Migrant times beyond the life course: The temporalities of foreign English teachers in South Korea

Geoforum 62 (2015) 96–104

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Migrant times beyond the life course: The temporalities of foreign English teachers in South Korea Francis L. Collins a,⇑, Sergei Shubin b a b

School of Environment, University of Auckland, New Zealand Department of Geography, Swansea University, United Kingdom

a r t i c l e

i n f o

Article history: Received 30 August 2014 Received in revised form 1 April 2015 Accepted 5 April 2015 Available online 4 May 2015 Keywords: Migration Time Life course Heidegger Mobilities South Korea

a b s t r a c t The study of life course has become a central feature of geographical and other social science approaches to youth and migration. It has offered scholars possibilities to explore the timing of events, experiences of time and in the context of migration, the opportunity to analyse mobility patterns in relation to life stages and transitions. Yet, despite this emphasis, much life-course research rests on a limited understanding of time characterised as a linear or even static entity that regulates life in a way that occludes the complex directionality and rhythms of time. In this paper we seek to push beyond these limitations of life course research by developing broader theoretical understandings of time in migration. In particular, we develop a Heideggerian analysis of the migration stories of western English teachers in South Korea, an example of migration as part of a youth–adult transition. Our analysis reveals that the mobilities of English teachers need to be understood in much more complex and relational ways and we draw attention to their more-than-subjective temporalities, questions of attunement to being (affect) and temporal openness in migration. Through this discussion the paper highlights three key areas for further development of scholarly understandings of time in migration: the situatedness of migrants, the holistic character of migration as a happening in the world, and the eventfulness of migration, always characterised by an openness of possibility for emergent spatio-temporal differentiation. Ó 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction Life course perspectives have become one of the most popular theoretical orientations in the social sciences (Elder et al., 2004). Geographers, for example, have used the life course approach to describe ‘‘structures and sequences of events and transitions through an individual’s life’’ (Bailey, 2009:407), as well as to explore the dynamic ordering of patterns and experiences of time. Migration scholars too have adopted life course perspectives to develop broader understandings of life transitions, behavioural patterns and sequences of events in the lives of mobile individuals. Despite their popularity, however, many life course-based studies draw on relatively matter-of-fact conceptions of time, particularly in terms of directionality and associations with presence. In the emphasis on the flow of events and life change, for example, time is often framed in terms that connote a linear or static framework that regulates life. Similarly, migration research often presents time as a succession of instants or threads that run ⇑ Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (F.L. Collins), [email protected]. uk (S. Shubin). http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2015.04.002 0016-7185/Ó 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

horizontally between successive points, so that the possibility of transition or movement of time remains underdeveloped in its conceptualisations (Cwerner, 2001; Griffiths et al., 2013). The result is that the complex temporal dimensions of migrant lives can sometimes appear purely objective in ways that underplay the significance of changing rhythms, times and transitions (Ansell et al., 2011; Hörschelmann, 2011). In this paper we seek to extend conceptions of time in relation to life course and migration studies by developing broader theoretical understandings of time through the migration stories of English teachers in Korea. In order to unpack these stories we develop a Heideggerian analysis that offers a more relational and complex reading of temporality. Rather than accepting a normative framing of English teachers as undergoing a youth–adult transition, our discussion explores the more-than-subjective temporalities of migration and questions of attunement to being and temporal openness. This analysis makes three critical contributions to questions of time in migration, highlighting the situatedness of migrants, the holistic character of migration as a happening in the world, and the manner that migration in its eventfulness is characterised by an openness of possibility for spatio-temporal differentiation.

