Digital Nomadism: the academic research behind the lifestyle

Most writing about digital nomadism is either a sales pitch or a travel diary. Digital Nomadism is neither. It is the public home of a decade-long university research program into remote work and location independence, and it puts the papers and the data where anyone can read them.

What Digital Nomadism Does

• Publishes the research: journal articles and conference papers from the group, in outlets including the Journal of Business Ethics, the Information Systems Journal, the Journal of Information Technology and the Journal of the Association for Information Systems.
• Takes on the awkward questions: the effect of nomads on local communities (with fieldwork in Chiang Mai and Canggu), identity and belonging, the ethics of the lifestyle, and what knowledge work looks like after COVID-19.
• Statistics dashboards: global nomad population, age demographics, gender distribution, education levels, income levels, work arrangements, preferred destinations, how long people stay nomadic, and a separate view of US nomads.
• Documents the team's public work: keynotes, panels and press appearances, including Thailand Digital Nomad Week and an SRF interview filmed in Chiang Mai.

Why It Makes Sense for Nomads

When you are deciding whether to keep moving, where to base yourself, or how to explain your life to a sceptical relative, numbers beat anecdotes. The statistics pages show the actual shape of the population you belong to, and the papers give you language for the parts that are hard to articulate: why the freedom often feels conditional, how visa regimes decide where people cluster, and what people who stay nomadic for years do differently from those on a one-year break.

It is also the rare source that takes the host community seriously. If you care about not being part of the problem in Chiang Mai or Canggu, the fieldwork here is the most honest reading available.

Pricing

The site itself is free. Some of the underlying journal articles sit behind publisher paywalls, though most are also posted on ResearchGate and Google Scholar.

Worth a read before your next round of deciding whether this lifestyle is actually working for you.