Encounters, Resonance and Structural Stories: Understanding Migrant Trajectories

Recent explicit examinations of temporalities of migrant’s journeys have profoundly questioned once firmly imagined temporal linearity of migrant movement. Especially research with irregular and precarious migrants has highlighted different rhythms and cadences of often ‘staggered’ mobility and migrants’ complex negotiations of waiting and stuck-ness. Researchers of privileged migration have also been asked to pay attention to the temporal openness and eventfulness of migration. This paper offers a conceptual framework through which to make sense of this eventfulness, especially in relation to such migrants’ decisions and trajectories. I draw here on (post)migration urban studies, broader social theory and urban mobilities studies respectively to bring together the concepts of encounter, resonance and structural stories, highlighting in particular the temporal aspects of this framework. If encounters seem temporally singular, as well as subject-centered, resonance is much more temporally complex. Empirically, I analyze ethnographic research and interviews conducted with migrants who have moved, some several times, within the eventually more firmly established and thickly textured transnational field between Denmark and Israel; some four decades while others ten years ago. I highlight how over time the types of resonant encounters – with people, experience, object or ideas, including beyond Zionism - have diversified and how they work to effectuate people’s mobility, or lack of it. Likewise, the paper traces a shift in the kinds of structural stories people draw on in their narratives about transnational mobility, highlighting a growing importance of stories focused on subject-relevant quality of life relative to those focused on the collective trajectories.