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2. Life course and migration times Migration is a key area for the application of life course theory in the social sciences. Central questions around migration processes and migrant characteristics (Jasso, 2004) draw our attention to four key principles in life course research (Elder, 1994): the role of human agency in constructing life course, the interplay between lives and historical times, the linking of lives across time, and timing of lives in relation to behavioural patterns and transitions. Each of these principles of migration scholarship draws on a specific interpretation of time, which, while offering insights into the changing moments in migrant lives, tends to underplay key elements of the interconnections between time and modes of mobile being. Our aim here is to draw attention to these principles and their shortcomings to develop a more sophisticated analysis of temporality in migration. An emphasis on human agency forms a key component of migration research, highlighting the ability of individuals to construct their life course through choices (Elder et al., 2004). Migration is often framed as a ‘‘planful’’ process (Clausen, 1993) and time is seen as a noetic correlate of individual existence, internal to consciousness and subject to different mechanisms of ordering (Piore, 1979). While such an approach draws attention to migrant practices, the focus on the orderability of experience and time-determination relies heavily on a singular internalization of time that frames experience (Hoy, 2009). As May and Thrift (2003:5) argue, time is ‘‘multiple and heterogeneous’’ and it cannot be internalised as it involves ‘‘various (and uneven) networks of time stretching in different and divergent directions across an uneven social field’’. Rather than following a path of resemblance, deduction and derivation, the temporal norms and rhythms of migration are rather non-linear, and often characterised by surprising and divergent experiences. In addition to its focus on agency, life course theory also suggests that the life course of individuals is shaped by times and places they experience over their lifetime (Elder et al., 2004). In migration this theoretical principle implies objective analysis of migrant time as a chronological succession of instances, defined as an external framework shaping individual characteristics (migrant’s age, date of entry, assimilation) and linked to expected temporal patterns in origin and destination countries. While this approach has usefully drawn attention to experiences of arrival and departure and processes of adaptation (Berry, 1992) it does so principally by explaining migration events in terms of where they occur. This focus on ‘‘locating people. . . in more precise historical placement’’ (Elder et al., 2004: 9) also suggests that a migrant can be considered as a mappable discrete entity and not an unstable ‘‘subject-in-transit’’ as described by theorists of mobility (Clifford, 1994: 321). The principle of linked lives across time focuses explicitly on social networks, which affect transitions of other connected people, as well as support individual decision-making. In this context, time is often understood as a measurable social construction (in terms of development of skills or language, cf. Silvey and Lawson, 1999; Jasso, 2004), while migrant lives are dictated by ‘socially expected durations’ (Merton, 1984) in ways that underplay the multi-sensuality of their movements. This emphasis on the social representation of migration times sits uneasily with recent literature in geography, which emphasises the corporeal, sensuous and expressive being of mobile people in relation to experiential time (McCormack, 2008; Bissell, 2009; Shubin, 2011). Finally, the principle of ‘timing of lives’ links life transitions to their timing in an individual’s life (Elder, 1994) and emphasises turning points (changes in life direction) and trajectories (sequences of experiences). In migration studies, this approach has been useful for framing research on the

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migration-employment nexus and focusing on the role of social networks in shaping sequences of socially defined roles and events (Bailey, 2009). However, these conceptions of time tend to reproduce antinomies between temporariness and permanence, real or ideal, objective and subjective time. These elements of life course theorisation make it difficult to examine the actual passage of time because they flatten experiences by turning them into a succession of stages, where the complexity of relations between past, present and future is largely taken for granted (Al-Saji, 2004).

3. Heidegger’s interpretation of temporal being Our aim is to offer an alternative reading of time that addresses extant issues in life course approaches and enhances the understanding of time in migration. To achieve this we draw on the interpretation of temporal being developed by Heidegger.1 The question of co-belonging of being and time occupies a central place in Heidegger’s writings, where he stresses that human existence is most fundamentally temporality and time cannot be seen as a framework to which human beings are externally related (Heidegger, 2003). This perspective is well suited for theorisations of time in migration research for two reasons. First, Heidegger focuses on situated being-in-the-world in a way that highlights the importance of a relational understanding of time that is both objective and subjective. Indeed, time relates to the possibility of encountering entities in the world of being with others and yet, since we are time, it is also a condition of possibility for human existence. This interpretation helps to overcome the problem of identifying migrant times as either a framework structuring migrant movements or a mind-dependent feature of migrant lives. Heidegger stresses that subjective engagement with the world and its objective temporal structures happens through ‘‘attunement’’, affective conditions that shape what individuals can do and reflects how they encounter others. Within the context of migration, this approach makes it possible to understand objective time in a way that emphasises the experiences of migrants but does not insist on the primacy of human agency that is prevalent in life course approaches. Secondly, Heidegger’s work is important for its emphasis on the unity of time and the incompleteness of subjectivity. For Heidegger, past, present and future are conceived as co-existing and interrelated. In this reading, a human being is considered a constantly developing creature, whose existence is always futural and projective, rather than one that simply emerges in the present. Human beings are associated with all three temporal dimensions simultaneously such that one has the capacity to be at once ahead (futural), having-been (past) and alongside oneself (present) (Mulhall, 1996). Rather than focusing on a particular life stage or trajectory, this approach makes it possible to study the very process of migrants’ ‘living on the move’ as open-ended and always becoming. To explore the timing of English teacher migration, this paper draws on two specific implications of Heidegger’s ideas on co-belonging of being and time. Firstly, incorporating Heidegger’s relational thinking allows us to develop an understanding of migrant times as more-than-subjective. This emphasises that while individuals participate in public temporal structures they are not able to deliberately manage or exercise ownership of time as suggested in agency-centred accounts of life course theory. We also explore lostness in the world and the ways this reveals a misunderstanding and covering over of the meaning of everyday time. In Heidegger’s terms, lostness refers to the way a human being always finds herself thrown into the public world (being-with others) and has to 1 We do not develop a full inter-relationship between lifecourse approaches and Heideggerian philosophy here but see Shubin (2015).

