Introducing Lifestyle Mobilities

Discordant Lifestyle Mobilities in East Asia: Privilege and Precarity of British Retirement in Thailand

“…This paper considers how ageing and mobility intersect through a critical engagement with the concept of ‘lifestyle mobilities’ (McIntyre, ; Cohen et al ., ). Before unpacking this concept, it is first necessary to trace the theoretical trajectory of ‘lifestyle’ in migration scholarship.…”

“…To address this argument, I critically engage with the concept of lifestyle mobilities (Cohen et al ., ), cross‐referencing with scholarship on lifestyle and retirement migration (King et al ., ; Oliver, ; Benson & O'Reilly, ) to discuss relationality as a key component of lifestyle mobility. I use an empirical case study of British retirement migration to Thailand to explore the ways in which lifestyle migrants experience privilege and precarity in their everyday lives, focusing on three aspects of precarity: financial insecurity, health inequality and status discord.…”

Toward a Critical Sociology of Lifestyle Migration: Reconceptualizing Migration and the Search for a Better Way of Life

“…Beyond this, however, the characterization of the relationship between romanticism and movement as discussed by Cohen et al . () is not distinct to nomadology, but is long‐standing within cultural analysis (finding authenticity); indeed, the acknowledgement of this as a social construction informs some research into lifestyle migration (and amenity migration) (see Benson, , ; Osbaldiston,, ).…”

“…The mobilities paradigm – characterized by its opposition to the traditional approaches to social science as sedentary, failing to keep up with a world that is forever moving and never fixed (Urry, ) – has also been used to problematize lifestyle migration on the grounds, among others, that it overlooks a host of different movements of people, things, images, objects, ideas and capital (Cohen et al ., ; McIntyre, ; Glick Schiller and Salazar, ; Salazar, ; Vannini and Taggart, ). This critique has produced new conceptualizations for understanding the relationship between lifestyle and migration, but these conceptualizations appear to be less driven by empirical data than their precursors.…”

“…Firstly, the definition of the term as a quest for a ‘better way of life’ – as characterized by Benson and O'Reilly () – is questioned by Cohen et al . (: 5; italics added) as follows:

[W]e maintain that to privilege any chosen way of life as ‘better’ is to potentially offer a romantic reading of it , and that links between romanticism and mobility have a long and critiqued history in nomadology (Cresswell, 2006; Hannam, 2009), embodied in the subject position of the nomad or ‘neo‐nomad’ (for example D'Andrea, 2006).

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