Paper short abstract:

Young adults moving from Finland to Sweden narrate an adventure in the present. The future becomes hard to visualise though, since everything depends on two options; staying or returning. This paper investigates constructions of the future in contemporary personal experience narratives on migration.

Paper long abstract:

This paper is based on interviews with Swedish-speaking young adults who have moved from Finland to Sweden in the late 2010’s. Regardless of whether they moved to study, work or just find themselves, they tend to narrate this ongoing part of their life as an adventure, something exiting. They are in the period of life between adolescence and adulthood, marked by searching for and experimenting with identity.

As their peers they see different goals in their future and they talk of graduating, finding a good job, making a career and starting a family. This corresponds with the idea of emerging adulthood and the ideal of self-realization, where studies and future career development are important parts (Arnett, 2004).

This future becomes hard to visualise though, since they are often unsure of whether they are staying in Sweden or moving back to Finland. Different factors are pulling and pushing in both directions, and though some informants are dead set on staying (or leaving), many seem to find it hard to see a future in either country.

This paper investigates constructions of futures in personal experience narratives, when these young migrants try to verbalise where they see themselves in the long run, and what factors they think will be important for their choices when it comes to staying or returning. These constructions of futures contain colliding concepts where for example a good job might be connected to one country but a family to the other, making the future in itself hard to imagine.