This Rural and Regional Mobilities Workshop: Exploring the Impact of (Im)Mobilities in Rural and Regional Communities was presented by the Hawke EU Centre for Mobilities, Migrations and Cultural Transformations on 26 September 2017 at the University of South Australia’s Mount Gambier Campus. The workshop was presented in association with La Trobe University’s Department of Social Inquiry and Centre for the Study of the Inland.

Characterised as being fixed, stable and homogenous communities, rural and regional areas are often viewed as largely untouched by the mobility of cosmopolitan, globalising dynamics associated with fast-paced connected urban centres. These notions have been challenged in recent years in Australia and Europe with claims that rural and regional communities have also experienced significant changes with increasing forms of mobility across a number of areas involving rural-to-rural, rural-to-urban, urbanto-rural or international-to-rural migration. Indeed it has been argued that ‘mobility is central to the enactment of the rural… and the rural is at least as mobile as the urban’ (Bell and Osti 2010).

The workshop was an opportunity for academics involved in research in regional and rural Australian communities as well as key regional leaders and stakeholders to learn from one another and engage with the challenges associated with changing regional and rural mobilities. A key aim of the workshop was to suggest recommendations that will enable regional and rural communities to effectively respond to these challenges. These challenges are not unique to the Australian context. We are also pleased that the Regional and Rural Mobilities Workshop was able to draw on the experiences and lessons learned from recent migration challenges in Europe (Germany) and New Zealand.