Constraints, Incentives and Pockets of Local Order on the Streets of Pelotas, Brazil

Abstract

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.

Achieving the goals – an analysis of irregular migrants’ possibilities to transform their space-times in Finland

“…The time-geography provides a useful theoretical-methodological approach to investigate intertwined elements in individuals' space-times (Schwanen 2007;Friberg, Scholten, and Sandén 2009;Hägerstrand 2009;Shaw 2012;Gadd 2016aGadd , 2017. This relational approach enhances understanding of how the multiple, often conflicting, interconnections coming from disparate space-times transform the geographies of irregular migrants (see Tedeschi and Gadd 2021).…”

“…Nevertheless, according to the time-geographic approach, all actions are constrained and incited by individual capacities, law, knowledge and mental loads to mention but a few (Friberg, Scholten, and Sandén 2009;Gadd 2017). As people have different goals and aspirations in life, different elements constrain and incite their activities.…”