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Based on ethnography with Russian migrant men in Uzbekistan, this paper explores how disrupted life projects and stalled mobility are reworked through cosmopolitan aspirations, understood as labour to sustain hope, direction, and imaginaries of a ‘good life’ under war-induced uncertainty.

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Based on nine months of ethnographic fieldwork with Russian migrant men in Uzbekistan, this paper examines how young men grapple with disrupted life projects and uncertain futures in the context of war-induced mobility. Russia’s war in Ukraine set thousands of people on the move, interrupting family cycles, delaying social becoming, and placing long-term aspirations on hold. Many of my interlocutors found themselves stuck in unwanted destinations, navigating prolonged uncertainty about how to move forward with their lives. The paper analyses how men from different regions of Russia reframe experiences of uprootedness and stalled mobility as part of an ongoing effort to sustain a sense of direction and a viable future. Rather than accepting imposed identities of either ‘victims’ or ‘traitors’, they engage in narrative and practical work to reposition themselves as emergent, mobile, and morally accountable subjects. Aspirations toward cosmopolitan mobility, whether realised or imagined, become a key resource for reworking broken life trajectories and keeping hopes for a ‘good life’ alive under conditions of geopolitical constraint. The paper argues that cosmopolitan aspiration functions less as a marker of achieved privilege than as a form of labour through which young men cope with suspended futures, recalibrate expectations, and continue to imagine movement in an unequal and uncertain world.

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This paper explores Buryat labour migration to South Korea as a pursuit of a ‘good life’. More than a place to earn money, Korea is tightly entwined with migrants’ visions of a ‘good life’, while also shaping their dreams of alternative futures for their home region.

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South Korea has been a popular labour migration destination for Buryats, a Mongol population in Southeast Siberia (Russian Federation), ever since visa-free travel was introduced in 2014. Typically, these migrants engage in various manual labour, with long hours of work, few days off, and harsh working and living conditions. However, Korea represents more than a place to earn money. To many migrants, it is tightly entwined with their visions of a ‘good life’, be it because of the country’s economic prosperity, enticing opportunities amid neoliberalism, or romanticisation of K-culture. To many Buryats, this new Asian-majority setting also provides a relief from everyday racism they have encountered as members of a minoritised group in Russia, and a vision of life in a democratic, prosperous Asian setting that contrasts their experience in Russia. Since Russia’s full-scale war in Ukraine and military draft in 2022, Korea has become an even more important migrant destination amid economic precarity, but also a significant social and cultural reference point, as a counterweight to Russia’s authoritarian, militant, and Russo-centric regime. At the same time, migrants’ experience in Korea may often be disappointing, as they face precarity, inequality, and lack of long-term opportunities. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Korea in 2025 and supported by earlier fieldwork in Buryatia and Mongolia, this paper explores Buryat labour migration to South Korea as a pursuit of differing versions of a ‘good life’, marked by often unrealistic imaginaries of Korea but also shaping dreams of alternative futures for their home region.

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This paper traces how crossings opened in 2003 across Cyprus’s Green Line are lived in Northern Cyprus, as unresolved violence settles into documents, rumours, everyday crossing practices, sustaining im/mobility as an anticipated condition through which aspirations for ‘better days’ are navigated.

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This paper traces how the opening of the crossings in 2003 was encountered, anticipated, and folded into everyday life in Northern Cyprus. A ceasefire line in effect since 1974, the Green Line’s opening was experienced as a previously unimagined possibility and widely framed as a ‘door’ oriented toward ‘better days’ and toward ‘Europe’ in Northern Cyprus. Over time, crossing has come to organise the near-daily rhythms of life for many, even as access remains uneven and uncertain. Crossing is mediated through regimes of identification, whereby birth certificates, marriage ties, and bureaucratic classifications determine who is recognised as “from Cyprus” and permitted to cross.

Read through Avery Gordon’s account of haunting, the crossing emerges as a durational scene in which unresolved political violence presses into the present through documents, rumours, dreams, and routine encounters. The paper follows these fragments as sites through which mobility and immobility are constituted as interdependent conditions shaping everyday life. Im/mobility thus emerges not as an outcome but as a lived and anticipated condition that organises everyday orientations toward movement.

