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This narrative inquiry uses the talking circle, a discourse process indigenous to the North American prairies, to explore the experiences of recent international migrants to rural Alberta. The immediate intention is to address questions of rural revitalization and the creation of welcoming communities. At a deeper level, it explores the role of history, cultural negotiation, and power relations in community development. It examines place as a critical element of human experience, which has been severed under modern economic regimes. Recommendations for how we might best respond to rural migration challenges include processes for listening and responding to needs, for building trustworthy relationships, and a call to recognize Aboriginal history. Findings also point to the importance of facilitating options for migrants with temporary status in a transient global context. The study advises that learning through attentive intercultural discourse could be integral to recreating democratic communities and establishing sense of place. / Adult Education

Rural revitalization is a major concern in many developed countries where rural exodus depopulated thecountryside, including France where some rural areas suffer from demographic and economic decline. In thefirst times of the Covid 19 crisis, the perspective of an urban exodus was largely raised in the developedcountries’ press. The idea was that the pandemic was sparking disenchantment with the urban lifestyleleading to mass migration from the big cities to the countryside, thus fostering rural revitalization, possibly ata wide scale. Therefore, the aim of this study is on the one hand, to understand this Urban Exodusphenomenon and its significance in the French context through press and literature review. On the otherhand, the aim is to investigate if and how this phenomenon impacts rural revitalization, by focusing on thecases of the rural municipalities Saint-Fraimbault and Mamers. We find that the vision of the Urban Exodusfirst conveyed by the media was distorted: there has been no global reorganization of spatial and migratorypatterns in France, even though more people have been moving towards an area with a lesser populationdensity. The host territories include rural areas that were in decline before the pandemic, where the UrbanExodus represents a potential in terms of demographic and economic recovery, as well as a challenge for theirrural identity and their development model. The case studies show that the effects of the Urban Exodus onrural revitalization are not uniform. They suggest that the effects may depend on the initial developmentstrategy of the municipality. In the case of Mamers indeed, the Urban Exodus was experienced as anopportunity while the phenomenon did not have significant effects in Saint-Fraimbault.