Mobility regimes, imaginaries, and navigations

For those lucky enough to have secure legal status, encounters with the regime continue through family and friends. (Tucket 2018: 113)

Keeping people in prolonged waiting is a technique to delay them. Delaying is a technique of domination, making the other's time seem less worthy. (Khosravi 2021: 65)

I was also trying to get him. I was trying to act like being one of his people he likes.

 —Maggis, on one of the encounters with the Dutch migration authorities. (Schapendonk 2018)

For this study, it is important to underline that categorizations such as “migrant/citizen” or “legal/illegal” or “forced/voluntary” are produced by policy discourses and are reproduced and performed in the spaces of encounter between certain “mobile bodies” and actors of migration and asylum politics (Häkli and Kallio 2021; Wyss 2022). In that sense, sticking to the rather generic term “African migrant” instead of differentiating subjects according to their legal status, is a deliberate choice (see also endnote 1). The immigration regime we identified above thus brings together migration control policies (who is allowed to enter, on what conditions?) and welfare policies (what social rights are attached to asylum procedures?) (Abdelhady et al. 2020), but also performativities that amplify hierarchical scripts of deservingness (Aparna 2020). The latter relates to the idea of social imaginaries, which are generally related to the normative and dominant discourse of integration (Schinkel 2018) and Europe's fascination with labor “absorption policies” that emphasize that migrants and refugees are “economically viable actor[s]” (Samaddar 2020: 68–69). We follow Charles Taylor's definition of social imaginary “not as a set of ideas; rather it is what enables, through making sense of, the practice of society” (Taylor 2004: 91). This concept is particularly useful to interrogate the way society and its migrant Others are imagined in Western Europe's immigrant integration discourses and the bureaucratic practices that emerge from them. We use the notion of “social imaginaries” to understand how migrants navigate judicial, racial, geographical, social, real, and imagined barriers simultaneously.

In the context of immigration in Western Europe, one of the most dominant social imaginaries is the bounded imagination of society and seeing “racialized” migrants as threats to be governed at the margins through the concept and related practices of integration (Haile 2020; Schinkel 2018). The immigration regime institutionalizes the imaginaries of difference between the “culturally and socially transmitted representational assemblages” (Salazar 2020: 3) of the host society and that of its immigrants (Bonjour and Duijvendak 2018; Dahinden 2016). Simultaneously, it re/constructs and institutionalizes imaginaries of boundedness and of mobility of the migrant from the margins to the center—a center where the location of society is imagined. Interestingly, this imagined social mobility toward society coincides with expected geographical immobility, which is reflected in people's state of waiting, illustrated by Shahram Khosravi's quote above. At the same time, this immobility is anchored in formalized rules of European asylum. For example, asylum regulations hamper cross-border mobility during asylum procedures. As we also show below, even when papers have been provided, cross-border mobility can negatively impact one's trajectory toward inclusion, as the imagined mobility toward the core of society.

Yet, this imagined topology of societal margins/centers and desirable/undesirable mobility are constantly “reconfigured, reorganized and reworked through emotional and affective practices” in transnational social fields (Andrucki and Dickinson 2015: 204; Cole and Groes 2016). Transnational connectivity re-positions migrants’ mobilities in terms of “expectations, imaginaries and hence itineraries and destinations” (Schapendonk 2020: 86, emphasis added). It is thus not one uncertain terrain (Vigh 2009) that people navigate, but multiple terrains that hook up into each other in simultaneous ways. For these reasons, we place migrant navigations exactly at these intersections of social imaginaries resonating through state bureaucracies of immigration, on the one hand, and through migrant everyday lifeworlds, on the other.

In these endeavors, it has proven to be productive to not separate mobility situations from situations of stasis. Recent studies on migration journeys (e.g., Lems 2018; Mainwaring and Brigden 2016; Wyss 2022)—a mushrooming field—shows convincingly that the journeys and trajectories under study involve a continuous process of re-routing (Schapendonk et al. 2020). This relates to the ways normativities around mobility shift over time and across places as well as how the same may appear to migrants in highly confused and violent ways. Existential immobility (Hage 2009)—as time that can be stolen from people while waiting (Khosravi 2018)— is often coproduced through mobility in the sense that this existential condition comes with sudden and forced relocations (to other camps, to other shelters, to other communities). In these conditions, migrants are requested to not ground, to not take part, to not belong. Mobility can indeed be a regime strategy to contain (Tazzioli 2020) as well as a migrant tactic to escape or remain detached (Schapendonk 2020). Our approach thus mirrors these situations in which mobility/immobility shift in terms of direction and meaning. In that sense, mobility is never really singular but consists of a constellation of (im)mobile practices and multi-layered meanings (Wajsberg and Schapendonk 2022).