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share temporal structures not of her own choosing. As a result, human being is caught up in everydayness and lost in the world of others, which is particularly relevant to experiences of international migrants dealing with changing times in origin and destination countries (Cwerner, 2001). By exploring the interplay between measured ordinary time and qualitative time of individual existence we raise questions about the orderability of temporal existence prevalent in life course theory. Secondly, the paper builds on Heidegger’s interpretation of time and attuned being to draw attention to affective changes or the ‘‘embodied time’’ of migrations (Davies, 2001). Heidegger’s understanding of time prioritises pre-reflexive interpretation of human existence in the world. In his view, temporality is more primordial than it is objective and as such it is a condition for things showing up in the world and mattering to us (Hoy, 2009:63). Experiences of time are foregrounded in ‘attunements’ (manifest in moods such as joy, love, anxiety, fear) that reflect ongoing individual interpretations of time or ‘‘temporalities’’. This approach reflects a shift from describing a thing (time as an entity) to a condition describing activity (temporality or timing as a dynamic mode of being). This focus on enacted temporalities provides an avenue to stretch beyond life course accounts that tend to valorise particular experiences of time that hinge on the existence of predefined meaning to temporal experiences (stages, phases or careers). The migration of English teachers to South Korea offers an excellent case study to explore these approaches and it is to this case that we now turn.

4. Teaching English in South Korea In 2013 there were 20,030 individuals holding ‘foreign language instructor’ visas in South Korea, 93% of whom are employed as English teachers (KIS, 2014). As a young population whose mobility follows periods of education, English teachers can be conceived in relation to two discourses of mobility within life course. Firstly, the mobilities of this group could be conceived as a form of ‘mobility’ capital, where travel forms part of the development of self (Conradson and Latham, 2005). Secondly, international travel and work are also conceived as ‘lifestyle choices’ (Beck and BeckGernsheim, 2002), as part of the active ‘extension’ of transitions between youth and adulthood (Furstenberg, 2003). Migration from this perspective would be conceived as a ‘planful’ process, while time is claimed to be orderable and, despite emphasising individual life trajectories, expressed as a chronological succession of instances. While many English teachers construct narratives of themselves as travellers and adventurers, seeking overseas experience as selfdevelopment, their experiences are also tied up with the expansion of higher education, qualification inflation and underemployment at home, and the burden of student and other debts (Lan, 2011; Collins, 2014). Indeed, as we discuss later, many teachers also revealed that problems finding employment, debt stress and relationship difficulties contributed to their migration. Moreover, interviewees often articulated difficulties managing time, a sense of ‘floating’ or ‘drifting’ rather than moving along a knowable life trajectory, and that their migration sits awkwardly in relation to both past and future trajectories. Normative conceptualisations of life course are also generated in Korean expectations about English teachers and the temporality of their behaviours, actions and life paths. Indeed, the position of English teachers is defined in relation to their career stage (individuals with recently completed bachelor’s degrees, Shin, 2007) and narratives expressing the origin of individuals and embedded times (they must be citizens of Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, South Africa, UK or USA). Employers desire a particular

