Re-visiting the interrelatedness between spatiality and temporality in migration research

There have been a lot of debates over the relationality between spatiality and temporality in extant migration research. In terms of space, several strands of research have focused on exploring migrants’ strategies for migration and relocation, implicitly considering migration as a complete sojourn. However, migrants tend to establish and maintain transnational ties across spaces, making migration an on-going process. Others have examined how migrants sustain transnational activities and relationships over time. Migration, in the latter sense, becomes a complex process involving multiple times and spaces. Migrants’ mobilities are shaped and reshaped by their past memories, present relocation experiences, and aspirations for the future, as well as the influences of the immobilities of others and things across spaces. This raises theoretical questions about how time is embedded in space and what time and space mean to migrants. This paper argues that the core of the debates is grounded in the ways migrants experience subjectivities in defining what their mobilities mean to them. This argument is presented through a literature analysis of key research on the interrelated issues of temporality and spatiality, roots and routes, as well as assimilation and dissimilation that partly contribute to the meanings of mobilities. It offers an overview of current research on transnationalism and advances the current debates on temporality and spatiality. In this paper, temporality and spatiality in migration are conceptualized as dynamic and intertwined entities, rather than fixed or linear processes. This conceptualization is hoped to clarify the ways in which researchers often become divergent in their research strands, leaving gaps in understandings of current migration schemes.