In the methodological sense, we make use of two related and complementary ethnographic projects, both based at the Geography Group of Radboud University. The first project focuses primarily on how African migrants in the Netherlands find their way toward embeddedness. The ethnographic material is collected through 18 months of participatory fieldwork in the context of a university-initiated project that sought to assist young Africans (between 18 and 22 years of age) in terms of their inclusion in the city of Nijmegen, the Netherlands. The project raised funds to finance extra lessons and opportunities for integration exams, in an attempt to fill an integration policy gap of self-sufficiency that left many of them without resources to complete the program. The first author of this article was employed to “mediate” between the migrants and the different organizations involved in its implementation. In addition to the author's position as a participant-observer during the 18 months, he also conducted 15 semi-structured in-depth interviews to understand how these young Africans simultaneously navigate integration bureaucracies and their transnational social spaces. Solomon's and Aron's vignettes, therefore, should be viewed in the above context of newly arrived refugees’ navigation of multiple terrains and imaginaries of “good migranthood.”

The second research project focused on the diverse ways Africans navigate and co-produce Europe as a post-national mobility zone. It used three geographical entry points (Lombardy in Italy, the Randstad in the Netherlands, and Catalunya in Spain) to follow various mobility trajectories through space between the years 2014 and 2018. Moreover, the project relied on earlier established contacts from previous research with the same itinerant approach. The vignette of Saihou below is based on the second author's engagement with a group of young men who started to move across Eurospace after their arrival in Italy. As a result of the mobility of his interlocutors, the second author ended up in a German city, where he met Franck, a man in his early forties struggling with Germany's asylum system. The second author followed his situation between 2015 to 2017 with three revisits and multiple telephone calls and online conversations. Although the first project is easily related to notions of “integration” and the second hints at continuous mobility, both projects overlap in terms of the conceptual focus on navigations and mobility regimes, as well as through continuous dialogues and co-organized research activities.

The empirical sections are organized as follows. The first two sections (Navigating the “system” I and II) start the analysis with the navigation of immigration regimes and relate it from there to migrant social lifeworlds. The next two sections (Mobilities that matter I and II) start from the mobility rules deriving from transnational social spaces and relate them to the immigration regimes.

Navigating “the system” I

I think this is stupid. He cannot even stand on his own feet let alone to have a wife and a child at this stage. He does not have a job, he has not completed his integration, he has financial problems, this is stupid.

 —Steven's protest to Solomon's travel back to Sudan three years after his arrival in the Netherlands in 2015

During the “refugee management crisis” of 2015, several collective and individual civic initiatives, semi-governmental organizations and faith-based organizations not only started filling the “gap” created by overburdened government refugee reception bureaucracies (Rast et al. 2020) but also became spaces of contestation and activism (Youkhana and Sutter 2017). In the process, they joined the “system” as their involvement re/produces norms and expectations that shaped the experience of newly arrived refugees.

The above quote is one example in which Steven—Solomon's self-appointed Dutch guardian and caretaker—conveys a message of correcting Solomon's priorities. Solomon has lived in the Netherlands since 2015. Shortly after his arrival in the Netherlands, he was confronted with immigrant integration practices and landscape together with some hundred young fellow newcomers who were placed in Nijmegen, as part of a pilot project to place newcomers in collective student housing in several cities.

In line with neoliberal translation of citizenship as a contract of duties and responsibilities between the state and its agencies (Suvarierol and Kirk 2015), Dutch immigrant integration is framed around the newcomers’ ability to navigate “the system” as they are left to “find their way” through a commercialized integration package. Navigating the “package”—which includes filling in online forms to request a loan from the government, finding a language school to sign a contract with, learning Dutch, and passing language exams—becomes an indicator of self-sufficiency, a highly valued integration achievement. Referring to how they were introduced to the integration “system,” Solomon described his experience as follows:

I came through the Sahara, and I was only four months in the Netherlands at that time . . . They showed us, once, where the school was, and the next day, they told us to go to school. We were lost, and we couldn't find the school. We didn't go to school that day, and we went back home.

