Finding Flow: Negotiating diverse temporalities in migrant family life

Finding Flow: Negotiating diverse temporalities in migrant family life

Based at the Center for Multilingualism in Society across the Lifespan (MultiLing) at the University of Oslo, this project will undertake a critical sociolinguistic ethnography by way of a new innovative approach - rhythmanalysis - to explore the temporal dimensions of migrant adaptation processes. Five Russian-speaking multilingual families will partake in the study, which adopts a participatory research approach. The research starts by framing migration as a time prone to social arrhythmia – a disruption to the familiar, predictable, and secure – and proposes that integration practices such as language learning and acculturation are in fact sites of conflicting rhythms and temporalities. As such, the project incorporates several layers of inquiry to understand rhythmic relations at individual, interactional, and societal levels, and how these interact. Moreover, it aims to comprehend how temporal perception correlates with meaning-making practices. If mobility can lead to new temporal experiences, then narrative and discourse become key symbolic modes for making sense of this experience. Integration – or more inclusively, adaptation – is thus conceived as an embodied, temporal, rhythmic process of habit transformation, with ‘breaks’ in the flow of an event serving as a window into processes of change. The project also explores the prominence of past and future in migrant lives, as decision-making becomes more conscious, and new versions of heritage take shape. The ultimate goals of this research are to produce a novel theoretical framework for exploring issues of integration, identification, and belonging in a sociolinguistics of mobility, or superdiversity. In understanding how adaptation occurs, families and communities can be equipped with practical strategies to deal with the novelties experienced during migration, and to find a renewed sense of eurythmia, or flow. The research aligns with H2020’s goals for ‘inclusive, innovative and reflective societies’.