kind of teacher, with preferences around nationality (USA and Canada), age (early-mid 20s), ethnicity (white), and qualification that influence the location, remuneration and availability of jobs. Time, hence, can be understood as a social construction, where individuals are located within particular social pathways or trajectories that point to the interplay between lives and historical times. In resonance with life course approaches, the ideal English teacher is conceived by Koreans as a product of the times and places they have experienced over their life rather than a changeable and emergent individual. Experientially, many English teachers highlight attunements and instantaneity in their international mobility. Many spoke of unexpectedly finding internet advertisements for teaching jobs and the expedited process of recruitment, departure and orientation that followed. Relocation to Korea was often described not as a linear unfolding of time (chronos), but rather as telling the time of kairos, the time of seize-the-moment before it is lost. Rather than following a chronology of successive moments, migration often opens up opportunities for a radical intensity of space–time compression where English teachers may have one week between being unemployed in their home country to working full-time in an occupation they have no training for. At the same time, English teachers also encounter the different temporal norms of Korea’s ‘compressed modernity’ (Chang, 2010), characterised by speed in everyday life, demands of efficiency and deference from workers summed up by the Korean phrase bbali bbali or ‘Quick quick!’ (Lee, 2005). English teachers have to reconcile their lives with the objective temporal structure of Korean society in numerous ways: they are hired on twelve-month contracts, sometimes with only two 5-day breaks annually; teaching is timed sparsely across the day to meet school needs; and class rotation is regular and predetermined by management. Through these encounters English teachers reflected on rewarding and exciting opportunities offered to them through relocation to Korea and potentialities to come back to themselves (question their past, relationships, job choices), which can be made possible through migration (focus on the future and their place in the world). These experiences challenge an interpretation of spatiotemporal transitions in migration linked to end-points as English teachers emerge as unsettled, uncertain and always developing individuals on a journey which reveals other things and beings as meaningful. English teachers in Korea, then, represent an excellent case for developing a more complex reading of temporality in migration and life course. This migration occurs without much planning, emerging as part of post-graduation lives that do not have clear direction. The scale and intensity of transition from their home countries to Korea also means that English teachers have to deal with significant changes in socio-spatial structures while also reflecting on their own prospects for migration and future. As such, the narratives of English teachers highlight the need to reconcile their experiential sense of nearness, temporality and the distance of places and things with the objective structure of timespace in the host community. This paper draws on research from a project on the lives of English teachers and migrant workers in the Seoul. The project included biographical interviews (n = 41) and an online survey (n = 505) with English teachers. The interviews focused on experiences of migration to Korea, were conducted in 2009 in Seoul and lasted 60–90 min. The interviews were conducted by the first author, who prior to his academic career worked as an English teacher in Korea. In addition to generating insight into the contours of English teacher mobilities, this insider positionality also generated rather frank accounts from participants that draw attention to some of ambivalence and eventfulness of their migration and life in Korea.

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The 41 interviewees were selected from 211 volunteers recruited through advertisements and the survey – participants were selected to achieve a diverse mix of gender and nationality. The final sample included 22 males and 19 females, and participants came from Canada (n = 10), USA (n = 10), UK (n = 7), South Africa (n = 5), Australia (n = 5) and New Zealand (n = 4). The sample included one Korean adoptee but otherwise excluded Korean-descendants because of their different conditions of migration. All but four research participants arrived in their 20s either directly following graduation or shortly afterwards. While the research design sought to capture some diversity in the experiences of English teachers, it is important to emphasise that this paper does not aim to either be representative or to focus on comparisons across categorical differences – age, gender, nationality (Valentine, 2013). We undertook narrative analysis of interviews that explored participants’ accounts of their circumstances before and experience of migrating to Korea, their lived experiences in Korea, and their views of the future. The focus on individual narratives allows us to draw attention to the situatedness of migration by viewing interview material as a lens into the specific mobilities and temporalities of individual teachers. All interviews were conducted in English and transcribed prior to analysis. All names used are pseudonyms. 5. More than subjective temporalities 5.1. Adapting to incompleteness: living ‘‘in-between’’ A key feature of Heidegger’s reading of time is the assertion that individuals find themselves thrown into the world where they are caught up (‘‘lost’’) in temporal structures that are not of their own choosing. This sense of incompleteness is amplified in the lives of English teachers as their migration draws them out of temporal patterns they have become accustomed to – the work day, weekends, vacation – and into an objective structure of timespace that is both unfamiliar and beyond their control. Many teachers described in extraordinary detail their temporal activities in Korea in terms of standardised patterns, highlighting a view of time as a substance that can be grasped in a specific form. Chloe, who was in her first year of teaching, provides a good example of this framing of time when she articulates the possibility of managing it as a ‘‘holiday’’: ‘‘The working hour is. . .hysterical[ly] funny. Eight hours a week, other people work 45 and you work. . . from nine to five, you work from half past eight, you stay until half past four but you don’t work half of the time. It’s like a holiday actually.’’ [Chloe, South Africa] English teachers tend to understand themselves in terms of the generalised anonymity of objective time – temporal norms describing ‘‘work’’ and ‘‘holiday’’ which they do not choose. While Korean teachers work a 45-h-week, the majority of English teachers either work shorter hours (averaging 31 h), ‘don’t work half of the time’, or ‘fill time’ in-between classes with social media or activities. Despite their efforts to fill time with habitual and structured activities, English teachers can neither share the temporal experiences of ‘work’ time nor claim ‘holiday’ time as their own. Moreover, when teachers are absorbed in this way and enact everyday conceptions of time, they attempt to turn even their spare time into measurable units or moments to be ‘‘taken’’: ‘‘Different days mean different things. Monday’s Pizza Night. We get pizza, watch movies. Tuesday night is kinda go out with the girls usually. Wednesday’s curry. Thursdays whatever. Friday’s go out night.’’ [Rebecca, Canada]