Solomon's experience shows the “post-arrival geographies of asylum” (El Moussawi and Schuermans 2021) in which refugees resettlement geographies shape their im/mobility. It applies not only to geographies of reception centers but also resettlement in the physical and social spaces of cities and towns where refugees are placed. Volunteers, like Steven, intervene in these post-arrival settings, by providing mobility alternatives and translating the integration “system” into something “manageable.” In this context, we regard Steven's protest to Solomon's mobility as a manifestation of social imaginaries of integration in which migrants are imagined or expected to move toward society through integration. The design and direction of this pre-framed path toward society is imagined in such a way that any deviation—in this case Solomon's visit to Sudan—is considered undesirable. Staying put in the imagined host country can be considered the main mantra of integration.

The financial problems of Solomon, Steven refers to, emerged from the bureaucratic mesh they encountered during the process of asylum and re/settlement. Solomon, like all his colleagues, signed an agreement with a “language school” as part of an integration package. For the school, it was a consent to access the loan money of 10,000 euros that the refugees signed to borrow from the state. For Solomon, this financial arrangement was one out of many bureaucratic processes mediated by “a network of people and by material objects” (Geoffrion and Cretton 2021). In this process, volunteers like Steven functioned as intermediaries sensitive to the precarity of the newly arrived refugees and in solidarity with the challenges they faced, while re/producing normativities attached to “good migranthood” and making the “right” choices in achieving it. This relationship between the newly arrived refugees and migration bureaucracies through the intermediaries of volunteers is understood as a “space of continuous asymmetrical negotiations” (Borrelli 2021: 1). Through these relations, mobility rules are central to the formation of “good migranthood.”

For Solomon, however, navigating the bureaucracies of the “system” at his “new home” involves drawing tactics and strategies derived from the implicit rules regarding “good migranthood” in his transnational social spaces as well. He has arranged and financed the trip of his mother to Sudan in order to make possible the mobility of his future wife from Sudan to the Netherlands. His struggle “to stay” in the Netherlands according to “the rules of integration” is thus inherently related to the social rules of new mobility processes of his family members.

Interestingly, Steven's opening quote shows the tensions between the expectations of “the system,” on the one hand, and Solomon's lifeworld, on the other. Whereas for Steven, integration was something to “be completed” before one can move on in life; for Solomon, integration rather reflects a moving ground that never can be fulfilled. In this way, integration can be seen as a “broken promise” in which society is imagined as a bounded, territorialized entity and its migrants as residing at its margins, whereas refugees’ transnational lifeworlds transgress boundaries (Haile 2020). For Solomon, the mobility of his future wife is in this light not a process that is in tension with his well-being and social embeddedness in the Netherlands; it is rather central to it. In this line of thought, we could regard Solomon's “subjective condition of stuckness” (Cangià 2020: 699) as is his lack of space to take another route deviating from dominant integration discourses, yet with the aspiration to achieve social embeddedness. In other words, integration imaginaries, like other socioculturally constructed imaginaries, not only blur and enforce traditional territorial and sociocultural boundaries (Salazar 2011) but also re/produce the imagined boundedness and location of society and that of its migrant Others.

Navigating the “system” II

I tell him, I tell him, I say, MOVE! You are there, you are not working, you are doing nothing! You are just sitting there. Just eat and sleep, just eat and sleep, only that. . . . So I tell him. YOU ARE WASTING. You are wasting your life.

 —Saihou, on how he encouraged his friend to move out of his asylum condition in Italy

