(Im)Mobile imagination. On trailing, feeling stuck and imagining work on-the-move

Abstract

Emerging research focuses on the role of time in the context of mobility and explores the conditions of ‘wait’ and ‘stuckness’ as conceptual tools for understanding the tempos and socio-cultural implications of mobile experiences. This paper contributes to this research by exploring these conditions in the context of work and geographical mobility, with a special focus on people who migrate and follow their working partners in international professional migration and temporarily live in Switzerland. The increasingly mobile and changing conditions of some professional sectors have made transnational career trajectories imaginable also for many partners. Yet, at times, their working life is not easily reconstituted on the occasion of the move, and the timing for job-search and unemployment can extend indefinitely. I will discuss how mobile professionals’ partners, by transiting from a working situation to another one that is not yet in place, experience a condition of stuckness between identities, phases of life and destinations of migration. I will ask how the subjective experience of stuckness can trigger and at times block a person’s capacity to imagine work under conditions of geographical mobility.