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As this quote illustrates, teachers look for different ways of making time useful, but often find themselves lost in their everyday life in Korea. Many also attempted to compartmentalise their days into different time units that were allocated to different activities (‘‘pizza night’’) often with the hope of passing the time. This organisation of life according to a measurable and quantifiable patterning can be understood as one way of coping with temporal disjunctures generated in migration. English teachers often lack familiarity with people and things but also with culturally specific temporal practices of Korea. Rather than rework themselves through these Korean temporalities, most teachers seek to cover up these differences, to mask their lostness by overlaying life with experiences that make sense because they are familiar but nonetheless out of place in Korea. Moreover, teachers involved in such time-grasping activities lose sense of directionality in their lives and get ‘‘lost’’ in temporal structures that are clearly not of their own choosing: [Teachers are] the people who run away from reality. [. . .] It’s like people who [say] ‘‘Oh I’ve had such bad luck and I thought Korea was going to be wonderful and I came here and then’’ and now they’re here and complaining about anything. So it’s people like that, floating around. Not people who know where they’re going, and they’re irritating. [Chloe, South Africa] As Hörschelmann (2011) notes, one of the key principles of life course studies is the emphasis on individuals’ ability to assemble life in an orderly fashion, mapping out where they are in the present and what they are doing in relation to a future end-point: career, adulthood, family, return, retirement. By contrast, the lives of English teachers are characterised much more by a sense of ‘floating’ or ‘drifting’ through time, where individuals deal with things as they emerge and are constantly obsessed with present concerns. As Heidegger (1996) suggests, then, when people consider time as an object or measurable entity, they lose and waste time as they lose themselves in the distractions of everydayness: ‘‘The irresolute person understands himself in terms of those very closest events and be-falling which he encounters in such a making-present, and which thrust themselves upon him in various ways. Busily losing himself in the object of his concern, he loses his time in it too’’ [Heidegger, 1996: 411] By attempting to arrest the flow of time and break down every passing moment into measurable parts, English teachers also find themselves ‘‘lost’’ in anonymous temporal structures and disconnected from broader existential issues of self-development. Many English teachers bemoaned lack of direction, but many more used the interview as an opportunity to air complaints about Korean life. In obsessing in this way with the present, and in many cases with everyday life (cultural norms, workplace practices, food, language) that are beyond individual control, participants also reveal their inability to map their lives in a fashion that leads towards a desirable future. This disconnection between public temporal structures and individual experiences of time highlights an important contrast with life course studies and the emphasis on the planful nature of migration. Many participants described being in Korea as an ‘‘in-between time’’ of travelling, repaying debts or trying new jobs – what is framed in the ‘emerging adulthood’ studies as time between adolescence and adulthood where individuals ‘‘explore a variety of possible life directions’’ (Arnett, 2000: 469). While this focus on extending youth highlights an increasing variety of life course trajectories (Brooks, 2009), it remains tied to a conceptualisation of time as linear, a period of life experimentation that sits