For many recently arrived migrants, Italy is a place to start moving from. Although these movements are often reduced to a lexicon of “onward migration” and “secondary movements” (see for an elaborative critique, Schapendonk 2021), we came across a wide variety of mobility practices that are not easy to pin down. For those who arrive in Italy via the risky boat journey across the Mediterranean, the first period is often characterized by relocations to different places, which may lead to vary different mobility horizons. Saihou and his friend arrived on the same boat in Italy. They were initially transferred to the region of Naples. From there, Saihou was sent to an asylum shelter in Milan, and his friend was sent to a smaller place in Liguria. Despite the physical distance, they stayed connected. During their juridical procedures in Italy, both men had very different tactics. Saihou decided not to wait for the asylum outcome and moved across Europe. He lived in different places in Germany, Italy, and Switzerland, where I (author two) revisited him. In these places, he did not necessarily have pre-established contacts. Saihou saw his mobility as a kind of trial-and-error process. If he would not succeed in Germany, he could always return to Italy, so he reasoned. When he was in Switzerland, he considered Italy, the Netherlands, and Scandinavia as possible next destinations. His mobility seemed to be a moving ground. In this context, Saihou, like many others, stressed the importance of “seeing places” and “analyzing” different situations, not only in terms of local bureaucracies but also in terms of rooms to maneuver in the socioeconomic sense. Hence, Saihou regarded his asylum stay in Germany more limiting than his periods in Switzerland and Italy, which were to a large part characterized by his informal economic activities and a rich social life outside asylum spaces. As he put it, he was tired of “sitting” in Germany. “Sitting,” here, refers to a notion of involuntary immobility; it is both about non-movement but also about social stagnation (Hage 2009).

In contrast to Saihou, his friend decided to stay in Italy and wait for the outcome of the asylum procedure. Whereas for some staying inside the “system” led to a productive outcome (in terms of a regularized stay), Saihou's friend was confronted with a similar passiveness and stagnation that is reflected in Saihou's notion of “sitting.” Partly as a result of this stagnation, he gradually developed a more resistant attitude toward the Italian system, especially when he noticed his initial practices of obedience had very few effects. At a certain point in time, he simply refused to live up any longer to the expectation of a cooperative and deserving refugee. Instead, he openly criticized the coloniality and racialized structures of the system. In the many conversations I [author two] had with him, he shared his frustrations, especially since he knew that his friends (including Saihou) moved out of the asylum condition:

Yeah, they move, man, but me, I am still here. I was trying to wait for the document but I can see what they have told me, all lies, man. They are not working for my documents; they are keeping it inside, man. They block it. That is the problem, man.

Where his friend refused the “system” while staying inside it, Saihou navigated the “system” carefully while he moved out of it. He made sure his appeal in the asylum process in Italy was in safe hands while living in a different European country. He therefore invested heavily in his relationship with his lawyer. This indicates that—even though migrants are confronted with the massiveness of mobility regimes in Europe—they develop their counter-calculations and tactics to circumvent and deal with the system (see also Wyss 2022). Interestingly, in his conversations with his friend in Liguria, Saihou kept stressing the potential of mobility; moving out of the Italian “system” became something normative—a rule.

The story of these two men is full of irony. Saihou only received his Italian residence paper after he had left the country, while his friend was not provided a residence permit, but stayed inside the country. The story contrasts the idea that a phase of immobility serves motility as it is often suggested in the literature that discusses citizenship in relation to mobility. In this debate, it is often made explicit that people start to move after having received more citizenship rights (Della Puppa and Sredanovic 2017). Saihou claimed his mobility well before he received any rights, and he navigated it in such a way that his mobility practices did not violate his institutional embeddedness in Italy.

Mobilities that matter I

Someone told the municipality that I was in Sudan for more than a month. I needed that time to arrange the paper work to bring my wife here. Now they are causing me trouble. They asked me to pay back the uitkering [social assistance] I received.

 —Aron, personal communication, 2019

Aron has been living in the Netherlands with a refugee status since 2015. While trying to navigate in and out of work situations and his own integration obligations, he was also occupied by situations in Sudan, a transit place, where his wife lived. Her mobility is dependent on the family reunification process Aron was closely following. However, the “paper work” in Sudan is reliant on documentations from his home country, which appeared to be impossible to arrange in a short period of time. After spending around two months in Sudan, Aron returned to the Netherlands. He came back content with his intervention in Sudan, but upon his return, he faced unforeseen consequences. While his travel to Sudan was a life changer for the desired mobility of his wife, it was seen as an “undesirable” in the eyes of Dutch municipality to which he was obliged to confirm his presence through the monthly notification form attached to the government benefits he receives. This tension marks the unique encounter of refugees with the welfare bureaucracies attached to asylum and integration politics, where welfare bureaucracies “maintain a level of discipline and control over the daily lives of their welfare clients” (Abdelhady et al. 2020: 5). Aron recalled his encounter with the municipality, “I tried to explain how the ‘system’ works back home. It is difficult to get official documentation.” Although bureaucracies of welfare do not exclusively affect newly arrived refugees, very few refugees escape this encounter, particularly in the first years of adjustment in their “new home.” Aron's story, thus, highlights how certain mobile bodies have to deal with immobile welfare systems (Mingot and Mazzucato 2017).

