the topics of immobility and staying to be given greater priority among geographers and other social scientists. acknowledge that staying is as diverse and ongoing a phenomenon as moving. It is not a decision that is made once and never renegotiated. … in order for someone to stay in or move into a specific rural area, there has to be an adequate fit between the personal motivations and resources, and the place-specific opportunities. Halfacree and Rivera (2012) pose an interesting related question: how come those moving to the countryside stay? Such a question further acknowledges that migration and immobility are not static or rigid dichotomies but instead are fluid states for the individual, couple or family. With such fluidity, however, further questions arise: how is a stayer defined? How long must one stay to become a stayer? From a migration perspective a stayer is commonly defined as someone who has been "born and bred" in the area and never left (that is, a lifetime non-mover) or someone who has not moved within the researcher's pre-defined time period (which might be 1 year, 10 years etc). However, if we adopt an immobility perspective, it is not so much the duration of stay that is important but so too becomes the diversity of stayer types, the processes of staying, the staying place, and the perceptions of stayers. In particular, spatial aspects of immobility and staying need to go beyond geographical boundaries. The decision-making processes and the experiences of staying will be different among those who stay in the dwelling of their childhood, who leave their childhood home but stay in the home area, those who at old age stay in the dwelling/area that they moved to at an earlier life stage (such as, union or family formation), and those who stay in the same type of area as their home place, for example, the rural but not necessarily their home rural area. Place matters and the staying place provides opportunities for research. It is likely that there are multiple levels, scales and dimensions to staying and indeed different self, family and peer perceptions of staying which have yet to be adequately researched. Regarding perceptions, is the young adult who leaves their rural parental home to move to an urban centre in the same district or region a stayer or a mover? Is the adult who lives elsewhere during the week for higher education or employment, but returns "home" at weekends a stayer or mover? Is the family that moves from one rural area to another a stayer or mover? By adopting an immobility perspective, that focuses on the processes of staying (rather than on why they did not move), we recognise the agency of stayers, different spatial aspects to staying, and perceptions of staying. In addition, stayers by definition may not be immobile. Instead, daily life mobilities and virtual mobilities may enable stayers to stay and, in some geographical contexts, the migration of some family members may allow others to remain. Other aspects of rural place have reportedly influenced the decision to move or stay (especially among young adults). Recurring themes include the physical and social characteristics of place (Mellander, Florida, & Stolarick, 2011) alongside the roles of family, friends and community in developing not only a sense of home, place attachment, belonging and rootedness (Haukanes, 2013; Roin, 2015) but a culture of migration or staying (Nugin, 2014; Thissen, Droogleever Fortuijn, Strijker, & Haartsen, 2010). What is absent from this literature is how aspects of place intersect with the staying process or, to borrow a phrase from Antonish (2010:130), what are the stayers' "personal moments of place": how do personal and socio-spatial place meanings relate to the ways place becomes a home place and a place to stay. Indeed, such personal place experiences of staying, how these vary across the life course, and their impact on the re-negotiation of the decision to stay have not been fully explored. Aspects of place are embedded in the concept of rurality which will hold different meanings at different life stages and, consequently, impact on the decision to stay. Again, by placing an emphasis on stayers and the processes of staying (an immobility perspective) the role of place and, accordingly, that place matters can be better understood. In this special issue, by putting actual rural stayers in the spotlight, we bring immobility centre-stage, and portray staying as a conscious decision, a positive process and a potentially positive experience. In short, this special issue adopts an immobility perspective (in contrast to the more common migration perspective to date) to shed not only new insights on immobility/staying but also to propose a new research agenda. This collection of papers brings together leading researchers from different disciplines and geographical contexts to report contemporary thinking on immobility and the "processes of staying," and to propose a future research agenda. In assembling our authors, we deliberately invited: (a) experts in the field (rather than from any one discipline), (b) those that adopt a strong life course or life strategy approach, (c) those with access to national datasets which could be analysed for immobility and staying (but may not have been before), (d) those offering a more qualitative perspective on the decision to stay and staying experiences, and (e) those providing different geographical, economic, social, and cultural contexts. With this in mind, we now introduce the six papers that follow. In the first paper, Erickson et al., 2018 use a dataset from the Montana Health Matters Survey to explore differences between stayers and nonstayers in urban, rural, and highly rural communities. They identify community and individual predictors to staying and conceptualise staying as a deliberate choice with each life transition representing a "decision point" regarding mobility. They also suggest that the social networks and social capital of stayers can be invaluable to policymakers to recruit and attract external resources: stayers are, therefore, a bridging link to outside people and capital. The collection then moves on to report on the decision to stay at different life stages, stayers' lived experiences, and the positive role of stayers in facilitating rural place attachments and identities. The second (Mata-Codesal, 2018) and third (Ye, 2018) papers amply demonstrate, through ethnographic studies, that the decision-making processes and the experiences of stayers are part of complex family life strategies. Mata-Codesal, 2018 adapts the aspiration/ability model (Carling, 2002) to the study of stayers in the Mexican village of Zacualpan and argues that the ability to stay is the consequence of family life strategies with mobility frequently facilitating immobility. For example, some family members leave to enable others to stay, and some leave now to enable staying in the future. Ye's study in rural China incorporates a life course perspective to demonstrate the fluidity of mobility and immobility. He reports on the structure and agency of immobility and identifies stayers as a heterogeneous group in terms of personal attributes, household compositions, motivations, and family livelihood strategies. In common with Mata-Codesal (2018), Ye concludes that not all stayers are "left behind" stayers and that the decision to stay or leave is not made once in a lifetime. Instead, the decision is renegotiated several times with an individual