The grant was awarded to attend the RGS-IBG conference in London, UK, August 27 to 29, 2013.  With the grant, however, Dr. Hayes was able to attend this conference and the American Sociological Association’s (ASA) Annual Meetings , August 9 to 13, 2013 in New York City.  At the ASA, Dr. Hayes was presenting his work at a roundtable organized by the migration section.  His paper looked at retiree migrants in Ecuador and argued that although they most often fit under the subfield of lifestyle migration, their migration also constituted a form of economic migration to a lower cost of living destination.  There were approximately 8 other people at the roundtable, all researchers in the field of migration studies.

Dr. Hayes report:

The conference in London went extremely well.  I was on a panel with two of the leading figures in lifestyle migration, Karen O’Reilly and Michaela Benson.  Both gave me encouraging and positive feedback on my work.  I presented on a concept called geographic arbitrage, which is a calculative rationality of transnational mobility.  Most of the existing literature tends to treat economic rationalities as push and pull factors within rational choice theories.  My work looked at how new narratives of economic rationality emerge against the backdrop of social forces, such as the rise of new lifestyle actors and the decline of retirement savings.   There were approximately 20 researchers at the presentation, most of them in the fields of lifestyle migration and population geography.

In addition to making useful contacts at both conferences that will help in presenting my work at other conferences next year, I also got some useful suggestions of places to publish my work and encouragement that it was up to standard.  This should hopefully facilitate research publication and further dissemination.

In addition to the conference, I spent a week networking with researchers at the Groupe de recherches interdisciplinaires sur l’Amérique Latine (GRAL) at the Université Catholique de Louvain in Belgium, who were also enthused by my work and who are inviting me back to give a research lecture in October.  They may also have avenues for publication of my work in French.