This article focuses on rural life and the voluntary commitment that it often seems to require. It builds on extensive ethnographic material collected between 2013 and 2020 in the northern inland of Sweden. The geographic conditions are marked by sparsely populated areas with villages and some smaller towns with forest industry and tourism as primary sources of income. They have also, at least since the financial crisis in the 1990s, been marked by a withdrawal of the welfare state and welfare

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... ervices as well as by depopulation. The article engages with how voluntary engagement in its various forms takes shape and how its meanings are based on what the engagement implies, where it is performed, how it is expressed, as well as on who is participating. This article explores these voluntary geographies as a contested space where notions of gender both structure and become structured by neoliberal discourses of hopes as well as fears for the future.