Aspirations for ‘better days’ are oriented toward 'Europe' as a proximate articulation of broader global imaginaries of the ‘good life’, while being continually reshaped through the lived conditions of division. In this sense, unresolved political violence and late-capitalist imaginaries of ‘better days’ converge and mutually shape one another through the ordinary, ongoing practices of im/mobility.

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The paper explores continuities between three projects of impossible lives in Nepal: Maoist revolutionaries during the civil war, Christian converts, and irregular migrants to the USA who finance their journeys through debt. How disparate are these projects and the 'dreams' underpinning them?

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This paper explores three models of ‘living for the future’ in the former Maoist base-area of Nepal: youth who joined Maoist guerrillas during the war of 1996-2006, recent converts to Christianity, and migrants who have embarked on perilous journeys to the USA via South America - the journeys that took up to year and cost up to to 60,000 USD. I suggest that it is the dialectic between a powerful vision of a future and an acute sense of disillusionment or ‘existential dissatisfaction’ (Jackson 2011) in the present that makes people embark on these seemingly disparate projects. By providing a long-term vision of the future and a new meaning to people’s lives, all of the three projects, however different their ultimate goals might be, allowed the followers to experience ‘existential mobility’ (Hage 2006), overcome the impasse in the present, and ‘move forward’ in life. By ‘evacuating the near future’ (Guyer 2007) and by emphasizing the long-term horizons of either building a ‘new’ egalitarian society in a country with rigid social hierarchies (Maoists), attaining a ‘new life’ (Christians), or pursuing the American Dream, indexed by permanent settlement one of the so-called ‘big countries’ (migrants), these projects fostered new type of subjects – the ones who are happy to sacrifice the present and the ‘near future’, kinship ties and familial resources, for the sake of long-term, often utopian future.

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Based on ethnographic fieldwork among Syrians in Denmark after the fall of the Assad regime, this paper explores what it means to imagine, inhabit and labor towards a multitude of simultaneous futures, as you navigate and resist the futures imagined for you in a shifting political landscape.

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Days after the fall of the Assad regime, as Syrians were still recalibrating their expectations for the future of Syria, the Danish Prime Minister made it very clear what kind of future, she envisioned for Syrians in Denmark: return. For the Syrians I encountered in my fieldwork, however, the future extends far beyond the binary question of returning or remaining. It contains a multitude of parallel and sometimes seemingly contradictory dreams, life projects and trajectories, and involves different forms of im/mobility. Meanwhile, individual ideas of 'a good life,' are deeply intertwined with fears, expectations and hopes for the collective future of Syria, which are not only highly polarized across the Syrian community, but also in flux as events unfold.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork among Syrians in Denmark conducted over the course of one year after the fall of the Assad regime, this paper centers the ways in which Syrians in Denmark not only imagine but also labor for ‘good lives’ in plural. I also explore how affective orientations (Ahmed, 2006; Bryant & Knight, 2019) towards this plurality of futures evolve in response to the political developments of both Syria and Denmark. Inspired by Ghassan Hage’s concept of diasporic lenticularity – i.e. the experience of inhabiting multiple realities at the same time (Hage 2021), I examine what it means to imagine, inhabit and work towards a multitude of simultaneous futures, as you navigate and/or resist the futures imagined for you in a shifting political landscape.

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Centring young Nepali women’s experiences of busyness, waiting and stuckedness as they dream of and labour towards a mobile future as flight attendant, this paper attunes to the question of how to carry on if what one desires remains out of reach despite the time, money and labour already invested.

Paper long abstract

What kind of dreams variously positioned young women can weave (Nep. sapanā bunnu) has been changing over the past few decades in Nepal. Drawing on ethnographic research on young women’s quest for mobility and hopeful futures in Kathmandu, this paper attunes to the question of how to carry on if what one dreams about remains out of reach or seems to keep moving further away despite the time, money and labour already invested. To this end, I explore temporal experiences and rhythms of intense busyness, waiting and stuckedness as they are experienced by young women with a high school degree who dream about and labour towards a mobile future following their training at private cabin crew institutes with the aim of becoming flight attendants.

