On multiple spacetimes in the everyday lives of irregular migrants in Finland

Abstract

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.

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). Moreover, the time-geographic framework includes the analysis of one's personal goals, projects to reach them, but also the analysis of the elements constraining and inciting the projects.…”

“…Anderson and Wylie 2009;Buchanan and Lambert 2005;Hägerstrand 2009;Lefebvre 1991;Massey 2005;Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos 2015;Shubin 2015). Hence, elements such as past social relationships, memories, physical and digital spaces, laws, and future uncertainties in past-present-future space-times, all are present in an endless circle constituting spatio-temporal dimensions as both the same and different (see Tedeschi and Gadd 2021;Deleuze 1994). Furthermore, time cannot be conceptualized only as absolute or linear, beginning in the past and moving from the present to the future (Tedeschi and Gadd 2021).…”

“…Hence, elements such as past social relationships, memories, physical and digital spaces, laws, and future uncertainties in past-present-future space-times, all are present in an endless circle constituting spatio-temporal dimensions as both the same and different (see Tedeschi and Gadd 2021;Deleuze 1994). Furthermore, time cannot be conceptualized only as absolute or linear, beginning in the past and moving from the present to the future (Tedeschi and Gadd 2021). Actually, 'a number of heterogeneous elements thrive together and constitute a multiplicity of relations that give rise to the moments of becoming that we perceive as the present' (Blazek, Esson, and Smith 2019, 66).…”

“…Hence, in the fieldwork, I explored the elements in participants' everyday and the interlinkages among the elements, and their effects on migrants' activities and mental states. Different spatiotemporal dimensions were identified in the participants' narratives, and the multiple interlinkages between those dimensions were detected through participants' embodied spatio-temporal practices (see Tedeschi and Gadd 2021).…”

“…With this research, my aim is to contribute to the current, extensive discussion regarding irregular migration by analysing the interlinkages among various elements in the lives of these people and by demonstrating how the participants of this research try to transform their space-times in order to overcome the adversities in their lives. Consequently, this article illustrates how multiple, often conflicting spatio-temporal elements coincide inseparably in migrants' various relationships and everyday experiences, and how the transformation of these space-times, materially transform the actions of the migrants (see also, Tedeschi and Gadd 2021).…”