This article explores how multiple layers of spacetimes overlap and merge in individuals' lives and relationships, transforming, enhancing, and/or hampering their abilities to interact with the environment. Drawing upon content-analysed ethnographic notes, the article investigates the case of irregular migrants in Finland. It shows how their past activities, practices, and relationships, as well as their hopes and fears for the future, materially shape their now-times. The latter change and evolve through a relentless combination of different past and future elements, in multiple, disparate, and often contradictory ways. This article considers how these migrants survive by inventing new activities and practices and building social relationships (with local residents and their own communities) on a daily basis, negotiating disparate elements, such as laws, digital and physical spaces, and work-and health-related issues. In so doing, migrants acquire, in roundabout (non-linear) ways, the knowledge and capacity to deal with their current, stressful conditions. The article shows how a spatio-temporal approach can transform the emotional geographies of irregular migrants by shedding light on how they navigate the disparate and often conflicting elements of their lives, activities, and relationships.
This article investigates the life experiences of 19 young people on the streets of Pelotas, southern Brazil. Manifold methods were used revealing several highly interconnected aspects in their realities. This study, which was conducted for a period of seven years (2009–2016), illustrates how the studied street youths form their environments physically, socially and mentally in order to reach their goals and create the multiple means of survival in challenging street environment. It is important to understand heterogeneous, interrelated physical, sociocultural and mental elements to study subjectively experienced realities. Personally experienced multidimensional constraints and incentives and the individual’s own goals shape these realities.
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