Learning by doing migration: temporal dimensions of life course transitions

ABSTRACT

The increasing speed of societal, environmental, technological, and workplace changes brings into sharper focus the question of how people shape and learn from transitions, such as so-called ‘skilled migration'. Taking a doing transitions and doing migration perspective, I assert that transitions and migration do not simply exist but are constituted relationally through social practices and accompanied by learning processes. This paper reports findings from qualitative research into the question of how people learn and transform their understandings of (life)time when moving to a new country and seeking entry into the labour market. The study used the documentary method to analyse data from 20 biographical-narrative interviews with people who moved to Canada as adults. Findings indicate different modes of dealing with shifts in temporal contexts during migration as decompressing lifetime, losing time, and going with the flow. These modes are associated with positive transformative learning, negative transformative learning, and learning through participation in practices. This study has implications for theorising learning during life course transitions as a socially embedded process. It also points to the need for differentiated support as individuals seek to enter new labour markets or make career changes in the context of migration.

KEYWORDS:

• Transitions
• migration
• learning
• temporality
• documentary method

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Christiane Hof, Barbara Stauber, Khira Sippli and Elisa Thevenot, as well as the editors and anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback on earlier drafts of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Names of persons, places, and organisations are pseudonyms.

2 Excerpts in single quotation marks and block quotes are from interviews.

3 PR is short for permanent resident status.

Additional information

Funding

This project is part of the DFG-funded interdisciplinary research group ‘Doing Transitions – The Formation of Transitions over the Life Course’ at the Goethe University Frankfurt and the University of Tübingen, Germany. Financial support for the research thus came from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft / German Research Foundation (DFG).