Many trainees whom I accompanied in the months and years after their training during various phases of their job search, a time initially characterized by hopeful anticipation for the future, eventually need to grapple with the fact that their dream of social and spatial mobility – epitomized by the image of flying for an international airline – remains unattainable. The acceleration and deceleration of time, I will show, appears to be at the heart of experiencing an existential sense of immobility while holding on to the dream of flying and coming to terms with low-level service jobs in the meanwhile. Finally, even after landing a supposedly dream job as a flight attendant, a deep sense of immobility might persist and shape everyday working life.

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This paper explores how chronically unemployed youth in Johannesburg hunt for formal jobs while holding little hope for future employment. Rather, they approach their indefinite job search as a present-oriented activity that affords belonging, resources, and gendered affirmation while carried out.

Paper long abstract

In inner-city Johannesburg, work seekers without the professional experience, qualifications, or financial means to land stable employment nonetheless spend years, if not decades, searching for ‘proper jobs’ in South Africa’s exclusionary formal economy. These chronic work seekers pay daily visits to formalised labour agencies and recruitment services. Yet, they hold little hope that these market intermediaries will ever award them the 'proper jobs' they apply for and express only vague aspirations towards a future of employment. While work-seeking is usually understood as a transitional, aspirational activity aimed at future job-attainment, chronically unemployed youth instead approach their job search as a primarily present-oriented project that affords them favourable forms of spatial and social belonging, provisional access to socio-material resources, and for unemployed young men, gendered affirmation as ‘masculine working men’. Thus, work seekers keep applying for high-competition, high-status jobs, not in some ‘cruel optimism’ (Berlant, 2011) that they might arrive at a ‘fantasy future’ (Bear, 2017) of stable employment and socioeconomic mobility, but with the acute awareness that formalised job-seeking might be the only 'proper work' they can access in the foreseeable future.

Building on two periods of ethnographic fieldwork in Johannesburg in 2022 and 2024, this paper therefore suggests that work-seeking must be understood as more than an aspirational activity done in the hopes of future market incorporation. At the peripheries of the labour market, ‘hopeless’ jobseekers craft work-seeking lives they understand as good, meaningful, and ‘decent' working lives, even as they remain excluded from ‘decent jobs’.

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This paper aims to investigate Iranian women’s small online home-based businesses as a response to the condition of inclusion and exclusion following the Islamic Revolution. In my research, I explore the link between women’s online entrepreneurship and their belated hopes in socio-economic mobility.

Paper long abstract

The main aim of this paper is to investigate the case of Iranian women’s small online home-based businesses as a response to the condition of inclusion and exclusion following the Islamic Revolution. While the rise of online entrepreneurship is considered as the result of the neoliberal economic restructuring, close anthropological attention to the phenomena points to a variety of value regimes that account for both the expansion of women’s online businesses and their struggles. This includes the link between women’s online entrepreneurship and their belated hopes in socio-economic mobility. To delve into women entrepreneurs’ aspirations for economic inclusion, I conducted a digital ethnography of Iranian women’s businesses on Instagram. I also participated in business-related conferences and classes, interviewed women, and observed them as they move from home to online spaces, dream-selling events, traditional market and other venues for fulfilling their aspirations. Adopting a gendered approach to understanding what women aspire to, and how they strive to create a plan of action to realize these aspirations, this paper aims to analyze women’s labor on social media as a form of gendered labor, shaped within the context of historically evolving ideologies of hope. Examining the various gender regimes that are affecting Iranian women’s entrepreneurial labor, this research seeks to discuss the ways women experience the specific arrangements between “public” and “private” patriarchy, as well as the work and welfare policies that include or exclude certain groups of women from chances for mobility.

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This paper explores how “good futures” produced by development projects are negotiated by rural young women in southwest China. Drawing on ethnography, it shows how empowerment experiences enable girls to rework, resist, and redefine future imaginaries through everyday practices of mobility.

Paper long abstract

Development projects often produce normative imaginaries of a “good future” through education, skills training, and mobility, framing urban life, respectable work, and upward mobility as desirable goals. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2016 and 2023 in southwest China, this paper examines how such “good futures” are produced through development practice and how they are negotiated, accepted, and resisted through lived experiences of empowerment.