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between established notions of childhood and adulthood (Blatterer, 2007). In contrast, our research demonstrates that the temporal experiences of English teachers often oscillate around a sense of ‘‘lostness’’ and disengagement with the world that is articulated in preoccupation with the present. Time is understood in relation to the period required to complete a particular task rather than something that relates to broader existence. For many teachers, the dominance of external measurements of time related to particular tasks was particularly apparent in the compartmentalisation of their presence in Korea around the twelve-month contract: Each contract is a separate year for me. I’m not looking beyond the end of my contract. And actually it is possible that some fantastic job came up somewhere else I would take it. [Heather, New Zealand] ‘‘I guess I still celebrate it. My Korean birthday is November 2nd. So every November 2nd is like ‘‘Yeah! Another year!’’ [Chris, Canada] As these extracts demonstrate, time for English teachers is often understood in relation to their past, present and future contracts, which frame their decisions about remaining in Korea or changing employers. As Chris suggests, the annual contract signing can take on personal significance (‘Korean birthday’), yet it represents an external (public) measurement of time, the product of established governmental practice that frames the manner in which English teachers inhabit the world. The result is an effective dispersal of teachers’ individuality in the public work-world and their inability to establish their own relation to time. 5.2. Transience and successive time The focus on these present objects of concern highlights a broader orientation of time around transience through which the present is isolated in itself and the possibility of transition or movement of time is removed. In Hedieggerian (1996) terms, the lives of English teachers are configured from the perspective of the present, so that the past (seen as dead repository of events) and the future (something uncertain and ‘‘yet to come’’) are viewed as separate entities: ‘‘In the short term, yeah. You can live in this city. You can live in your own little world, work your job, make your cash and then when it’s time to leave, you leave. But you’re not staying. This isn’t going to be your home but that’s not a pattern for making this your home. It just becomes a place, a place to work and then eventually a place to leave’’ [Alan, Canada] Teachers live their lives oriented towards imminent departure. As Alan suggests, however, the imminence of departure does not necessarily mean that individuals are actually going to leave or thinking in concrete terms about leaving. Alan had been in Korea for nine years, and when asked about his future plans he responded: ‘‘I’ll get the hell out of here! [. . .] Hopefully in the next two years. Definitely within the next two years’’. He has no concrete plans however, and like many teachers appears to be living from one day to the next, from one contract to the next. This transience relies on a juxtaposition of now-points where one moment follows after another rather than leading into particular planned future activities. Such engagement with time can be seen as ‘‘making present’’ at the expense of forgetting the past and undermining the significance of the future (Heidegger, 1996). For Heidegger, present understandings are linked to particular accounts of the future, either as awaiting or anticipation (Hoy, 2009). Anticipation implies openness to the future, past and

present, so that human being can project herself upon things that matter and face up to her finitude and death. As we demonstrate later, anticipatory attunement vis-a-vis the future can be an anxiety, revealing the insignificance of everyday things and amplifying the focus on key concerns and aspirations. This contrasts with the situation of many English teachers who ‘‘make present’’ and look away from rather than towards the future. In this context, they do not focus on the future as a possibility for change, but rather remain focused on issues of present concern. Many await the future and dismiss things that are no longer present: ‘‘I love my job so I’m going to stay another year because I really haven’t saved any money at all like just trying to get settled and going on all these trips. I’m going kinda crazy so I think like it’s probably not going to be as much fun next year but that’s how I’ll get settled down like really soon. . . honestly I’ve no idea, I’ve no idea where my life’s going. I’d eventually have to get married have kids and like do that whole domestic thing. [Ella, USA] Having ‘‘no idea where my life’s going’’ is a common state of being for English teachers. As Ella suggests, there are multiple contradictory motivations to migration: save money, travel and experience places, move towards an idealised future of settled family life. But none of these fits clearly onto a linear trajectory that English teachers can lay out in front of themselves and identify the direction they are taking. Rather than finding themselves on a particular trajectory, having a position that is mappable, English teachers are better understood as ‘‘subject-in-transit’’ (Clifford, 1994: 321) whose life oscillates between a disconnected present life in Korea and an imagined and idealised domesticated future. [Those] people who are here temporarily, if you walk into their apartments, they’re still living out of bags even if they’ve been here three, four years, they’re still thinking along the lines of how affordable they can make their lives so they can ship it all back on the plane back home. [Thomas, Canada] For the few teachers, like Thomas, who find themselves in more secure positions, the transient character of English teacher lives is all the more apparent. This is not simply about plans for the future or lack thereof (although this uncertainty about the future is evident), but also of individuals organising their lives in ways that highlight the normalisation of time into an extended or ‘permanent temporariness’ (Bailey et al., 2002; Collins, 2012). Transience is a taken for granted characteristic of English teacher lives – living out of suitcases, never accumulating the accouterments of settled domesticity, organising life around a twelve-month contract. Heidegger (1996) stresses that this preoccupation with the present makes human beings indifferent to all meaningful interactions and leads to two kinds of boredom. On one hand, he describes boredom by something in the world: with an object or particular arrangements. In this case, time is seen as a commodity which one can manage or dispense with at will (Hoy, 2009). English teachers, who are faced at work with temporal patterns that do not seem to be efficient uses of time, are often bored by the wearisome nature of their situation: ‘‘[T]here’s a huge variance in workload - for example, good friend of ours, Mark, [. . .] he’s only teaching 18 hours a week, and the kids are not interested in learning English anyway, he said he bribed them with candy everyday, but they do not want to do after-school classes, [. . .] so he’s a bit bored – he’s got a lot of time on his hands.’’ [Sallie, New Zealand] As Sallie suggests, Mark is bored by the tediousness of things and he resorts to unusual measures (bribing students with candy)

