Articles, Conferences, Lectures

It's been a month now, since I started working again after the long summer holidyas and paternity leave. At the moment, it feels like I'm there again, in the middle of the PhD jungle! In 6 weeks time, my real period of paternity leave will start, so I am about half way this autumn period, that was supposed to be a very productive time.

First of all, it took about two weeks to start it all up again. I transcribed an interview, which was a lot of work, but valuable. During this work, reflections came up about how to organise the autumn months. It all centres around three manuscripts;

- one about rural Swedish municipalities engaging in rural place marketing efforts, as descirbed earlier by Niedomysl and Heldt Cassell. However, a nordic dimension, an international approach and rural destinations make this study timely. This is supposed to result in an article, number 2 so far.

- one about ambivalence and identity shift after migration. How things that we moved away from in the country of origin can develop into triggers of return migration. This is supposed to become a chapter in an anthology with the working title "Place and Identity".

- one about the decision making process prior to moving from urban Netherlands to rural Sweden. This is the least develoepd one so far, but still it is supposed to result in article number 3.

In order to test some ideas, I will be attending the second edition of the Nordic Urban Workshop in Stockholm next week. This is a valuable platform as it consists mainly of PhD students, some of whom we met during the first edition in Örebro one year ago. A month or two later - yes I'll take a day off from my leave - I hope to attend an international conference on Place Branding in Utrecht. Many presentations are scheduled for this event, and at least two may prove interrelated with the article I'm currently working on (Art.2). One about marketing rural areas in general and another about branding coal mining identities of South Wales. Looking forward to those presentations!

In the mean time, of course, I prepare lectures for the course on Population Geography. After all, that seems to be my field!