The paper analyzes this process from two interconnected perspectives. From the NGO’s viewpoint, empowerment is mobilized to promote a particular future for rural young women, emphasizing discipline, education, delayed marriage, and sustained mobility. From the perspective of the girls themselves, experiences of dance education, urban mobility, and gendered awareness gradually enable them to evaluate and reinterpret these future trajectories.

Rather than simply accepting or rejecting developmentally envisioned futures, the girls continually rework their own future imaginaries through forms of soft resistance, including leaving the project, returning to the village, engaging in urban wage work, and prioritizing family care. These practices should not be understood as failures of empowerment, but as ongoing negotiations shaped by structural constraints, emotional attachments, and personal aspirations.

By conceptualizing the “good future” as a contested and continually reworked imaginary, this paper contributes to anthropological debates on mobility, hope, and the pursuit of a good life, highlighting the interpretive gaps between development intentions and lived experiences.

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This paper explores how aspirations for a ‘good life’ take shape amid im/mobility, precarity, and religious norms among moto delivery drivers in Dakar, Senegal. It considers how adaptive dreams and relational labour sustain drivers through periods of waiting, stagnation, and uncertainty.

Paper long abstract

Drawing on ethnographic research with moto delivery drivers in Dakar, this paper examines how aspirations for a ‘good life’ are pursued from positions of social and economic marginality shaped by the demands of moto delivery work. For the Muslim men who work as moto delivery drivers, mobility is central to their livelihood yet deeply ambivalent: constant movement through the city sustains economic survival while simultaneously shaping a lifestyle that places them at odds with normative religious expectations. As a result, drivers occupy a position at the edges of Dakar’s religious and social order, where access to recognition and belonging cannot be taken for granted.

For moto delivery drivers, pursuing a ‘good life’ rarely takes the form of dramatic upward mobility. Instead, it involves ongoing forms of relational labour through which access to social recognition, moral standing, and future possibility is sustained, alongside the continual mediation and adjustment of aspirations. Because drivers’ lifestyles often unsettle normative expectations, their dreams must remain adaptive to precarious circumstances. Hopes of advancement thus coexist with periods of waiting, stagnation, and uncertainty, producing a prolonged condition of im/mobility that is endured rather than resolved. Broken or deferred dreams are not abandoned, but recalibrated into relationally grounded projects that keep alternative futures imaginable.

Drawing on Sufi-inflected ethical frameworks, the paper shows how adaptability, patience, and relational belonging enable these men to cope with disappointment while continuing to strive, contributing to anthropological debates on im/mobility, marginality, and the ‘good life’.

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Drawing on ethnographic and auto-ethnographic work with pashmina-weaving households in Kashmir, this paper traces the collapse of a kinship-based mobility project oriented towards economic prosperity. It shows how, after failure, endurance and containment function as alternative modes of aspiration.

Paper long abstract

Anthropological research on aspiration and the ‘good life’ has often framed dreaming as an active endeavour oriented toward social mobility, well-being, and progress (Appadurai 2004; Fischer 2014; Hage 2009). In this paper, I build on this literature while arguing that, under conditions of structural inequality, aspirational labour often takes a different form: it is oriented less toward advancement and more toward containing a dream’s collapse.

In Kashmir, pashmina weaving is a centuries-old household-based industry in which families engage in weaving and trade; combining craft labour with kinship obligations and fluctuating export markets. Drawing on ethnographic and auto-ethnographic material from a pashmina-weaving household, I examine a kinship-based mobility project that emerged in the aftermath of India’s post-economic liberalisation. Structured around trade and aspirations for economic prosperity, this project collapsed following a major financial loss.

Taking this loss as a point of departure, the paper approaches capitalism not from corporations or financial centres, but from the households where its failures are lived, managed, and absorbed over time. I explore how people continue to orient themselves toward a ‘good life’ after failure, focusing on locally valued forms of stability, continuity, and social viability. Rather than treating aspiration as a driver of progress, I foreground containment as a crucial yet overlooked form of labour where endurance itself becomes a mode of aspiration and dreaming becomes more of an effort to sustain a livable present after the collapse of an anticipated future.

