Mobilities, Temporalities, and Well-Being: Deciphering the Lived Experiences, Labour Arrangements and Agency of Migrants
Mobilities, Temporalities, and Well-Being: Deciphering the Lived Experiences, Labour Arrangements and Agency of Migrants
Friday, 11 July 2025: 11:00
Location: SJES024 (Faculty of Legal, Economic, and Social Sciences (JES))
Oral Presentation
It is well documented that migration can be understood as a spatial process involving different places that shape the migration process. Moreover, migration offers a lens to think about the interconnectedness of space and time while also addressing the complexity of social interactions, (non)movements, and subjectivities in specific places.
We use a threefold understanding of spatiality as expressed by Lefebvre (1991) - spatial practices, representations of space, and spaces of representation - adapted to rural spaces (Halfacree 2005). The mobilities perspective allows us to look at people's (non)movements, their journeys, and the various temporal aspects associated with them. The life course perspective broadens the understanding of migrant trajectories and focuses on the temporal dimension of migration.
The paper aims to examine migrants' subjectivities of mobilities, temporality, and well-being at three distinct but interrelated levels: everyday experiences, labour arrangements, and place attachment. The main objective is to assess migrants' understanding of the rural places where they live and to understand how they conceptualize their actions and practices in these places and how they construe their well-being in the place(s) to which they feel attached. The temporal aspect is present at all levels, but more importantly, time plays a role in how migrants make comparisons between places and spaces, how they assess their position in the local social hierarchy, and how they project their belonging and/or appropriate (rural) space. The temporariness/ permanence affects how migrant subjects perceive their presence/absence in different places, where temporality refers to seasonality and circularity, while permanence refers to routinized living, sedentariness, and territorialization.
Our case study refers to the Region of Western Greece, which has been the focus of our research for more than a decade, allowing us to observe changes over time. Methodologically, our analysis is based on two multi-site studies conducted between 2017 and 2022.
We use a threefold understanding of spatiality as expressed by Lefebvre (1991) - spatial practices, representations of space, and spaces of representation - adapted to rural spaces (Halfacree 2005). The mobilities perspective allows us to look at people's (non)movements, their journeys, and the various temporal aspects associated with them. The life course perspective broadens the understanding of migrant trajectories and focuses on the temporal dimension of migration.
The paper aims to examine migrants' subjectivities of mobilities, temporality, and well-being at three distinct but interrelated levels: everyday experiences, labour arrangements, and place attachment. The main objective is to assess migrants' understanding of the rural places where they live and to understand how they conceptualize their actions and practices in these places and how they construe their well-being in the place(s) to which they feel attached. The temporal aspect is present at all levels, but more importantly, time plays a role in how migrants make comparisons between places and spaces, how they assess their position in the local social hierarchy, and how they project their belonging and/or appropriate (rural) space. The temporariness/ permanence affects how migrant subjects perceive their presence/absence in different places, where temporality refers to seasonality and circularity, while permanence refers to routinized living, sedentariness, and territorialization.
Our case study refers to the Region of Western Greece, which has been the focus of our research for more than a decade, allowing us to observe changes over time. Methodologically, our analysis is based on two multi-site studies conducted between 2017 and 2022.