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to pass the time. In this context, time is again viewed as a manageable entity, which can be ‘‘shortened’’ by specific activities (additional classes) and made to go faster. Conversely, Heidegger (1996) describes boredom with oneself as something which individuals might not realise as the experience is unfolding. In this case, there is no possible activity one can undertake to make time pass more quickly. When English teachers are boring to themselves and held in limbo by the standing of time, they can also be boring to others: ‘‘My class starts at nine and so I sit around at my computer, Facebook. And then I play it until lunch and then during the afternoon I don’t have class. Then I do lesson plans, I’m boring, I’m bored. Now I don’t do anything.’’ [Chloe, South Africa] Chloe doesn’t provide a specific reason for being bored, but realises retrospectively that preoccupation with everyday concerns induces self-repression and inactivity (‘‘Now I don’t do anything’’). For Heidegger (1995:141), in boredom an individual lives an undifferentiated life in an anonymous way, adopting a thinglike quality of being one among many (being an average person, Das Man): ‘‘one feels timeless, one feels removed from the flow of time’’. In this case, individuality is forgotten and English teacher understands herself from the point of view of society (is ‘‘lost’’), as an undifferentiated constituent. By focusing on present concerns, teachers leap from one activity to another without specifically relating to each one of them, and the past becomes outmoded and replaced with each new concern. Boredom therefore reveals immersion in the everyday world as a chronology of successive moments, where the significance of time has already been set. This focus on situations of ‘‘lostness’’ in the public temporal structures of the world challenges assumptions in life course research regarding the ownership of time. The situations of boredom reveal that the times of English teachers are not mind-dependent but also cannot be seen as solely objective. The focus on disjunctive moments in these migrants’ lives also questions expectations about successive progression of time and managed life courses (i.e. debates about ‘emerging adulthood’), which can overlook the situations of incompleteness and feelings of timelessness in English teachers’ lives. 6. Anxiety, joy and the possibility of being otherwise Apart from accepting ‘objective’ time, migrants can also rise above their incompleteness and grasp the complexity of their existence. In Heidegger’s terms, attunements and moments of affective intensity condition the way individuals overcome their lostness in the public world. An attuned human being finds that she is concerned about her being and is therefore brought before her own existence as something important and yet fragile. Attunements provide opportunities for English teachers to develop relations to time unique to their aspirations, yet these attunements are more-than-individual as they emerge through being in the world with others. In the following analysis we pay particular attention to ‘anxiety’ and ‘joy’ as attunements that reflect how migrants are in the world with others and reveal that their existence is not measured solely in terms of everyday tasks related to some sort of pre-determined structure. Anxiety is an attunement that manifests the loss of stability in life, often linked to a disruption of accustomed routines and temporal rhythms by an event, encounter or experience. In each case, anxiety represents a moving away from everyday conceptions of time but also from the myth of a coherent narrative of individual life. Contingency and uncertainty always characterise individual lives but people are often blind to these elements of daily

