New year, new plans

So, and 2011 it is :)
Christmas Holidays went by too fast, as always.
The days before the holidays were hectic, as always.

On 16 December, Mats, Dieter and me had a meeting about our plans and basically we discussed the two articles to come. It was about time to start writing, so this is what I'll do the coming weeks. I'll write about place marketing and public private partnerships (PPP's) in order to have an introduction for the second article. For the third article, the introduction will have to concentrate on the life course perspective and decision making processes. For the planning of the months ahead, this means the following:

First and foremost, I need to finalise the paper for the course on Geographical perspectives on Heritage industries (Swedish abreviation: GPKU) in Central Sweden. This is in fact a warm-up for the two articles to come.

Soon, on 19 January I'll head for the Netherlands in order to visit Placement's Scandinavia Day in Hoevelaken. Here, I'll will mostly observe and study in practice what I've learned about palce marketing techniques so far. In February, the big Emigration Fair is organised in Houten, Utrecht. I'll also visit this fair and observer the stands hold by the Swedish actors and see how they attract hundreds of Dutch families to come and live with them.

Meanwhile, plans are made for fieldwork in March, where I'll finally make my data "talk". I'll conduct semi-structured interviews with a number of Dutch actors in Central Sweden. They should be entrepreneurs, lifestyle migrnats and families. This way, an investigation can be amde of what expectations and aspirations the Swedish municipalities had when starting their Holland-projects. It can also be examined in what way and to what degree these aims are fulfilled. The same goes for the Dutch familes: what goals, and wishes did they have and what are their (post-)migration experiences? This could be supported theoretically by the work of Baumann, Giddens, Urry, Harvey, Lefebvre and the like.

So many other plans exist simultaneously; lecturing in the course on population, urbanisation and mobility, as well as in a course on a project resulting in a socalled B-paper, one level before the Bachelor thesis. In May, there will be a Nordic Geographers meeting in Roskilde, in June tehre will be a meeting for Population Geographers in Umeå. I hope to be able to present some results in connection to the above named articles at both of these confrerences. But first, in February, us geographers in Örebro will host a small workshop for a Swedish network of population geographers.

Also before the holidays, we were a small delegation from Örebro to witness a colleague in Borlänge at the defence of his Dissertation on 17 December. This was very interesting, thinking about my own work ahead. But for now, a slow start is what I want - not many have returned to office after these two weeks. This may facilitate the work on the paper for GPKU.