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This article analyzes the contrasting trajectories of “staying” and “moving” among Portuguese seamstresses, reflecting not only on what leads them to pursue the dream of a “good life”, but also on how this dream exposes them to harsher working conditions and conscious sacrifices.

Paper long abstract

In the literature on the textile industry in the Global South, it is common to observe that women, driven by the dream of a “good life”, migrate from rural areas to urban centers in search of work in garment factories (Nathan et al., 2022). In Portugal, during the 1980s, many textile workers, similarly driven by this dream - shaped by poor working conditions and economic insecurity in the sector - migrated to the French textile industry in search of employment (Rei, 2022).

Although today, as demonstrated by the ethnographic research I conducted with unionized Portuguese seamstresses, the dream of a “good life” and the possibility of moving to other factories to achieve better working conditions and a dignified life, continue to structure these women’s life projects, this desire is strongly conditioned by their immediate struggles (Narotzky and Smith, 2006).

This article, which analyzes the contrasting trajectories of “staying” and “moving” among my interlocutors, seeks to show that what leads them to move, more than the pursuit of better working conditions, is the desire to spend more time with their children and care for them better.

In the end, I conclude that the pursuit of the imagined “good life” leads these women to often encounter more adverse working conditions, and consequently to consciously sacrifice their own physical and emotional well-being. This paradox highlights how dreams can both drive action and reproduce vulnerabilities, showing that mobility and hope are deeply intertwined with risk and sacrifice, even when choices are made consciously.

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This paper adopts a person-centered approach to city-making and conceptualizes the gendered timescapes of suspension in a built-from-scratch Chinese city. A paradox in itself, suspension becomes a gendered experience of development that contains mobility and immobility at the same time.

Paper long abstract

Spectacular city-making and its intersections with real estate financialization, land speculation, and precarious urban living have generated much anthropological attention in varied geographical sites. This paper adopts a person-centered approach to city-making and conceptualizes the gendered timescapes of suspension amidst state-led development in a built-from-scratch Chinese city. My analysis focuses on a special group of pioneer settlers in an emerging model community planned to be the future city center—migrant mothers who took pains to build a new home in the absence of their spouses. By unpacking the lived experience of suspension as “women’s time” (Kristeva 1981), I discuss how a progressive imagination of speeding up urban development compels agentive temporal strategies on the ground that rely asymmetrically on women’s work in various forms while generating paradoxical aspirations for a fast-tracked familial future. A paradox in itself, suspension becomes a gendered experience of development that contains mobility and immobility at the same time.

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This paper follows V., an indigenous Makushi woman, in her travels to access chemotherapy for her husband. I ask how diagnoses reconfigure hunger and im/mobilities, transforming the marital relationship, before considering how V. coped with his eventual death and pressures intensified by inequality.

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In this paper, I attend to the moral strivings of V., an indigenous Makushi woman, to be a ‘good wife.’ In particular, I follow her as she accompanies her husband, who travelled to access chemotherapy treatment in the Guyanese capital city of Georgetown, far in many ways from the North Rupununi village where they then otherwise resided. There is a well-developed literature derived from ethnographic studies in the region that focuses on the largely idealistic ‘good life’ in Amazonian socialities, which emphasises kinship as coresidence. In part, this theme has been explored through the husband-wife relation and the mutual satisfaction of hungers, widely construed (Gow 1989; Overing & Passes 2000). As I turn to the affliction that V.'s husband's disease brought to her life, I ask how biomedical diagnoses trouble this imaginary found in the literature, and demand analytical consideration of reconfigured im/mobilities and hunger, which transform the marital relation itself. In conclusion, I consider how V. coped with her husband's eventual death, which marked a failure of her striving, at least on one level, alongside its related affective pressures in a context of intensified inequalities.

