Affinities matter. A novel approach for studying potent connections as personal life forces shaping human mobilities
(2024) 16th ESA Conference 2024: Tension, Trust and Transformation — Location: University of Porto, Porto, Portugal (27.August.2024)
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- Existing studies on the ‘drivers’ of intra-European mobility focus overwhelmingly on individual life projects and economic rationales, leaving largely unexplored the significance of people’s personal connections with their kin and places of origin. Our paper introduces and develops an orientation for conceptualizing and studying human mobility that builds on Jennifer Mason’s (2018) work on affinities defined as personal connections that have potency. Our argument is that such potent connection not only have an enormous influence on people’s experiences of moving-in-the-world, but matter also in directing and patterning their movements. We draw from in-depth interviews (N=33) with Spaniards and Finns living in Belgium to offer insights into how an affinities orientation can be applied to better understand transnational (family) life in conditions of free mobility. Bringing the affinities orientation into dialogue with existing migration literature, we suggest that it offers a genuinely relational, multidimensional, multisensorial, and anti-categorical way of understanding people’s living connections. These do not only take shape in relation to people’s significant others, but also the places, environments, and other elements that matter to them. Crucially, we consider affinities of positivity as well as of alterity and negativity, thus highlighting relational complexity and the ways affinities can form conflicting crosscurrents in people’s lives. Furthermore, the orientation is sensitive to the ways people’s personal lives are experienced and remembered in historically changing social, cultural, and natural environments, thus allowing a contextualized analysis of the unfolding of people’s personal lives over time and the intergenerational dynamics of such processes.
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Simola, A., & May, V. (2024). Affinities matter. A novel approach for studying potent connections as personal life forces shaping human mobilities. 16th ESA Conference 2024: Tension, Trust and Transformation, University of Porto, Porto, Portugal. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/269686