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Rural areas are often viewed as isolated and stagnating areas and urban areas as their opposites. This book corrects this misconception. It illustrates that rural areas are dynamic and interconnected by flows and mobilities.

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Rural areas are often viewed as isolated and stagnating areas and urban areas as their opposites. Against such a backdrop, this book seeks to unveil a set of dynamics that view rural areas as ´translocal´ in the sense that they are ´changing´ and ´interconnected´. Social transformations take place in rural areas as the result of intense exchanges between different people, settings and geographies. Accordingly, rural-urban but also rural-rural interrelations on international and national scales are strongly contributing to rural change. Translocal ruralism is exemplified through the analysis of local and global migratory flows, the activities of rural firms in national and global arenas, the spread of different forms of transportation and dislocation, and the growing information society, which enables rural spaces to be connected to the world and improves new ways of interconnection and sociability practices.

The book is structured into two parts, which intertwine the dynamics of rural spaces. The first part, ´ Linking nodes: people and networks connecting places ´, is concerned with mobilities such as migration and commuting, and the establishment of national and global networks. The second part, ´ International mobilities: a tension between scales´ , analyses the dynamics of international migration and mobilities in rural areas.

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1: Translocal ruralism: mobility and connectivity in European rural spaces: Charlotta Hedberg and Renato Miguel do Carmo.- I:Linking nodes: people and networks connecting places: 2: Between margimalisation and urbanisation: mobilities and social change in Southern Portugal: Renato Miguel do Carmo and Sofia Santos.- 3: The ties that bind? Spatial (im)mobilities and the transformation of rural-urban connections: Hendrike Rau.- 4: ´The rural´ intervening in the lives of internal and international migrants: migrants, biographies and translocal pratices: Susanne Stenbacka.- 5: Youth ´settles´ by mobility: ethnography of a Portuguese village: Vanda Aparecida da Silva.- 6: Migration dynamics in Romania and the counter-urbanisation process: a case study of Bucharest´s rural-urban fringe: Liliana Guran and Michael Sofer.- 7: Local embeddedness and global links in rural areas: euclidean and relational space in business networks: Alexandre Dubois, Andrew Copus, Moa Hedström.- II: International mobilities: a tension between scales: 8: When the world goes rural: transnational potentials of international migration in rural Swedish labour markets: Charlotta Hedberg, Gunnel Forsberg and Ali Najib.- 9: Foreigners, neighbours, immigrants: translocal mobilities in rural areas in Spain: Luis Camarero, Rosario Sampedro and Jesús Olivia.- 10: Transnational immigration in rural Greece: analysing the different mobilities of Albanian immigrants: Apostolos Papadopoulos.- 11: Golaka Dhama: a translocal Hare Krishna community: Louise Meijering.- 12: Boundary crossings: migration, belonging/´un-belongin" in rural Scotland: Philomena de Lima

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