Valuable insight into the experience of people that want to live in a more slow-paced community

Rannveig Ágústa Guðjónsdóttir, postdoctoral researcher at the project, has been collecting inverviews with families from around the country. In early summer, she drove around Iceland to inverview people, but she has also gone on shorter excursions to the countryside.

In her drive around Iceland, Rannveig usually conducted several interviews per day, as the project aims to get an insight into the experience of various types of families, in different places.

The highlights of the trip, Rannveig says, are the nature, incredible hospitality and impressive people.

"In a few places I was filled with reverence and felt small against the magnificent nature. I felt a real humleness. The mountain views and the country's harshness was such that I perceived my place as a tiny human creature inside this land. Descriptions of family life in these places were also more beautiful than I had expected, as I had prepared myself for stories about living far away from community services. Instead, I heard about the privileges of living in the countryside."

Rannveig says she got a valuable insight into the knowledge and experience of people living outside of the capital city of Reykjavík; of living a more sustainable and slower-paced life, living in a stronger community and even have a more accessible school system. She also says that she often found it regrettable that this knowledge and experience were not put to a better use in the capital.

Rannveig adds:

"There are so many resourceful people doing their best and paying for it financially and by taking on more workload because they want to live in a slower-paced community and because they want things to be sustainable. Even if it is hard and their kids have to sit on a schoolbus for many hours a day and they are far from all kinds of services. Even if they have to send their teenagers away to get schooling and pay high prices for flying to Reykjavík for sports events."

The data collection has had an obvious impact on Rannveig who says she is "tired but grateful".

"It has taken a lot of drive, in all senses of the word. But it also has been extremely interesting to meet these impressive people in this expressive country."

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