moving between migrant and stayer status and between different stayer types. The fourth paper, by Haartsen and Stockdale (2018), concentrates on the family formation life stage and asks, in line with Halfacree (2012), why have young families who moved to the rural northern Netherlands stayed? By adopting the "elective belonging" (Savage, Bagnall, & Longhurts, 2005) and "selective belonging" (Benson & Jackson, 2012; Watt, 2009) concepts, Haartsen and Stockdale (2018) find that while electing to belong to a rural residence newcomer families were selective in developing belonging to the rural place. Their paper also predicts that the decision to stay will be renegotiated at later life stages. In the penultimate paper, Barcus and Shugatai (2018) use the place elasticity concept (Barcus & Brunn, 2010) to consider place attachments from the perspective of Mongolian-Kazakh migrants and explore the different ways migrants remain connected to their home rural place. They find that stayers in the origin area of Bayan-Ulgii facilitate rural place attachments for migrants and serve as anchors for rural ethnic identity. The immobile are strategic keepers of the local culture whose continued residence in the rural place of origin facilitates an at-a-distance relationship with the rural by out-migrants. The final paper, by Burholt and Sardani (2018), concentrates on later life and uses cross-sectional data from Cognitive Function and Ageing Study Wales to investigate the support networks of older stayers in rural Wales. They note important differences between stayers and non-stayers in terms of their support networks and compare areas with low and high population turnover (viewed as "ageing in place" and "ageing places," respectively). They suggest that ageing in place is more likely in areas with stable rural populations (low in- and low out-migration) with those ageing in place more socially engaged in "locally integrated" support networks or more marginalised in "family dependent" support networks. By contrast, places with youth outmigration and in-migration by older cohorts (high population turnover) can be considered ageing places characterised by other support networks ("community focused" and marginalised "private restricted"). The results have implications for policy and services. Planners need to improve/help the marginalised support networks—that is, family dependent support in ageing in place and private restricted support in ageing places. Individually and collectively these papers provide additional and new insights on different aspects of staying and stayers in a rural context. They begin to address some of the under-researched themes noted earlier and importantly demonstrate the value of adopting an immobility perspective. The collective contribution of the special issue is organised around three themes. Although different definitions of stayers are used by authors in this issue, each adopts an immobility perspective and distinguishes stayers from non-stayers. The papers challenge a view of immobility as the "flip side" to mobility, a default or "no action" They demonstrate diversity among stayer and a much more positive perspective to staying than Mata-Codesal (2018) identifies three of immobility or stayers. includes with the and ability to stay. includes those to leave but the ability to do This group equates to being in the to who to move or they are about and to stayers. of and immobility are Ye identify what calls rural that is, those who have no choice but to stay in the rural by of household However, Ye also identifies deliberate stayers. These include migrant who to stay in the home village rural and staying families who do not have any family members in the rural as a deliberate is also among rural by Haartsen and Stockdale (2018) who distinguish from neither newcomer group to stay when they first moved to the rural area, by the time of to 10 years the stayers staying for as long as possible and stayers for as long as at are, therefore, multiple stayer those in this special issue are from an and future studies to to this by different economic, social, and cultural contexts. we allow for staying to be a deliberate choice that in of the of and that they have for their the that high and low being stuck may not be of being to a community a of how one about the place they community then to a deliberate choice to stay, low of with the community or its services. a immobility perspective Ye to that the people left are not necessarily The for left those who stay and hold the those who stay and for migrants to therefore, the village home for when migrants and facilitate ongoing attachments and ties to the rural also Barcus & paper demonstrates that immobility is of mobility and migration are frequently and within deliberate life strategies. In other words, staying is connected to other people and life 2014) and mobility and immobility are (Barcus & Halfacree, et al., 2016; It is to consider mobility and immobility as or as or, which is frequently the when a migration perspective is Mata-Codesal (2018) acknowledges mobility as to the of staying In geographical contexts, such as China (Ye, 2018) and (Mata-Codesal, the migration of some family members other members to stay, and to move that family to stay in the future. between immobility and mobility in other geographical What are the life strategies of contemporary stayers in a The of immobility may also be mobility. Ye that to staying, and Barcus and Shugatai (2018) that stayers remain connected to migrants social family and to the place of Such between immobility and mobility are or are considered from a migration perspective For example, and the of migrants to the From an immobility perspective, it is important to also an ability to on a daily or enable an individual or family to stay? do contemporary with other people and other places facilitate … a strategy to a modern life and to people with a long duration of stay are more to the between status and future at different life stages are strong in all of the papers is in particular, the role of place in staying and the role of stayers in places. First, in terms of the role of place several papers address the rural place which facilitate staying. Erickson et al., 2018 find that community attachment, as a of sense of rootedness to a is a of being a stayer than personal or community or the of with the community or its services. Mata-Codesal (2018) too reports on the which immobility is possible and and to of … as enable of considered migration to be in Instead, migration being to a life in such as family others in the community and local each other or simply in the local The place staying, community attachment, and sense of therefore, among stayers. Haartsen and Stockdale (2018) find that their frequently accept the physical of the rural, such as or and to social aspects of rural life and strong community which they value more The of the physical were by to urban were commonly made to urban places of residence and to family and friends in urban residential areas their choice for the rural, and in that stayers to stay. aspects of place are by Barcus and Shugatai who allege that stayers a of characteristics that collectively a continued sense of They cultural to place. However, by & 2015) cultural aspects of the rural immobile it is to ask if this represents a view of the place or contemporary rural to the some social aspects of the local rural cultu

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