Aron's struggle to strike a balance between navigating multiple “systems” (e.g., dealing with the immobility of his wife in Sudan due to externalization of EU borders [Mengiste 2019] and arranging documentations from home and/or welfare bureaucracies in the Netherlands) and contrasting imaginaries of “good migranthood” (e.g., through integration that envisions his arrival and thus his immobility and embeddedness and/or through transnational social spaces that “demands” his mobility and flexibility including his travel back to Sudan to “arrange” paper work) is another example of the ubiquitous presence of the “system” in the narration of our interlocutors, both as a metaphor and a bureaucratic reality.

In contrast, Solomon's (see above) wish to travel to Sudan never materialized. Instead, he arranged for his mother to move from her country of origin to Sudan. His mother's visit was pre-planned and discussed through several months of telephone conversations in which she convinced Solomon to get married. The travel of Solomon's mother is not simply an investment in a social relation. It can be understood as a form of “preparatory mobility” that aims to facilitate subsequent migratory movements—in this case, through family reunification programs. These mobilities can be seen as counter tactics to circumvent the tightening of the EU's border regime, including restrictive immigration policies that erode family reunification rights, among others (Pannia 2021). The preparatory mobility of Solomon's mother or Aron's own travel to Sudan are mobilities that matter and can then be seen as “mobility rules” that emerge in parallel with, and often as response to, the imposed rules and regulations that confine and restrict their spaces of maneuvering in Europe.

Mobilities that matter II

I always told you that I have the ambition of traveling, I always have confidence for myself. I know what I want to do. I must make it; there will be no obstruction.

 —Franck, on his motivation to move to France despite German asylum conditions

Within Europe, controlling the mobility of people in asylum procedures is a shared and rather central governmental strategy in the context of asylum. Beyond the spaces of containment, such as camps and prisons, there exist important administrative obligations to present yourself on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis to the migration apparatus. These obligations restrict people's mobility tremendously, and as we have seen, failing to present yourself to “the system” on time, may lead to very serious trouble. The idea of these administrative forces is, of course, to hinder and take control over people's mobility. Even in cases where people move across borders, as Saihou's case illustrates, the idea of “Eurospace” as a free mobility zone is highly misleading. As much as the EU facilitates mobility through “Schengen,” it fights against Other mobilities through “Dublin” (Schapendonk 2020) and other differentiating rules that may have their impact when people have obtained residence permits through asylum (see also Wyss 2022). In case of the latter, interlocutors who lived in Italy complained about their “incomplete papers” after they obtained a humanitarian protection status. Although this status provided residence and labor rights, these rights were restricted to the Italian nation-state only. With that paper, they cannot legally work in Spain or Sweden. This limitation actually creates another “system” with significant administrative labor involved; the system of borrowing, renting, and forging of papers. As one interlocutor indicated: “I did not like Spain too much for its look-a-like system. If you use somebody else's paper, you pay for this paper, so you lose money. If you get a fine, you lose double money, so it is a system of risk and gambling.”

For many of our African interlocutors, the stratified mobility rights symbolized that Europe never really embraces them, regardless their legality or time spent in Europe. As one of Saihou's friends indicated when he reflected on his social position after having lived in different European countries: “We don't feel part of the European Union. We don't feel part of it . . . We can only wait to be part of it.” Whereas the integration discourse thus somehow waits for migrants to move to the core of society, African migrants also wait their turn for the EU to let them move in.

Despite, or maybe because of, this powerful mobility regime that stratifies mobility rights, we came across a wide variety of mobility of presumed contained people. One illustrative example comes from Franck (who we met at the beginning of this article). While being subjected to the German asylum procedures, Franck traveled to Paris, not to work on his papers or to start a new asylum procedure but just to create some breathing space for himself. He “passed a lot of fun with his friend,” and he enjoyed the African social infrastructures of the French capital. In line with this example, we spoke to several people in a similar condition for whom mobility mattered despite all the hindrances. Some crossed European internal borders to visit friends, others to take care of family members, again others to enjoy music concerts, find jobs, or see other places. These mobilities are not free of risks as we have come across cases whereby internal border controls actually led to deportations to Africa. However, these mobilities are meaningful since they transgress the immobility rules of asylum and labor markets. Through these mobilities, people claim their right to have a social life in Europe and through these mobilities new infrastructures emerge (Wajsberg and Schapendonk 2022). Indeed, these mobilities reflect a clash between “compulsion of myriad structural forces” and people's transgressive agency and can be seen as expressions of a right to escape (Mezzadra 2015: 122).