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This paper examines existential mobility and suspended legality in Western Assam's river islands (chars), showing how recurrent displacement, bureaucratic waiting, and fragile dreams of home produce co-existing mobility and immobility under unequal regimes of land and citizenship.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines mobility and immobility as co-produced conditions in the shifting river islands (chars) of Western Assam, where the movements of the Brahmaputra intersect with colonial land-making, postcolonial bureaucracy, and contemporary regimes of citizenship. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among Miya char dwelllers alongside archival research in colonial maps, survey reports, and administrative records, the paper explores how existential mobility is shaped, constrained, and deferred by regimes of land and legality. Annual floods and river erosion compel recurrent spatial mobility, forcing people to relocate homes, livelihoods, and social worlds. Yet these movements rarely culminate in arrival as legal settlement or recognition. Instead, mobility is accompanied by forms of immobility produced through land administrative and citizenship verification procedures that demand documentary stability from landscapes and lives shaped by flux. I argue that char dwellers' life projetcs are animated by fragile yet persistent dreams of boshot bāri (home) and sukh-shanti (peaceful dwelling), imaginaries which are sustained through affective, material, and bureaucratic labour that involves constant moving, rebuilding, testifying, and waiting. What emerges is a condition of suspended legality, in which repeated attempts at arrival generate prolonged temporal and political immobility. By foregrounding waiting and the labour of hope, the paper reframes displacement as an enduring configuration of (im)mobilities rather than a discrete event.

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Based on ethnographic research with temporary workers in China’s state-owned railway sector, this paper examines how dreams of a stable life shape orientations to stay rather than move under increasing labour uncertainty.

Paper long abstract

This paper approaches precarity not simply as unstable labour conditions, but as a politically and economically structured differentiation of futures. While existing studies often link mobility to hope and the pursuit of a good life, it asks what happens when remaining in place becomes the primary way of sustaining future aspirations.

Drawing on ethnographic research with vocational school and junior college graduates from rural backgrounds employed on short-term labour agency contracts in China’s state-owned railway sector, I examine how dreams of a stable life orient practices of staying put under increasing labour uncertainty. Working alongside permanently employed state workers, these workers confront futures marked by unequal capacities to face risk, endure disruption, and await improvement. However, their own positions are widely regarded as offering better prospects than casual work elsewhere, drawing on a long-standing socialist imagination in which state employment has long been a key anchor for imagining a stable future, even as that promise has become fragile in late socialist China.

I argue that staying put in this context is not a form of demoralisation or political withdrawal, but an ethical and temporal practice through which life projects are held together. Conceptualised as the ethics of staying put, this form of suspended striving foregrounds how hope, insecurity, and immobility are actively composed in everyday labour lives.

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This paper explores onward migration aspirations among newly naturalized citizens and immigrants in Germany. Based on ethnographic research, it examines why some abandon the “European dream” and how ambivalence, broken hopes, and the affective notion of Ghurbah shape future-making beyond Europe.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines the aspirations for onward migration of newly naturalized citizens and immigrants to leave Germany in search for a better life and future. The paper seeks to answer the following questions: Why individuals and families aspire to leave Germany/Europe after dreaming of migrating to it? What their aspirations and decisions to leave tell us about coping with broken dreams and identifying alternatives?

The paper is based on a preliminary ethnographic fieldwork with immigrants and refugees, most of them arrived in Germany in 2015/16. After almost ten years, many research participants have received the German citizenship and it seems that they give up the “European dream” for other countries, such as the Gulf States, or to go back home.

Conceptually, individuals’ and families’ aspirations to leave Germany are framed in terms of ‘onward migration’. This notion is understood as a migratory trajectory that remains open-ended and sheds light on notions of ambivalence and unexpected turns. To capture the affective dimensions, the paper proposes the Arabic term “Ghurbah” as an analytical tool. “Ghurbah” refers to a state of being and feelings of strangeness, alienation, or being an outsider, often experienced by individuals who are new to a place or culture, and/or who feel out of place within their own society. While “Ghurbah”, i.e. aspiring for migration, was and still is a dream for many people especially from the Global South, it is this very notion that makes some of them whether give up their dreams or seek new ones.

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This presentation explores Ecuadorian return migrants’ moral reasonings and dilemmas, shaped by their migratory experiences, concerning their present lives, the ‘good’ life, and their aspirations for social, spatial, and existential mobility.

