The Nordic multiethnic rurality – one of the same thing or contextual?

The Nordic multiethnic rurality – one of the same thing or contextual?
Susanne Søholt, Norwegian Institute for Urban and Regional Research, Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Sciences, Norway
Susanne Stenbacka, Department of Social and Economic Geography, Uppsala University, Sweden
Helle Nørgaard, Danish Building Research Institute, Aalborg University Copenhagen, Denmark
Increased international migration to rural areas raises questions concerning the impact on the rural places and for rurality as a phenomenon. In this paper, multiethnic ruralities in Norway, Denmark and Sweden are explored. The aim is to understand whether these multiethnic ruralities tend to have shared features across the Nordic countries or have to be understood in their national contexts. To address this, we focus on who the immigrants are and where they come from, what has attracted them to their new places of residence or why they have been assigned to rural areas, how their presence influences the places’ characteristics and social relations - and by extension how people of majority and minority backgrounds interpret and reinterpret the place. International mobility affects both migrants and the established local majority population on an individual level, the local communities, and the localities’ majority-minority relationships. Thus, both migrants and the majority populations are active constituent agents in repositioning struggles of rural localities. The analysis will be framed against the backdrop of the interaction between migration and the general transformation of the rural. The paper is based on a Nordic comparative study on how immigration influences rural places and processes of inclusion/exclusion of immigrants in central welfare arenas like the labour market, the housing market and in civil society. The comparative study discusses and combines data and analyses across six subprojects.