Conclusion

With this paper, we attempted to disclose the wider web in which migrant-bureaucracy encounters are embedded. Although we did not delve into the very details of the encounter itself—the particular rules and policies behind it or the performativities involved—the four vignettes enhance our knowledge regarding how migrant lives and mobility regimes relate to each other. Migrants created their own mobility rules in their social lifeworlds (Solomon arranging the travel of his mother, Aron moving to Sudan, Saihou encouraging his friend to move), partly as responses to the suffocating effects of migration bureaucracies as rights to social lives are hampered to a great extent. In this regard, the empirical separation of “navigating regimes” versus “mobilities that matter” is artificial, as in real life, these processes constantly feed each other (see also Fradejas-García and Salazar, this issue). Newly arrived migrants’ navigation of inclusion and rootedness through realizing mobilities that matter often involves maneuvering between constantly shifting landscapes.

All migrant navigational practices in this article—from the immobile resistance of Saihou's friend to Aron's move to Sudan—are in essence responses to mobility confinement. In that sense, these navigations are highly political. The logics of these responses are not very different from people's practices to avoid the mobility restrictions in COVID-19 related lockdown. At a sudden point in time in the Netherlands, for example, an informal market emerged for the buying/selling of food delivery jackets after the government revealed that you may move in public space after curfew for work-related reasons (Salazar 2021). It is also known that “vaccination passports” are forged and sold to grant individuals more mobility freedom. There are many more parallels to draw with how people subjectified by asylum and migration regimes deal with the “system”—the main differentiating factor is, of course, the level of risks and precarity involved that derive from the intersection of race, class, and social position (Bonjour and Duyvendak 2018). In this regard, when we zoom out from the local bureaucratic landscape, we notice that from a migrant position these apparatuses appear as part of EU's expanding mobility regime that is put in place to control African migration. In other words, the local support structures, bureaucracies, and integration apparatuses that appear in this article as the immigration regime are somehow tied up with an expanding network of outsourced borders, humanitarian intervention to stop migration, and, of course, securitization. Moreover, when we zoom out from migrant local embeddedness, we see translocal networks that indicate how the immobility of some facilitates the mobility of others. The translocal topologies of both the regime and migrant social lifeworlds make the question of success/failure as well as mobility/immobility highly diffuse. If one seems to make progress in the social sense, the same reality may hit in other domains, as we have seen in the case of Aron's travel to Sudan. Similarly, if one person's travel is blocked, other mobilities emerge from that situation.

With these relationalities in mind, we reflect on the notion of migrants navigating uncertainty (Vigh 2009). In so doing, we would like to revisit Franck's quote at the beginning of this article. It is not so much that “after the sea, there comes another sea,” as the man expressed to indicate the seemingly everlasting institutional violence involved (Abdelhady et al. 2020). Immigration bureaucracies and transnational social imaginaries do not appear in the organized and temporal serial order of one after the other. In fact, people had to simultaneously navigate multiple policy forces as well as normative expectations. Hence, the often-used terminology of navigation (Vigh 2009)—as mostly referring to the navigation of “a terrain” or social environment that is constantly shifting and hence creates uncertainty—has its shortcomings. The notion of an environment—however mobile we might interpret it—still starts from a sense of coherent and bounded surrounded by rather clear-cut social or geographical boundaries. Here we encounter a similar sense of coherence and wholeness that we framed as the backbone of societal imaginaries of migrant integration (Favell 2019; Schinkel 2018). This article claims that migrant uncertainty does not emerge from a singular and passive surrounding. It is rather the dynamic intersections of formal and informal rules, in combination with the longue durée of a racialized Europe and people's shifting itineraries themselves that produce uncertainties that are indeed immediate and imagined (Vigh 2009). To put this in line with Franck's sea metaphor, people often find themselves swimming in very different seas at the very same time.