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In this presentation, I examine the trajectories and long-term life projects of Ecuadorian migrants who migrated to Spain at the turn of the century and came back to Ecuador following the 2008 Spanish financial crisis. For many, return proved largely disappointing, as their country did not correspond to their expectations. Since the late 2010s, Ecuador has experienced yet another economic recession and political uncertainty, prompting many of my returnee research participants to reassess what counts as a ‘good’ life, namely a life in which they can somehow flourish.

As a result of their moral deliberations on what constitutes a ‘good’ life and where it may be achieved (which context makes which kind of life possible), some returnees wish to remigrate to Spain, while others envisage remaining in Ecuador, notably narrowing down their aspirations for social mobility. In this presentation, I ask: How have returnees’ past migratory experiences and current moral dilemmas shaped their experience of the present time in Ecuador, their hopes, and their envisionings of the future, whether there or elsewhere?

By examining how returnees articulate imaginings of the past, the present, and the future, I show that differences in how and where they envision a better future are shaped by their particular ways of articulating their aspirations for social, spatial, and existential mobility in their moral reasonings. These reasonings have an impact on my research participants’ actions and their sense of either existential immobility or of moving ‘forward’.

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This article examines songs written by Thai migrants working in Israel, theorised as a form of unwaged social reproduction labour, by which migrants from Thailand’s rural sending migration communities maintain the possibilities their home communities open to them as they move between labour markets.

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This article examines songs written by Thai migrants about their experiences working on Israeli farms. The songs are analysed in the context of the Thailand-Israel labour migration regime. The recruitment of Thais was part of Israel's aim to replace, weaken and control the Palestinian workforce from the occupied Palestinian Territories in the West Bank and Gaza, aiming to maintain the Jewish majority through policies controlling migrant workers' lives, exploitative employment structures, continuous rights violations and social and physical isolation.

Writing, performing, and listening to such songs is theorised in this article as a form of unwaged social reproduction labour, by which migrants from Thailand’s rural sending migration communities in the northeast region (Isaan) maintain the possibilities their home communities open to them as they move between labour markets. With this analysis, I expand the scope of social reproduction theory (SRT) by arguing that unwaged creative labour is a further type of social reproduction labour.

In capitalist, racialised, and discriminatory migration regimes, migrants’ homes are more than a physical place of origin. They encompass a multiplicity of relations, affective worlds, and power dynamics. They are spaces where responsibilities, a sense of belonging, and hopes materialise and are negotiated. Although the creative social reproduction labour is embedded within capitalist labour relations and is part of the latter’s reproduction, the creative labour and the gravity of sending communities into the lives, imaginaries, and future-oriented visions of migrants serve as a potential means of political struggles and knowledge production.

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In depopulating small towns, staying is often seen as failure. But how do those who stay imagine a good life? Analyzing parental aspirations, we show how class, ethnicity, locality-derived values and shifting political-economic trajectories inform alternative visions of good life beyond migration.

Paper long abstract

Most parents, when asked about their aspirations for their children’s future, ultimately want them to be happy and to have a good life. What constitutes a “good life”, however, is shaped by broader societal ideals as well as structural possibilities and constraints linked to class, ethnicity, locality and wider political-economic trajectories. In slowly depopulating peripheral towns in Hungary, the dominant view inextricably links social advancement and a “good”, stable middle-class life to migration to larger cities. This is also evident in Csendes, where we conducted ethnographic fieldwork. Nonetheless, not everyone can or wants to leave. Our paper explores the alternative imaginaries of a “good life” articulated by local parents in relation to their children’s future. We argue that these alternative imaginaries, on the one hand, are rooted in values and forms of capital embedded in the locality, such as dense social networks, care relations, locally attainable relative middle-class positions, and a sense of security. Given the presence of a considerable Roma population, ethnicity also plays an important role in local aspirations, albeit in different ways across ethnic groups. On the other hand, alternative imaginaries are also influenced by broader political economic trajectories, such as re-industrialization, the prioritization of technical education, and the devaluation of certain higher-education professions. Our analysis demonstrates how these structural processes translate into local possibilities and constraints for attaining social advancement, shaping parental aspirations. By examining alternative imaginaries of a “good life”, we highlight local forms of social mobility that in dominant views often appear as “immobility”.