Karen O'Reilly

Kate Botterill and I gave a paper at the Royal Geographical Society Conference last week.

I have pasted the title and abstract as an aside. 

The whole session went very well. Indeed it was great to see almost an entire day in the programme given over to the study of elite/expatriate/lifestyle migrant flows. I started thinking about the longer-term impacts of lifestyle migration and the lessons we can learn from such migrants about wider issues such as how to age well, how to protect quality of life, and how to ameliorate the effects of migration. We have never talked enough about the global power structures that enable lifestyle migration flows. But then again there remains an assumption that these are all affluent people. Matthew Hayes caused us to rethink those assumptions, with his work with poorer Americans moving to Ecuador.