Thinking of 2010

Three months of paternity leave have gone by, Lucas and me have been to Holland for a week, and I decided to try to see these coming months as some sort of holiday. I will need to relax, because 2010 is already promissing to become a hectic year!

Planning for the courses that I'm lecturing on has started. Together with PS, I will be lecturing on a course about mobility and population geography. Last year's lecturing about Economic Geography will not be prolonged, but the work I did for the so-called B-thesis will. This means that I will be busy during the second half of the Spring Term (April and May 2010, with preparing in March and reporting in June), as well as some ten weeks at the end of the year.

Besides that, I had planned to write papers for 2 courses (the one about Cultural Heritage in Bergslagen and the one about Geographical classic texts). Of course, the article still has to be finished, and I have many ideas how to do this. It's just that I realise it will take a lot of time. Therefore, I cancelled my own plans about the trip to the congress in Washington in April. You can't always get what you want! On the other hand, I still would like to visit the Emigration Fair in Houten (NL) on 13 & 14 February 2010.

I had planned not to participate in any Doctoral courses during Spring 2010, as I have enough to do anyway. But what happens? Yes, a course that seems to be made for me is scheduled for January - April 2010. It's a course about "Mobility in Time and Space", organised by the Universities of Gothenburg, Umeå and Tartu (Estonia). Three sessions are planned, three days at each University. This means a lot of travelling, reading and writing. However, it would fit well with the course that I'll be lecturing on just a few weeks later. How to combine this all with family-life and hobbies?

Well, that's a puzzle I have to lay in the coming weeks....

Article 1 - the orange wave

Good news about the course in Norrköping - I passed! Yeah, the course leaders sent me an e-mail yesterday and I couldn't have a better start of the weekend. They praised my work and encouraged me to try to publish the course-paper in a journal.

This is exactly what I'm trying to do. The work with my first real scientific article has started. Inspired by concepts as transnational entrepreneurship, regional growth and literature about why Dutch migrants leave the Netherlands, I have written a text. This text was commented on during a conference in Örebro. I will revise it soon and send it to Dieter Müller, my second supervisor from Umeå. He will visit us in Örebro at the end of March and comment on my paper. His comments are of course valuable and I will revise the paper again and try to submit and present it at the Nordic Geographers Meet in Finland at the beginning of June. Who knows, after this, I might be able to send it to a scientific journal such as Population, Space and Place or Entrepreneurship and Regional Development. In the meantime, I need some more statistics and references to relevant literature.

Also in the meantime, I am and will be lecturing in various courses. Economic Geography, the same course as last semester; a course on how to write a thesis; and a guestlecture in a course about social work. This last lecture is a good challenge to me, as I will try to combine some interesting knowledge about migration studies with Area-studies and my own study.

Also, it is interesting to follow the current developments in the migrant recruitment industry. A close familymember to me has visited the Emigration Fair in March 2009 in Utrecht and sent me some interesting information and a good report about this. Placement will organise a fair in April and Region Dalarna is of course continuing their recruitment.

It is really exciting to try to combine this information into a good article just around the time of celebrating my 30th birthday, as well as raising our son and preparing for moving houses!

Emigrate 2008

Well, it's been a while since I last wrote, but here's an update about a trip I made: to Emigrate 2008. This is an Emigration Fair in Utrecht, the Netherlands. I was 'back home' during the first 11 days in March for this fair, but of course also for visiting friends and family. The idea of the fair is to bring people from the demand and the supply side together: certain regions or organisations anywhere in the world that want to attract immigrants on the one hand, and migrants that want to leave the Netherlands and look for a live elsewhere on the other hand.
During the two days of the fair, I conducted a small survey by taking questionnaires from all but one stand at the swedish part and 33 Dutch visitors that are interested in moving to Sweden. It was very interesting just to observe how this industry is arranged and even more interesting to hear the (live)stories of some potential migrants. Their reasons for wanting to move in a nut shell: looking for "Rust & Ruimte" (quiet & space), nature and a more relaxed pace of life, and being fed up with the rat race, traffic jams and 'overregulated Dutch society'. More about this can be found in a Survey Report that I wrote; just send me a mail if you're interested: marcoeimermann@gmail.com.
It has been a very useful pilot project and it helped me in orientating how I want to structure my research! More to come soon about the third course and the research prosposal.