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existence. Anxiety brings individuals face-to-face with this indeterminate future and discloses ‘‘the temporal openness of our Being’’ (Gross and Kemmann, 2005: 93). In anxiety, then, individuals may also understand that they have the potential to be free, of ‘‘being free for the freedom of choosing and grasping itself’’ (Heidegger, 1996: 176). Indeed, for many English teachers, when their impersonal meanings and temporal norms of everyday life are challenged, individuals must learn how to re-interpret and re-create the possibilities that are offered to them in the public world. Rather than a pre-planned decision, migration to Korea emerged suddenly for many participants, often in relation to employment, family or relationship difficulties. In Heidegger’s terms, such migration and its emergent temporality can be seen as ‘‘grounded in the spontaneous activity of attunement’’, which destabilises an individual and ‘‘constantly keeps him open to whatever may approach from the world’’ (King, 2001: 57). Teaching English was often encountered as an opportunity to respond to life challenges but one that required individuals to open themselves to further uncertainty, to depart from temporal routines of life and pursue unknowable possibilities. Nadia’s (UK) narrative offers insight into this emergence of anxiety: I did some travelling for a while and I was only working in bars and things – it’s so hard to get a job in theatre in London. [. . .] I just was getting stressed, I was like ‘What can I do? What can I do?’ Like I wasn’t earning much money, so then I thought ‘‘alright, I’m gonna go somewhere’’. I was just browsing the internet and looking at jobs for overseas, I wasn’t looking for Korea in particular – just anywhere. Examples like this reveal the fracturing of ‘calculative thought’, which reduces, counts and quantifies beings in relation to their potential for producing specific outcomes (McNeill, 1998:235). Contra the desire to follow a normative trajectory through the ‘education-work transition’ (cf. Blatterer, 2007: 778), Nadia finds herself exposed to uncertainty in her employment situation and lack of clarity about her future. In the process, she encounters a mode of existence where she is exposed to the emergence of being – openness to the possibility of teaching English overseas and finding her ‘place’ in the world. In this way, uncertainty and the anxiety migration generates can be understood as simultaneously troubling and opening up new ways of seeing oneself. As Simon (New Zealand) explains, migration creates new unexpected opportunities to orient oneself differently in the world: [I] graduated in 2003 and got my first post-graduate job at [a New Zealand multinational firm] and six months later found myself in Korea. [. . .] It was the result of boredom with the job, and particularly a nasty, nasty break up. So coming to Korea was the new start, new horizons, travel broadens the mind and all that sort of stuff. [. . .] I got a call from a Korean guy after I sent my CV off and just got this random call and he said ‘come and work for me.’ I said, ‘do you want to ask me any questions?’ and he said ‘no, no come and work for me.’ So I was like, ‘ok, fine send us a ticket and I’ll come’ and sure enough a ticket arrived and I was off. [. . .] So that is how I ended up here, sort of on a whim more than anything else. For Simon, the interruption of his trajectory post-graduation disrupts his sense of familiarity in the world. While he was employed post-graduation, Simon’s boredom with the temporal routines of work and his despondency following relationship difficulties places him in a position of taking on something that is unfamiliar. Like many teachers, Simon also commented that he had ‘‘no real idea [about Korea], if I had known then what I know now, I would have been a lot more prepared’’. Anxiety discloses temporal structures and possibilities offered to this individual in the public

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world. Through the speedy recruitment process, Simon’s trajectory in the world also then becomes determined not by his own preferences, but rather by attunements that come over him and reveal the world to him as important in a particular way (boring, threatening with mental pain of breakup, exciting). As Heidegger (1996: 88) stresses, anxiety arises in relation to something that is indeterminable as it ‘‘oppresses us. We can get no hold on things. . .Anxiety makes manifest the nothing.’’ This experience of the unknown in the process of migration reveals the arrangements that keep teachers like Nadia and Simon unaware of possibilities to become different individuals. Although such withdrawal of the circumstances and projects that were familiar to English teachers before migration can threaten their current self-interpretation, it also helps them to find different ways of being themselves. Anxiety opens up opportunities and generates a desire for different sorts of being in the world, even as those modes of being remain unknown. Ella’s (USA) narrative provides a useful example. Following graduation Ella envisioned a future of settled domesticity, getting married and living near her parents. After numerous applications and constant rejection letters she found a job she was ‘‘sure [she] was going to get’’. The subsequent rejection letter led to ‘‘an emotional breakdown’’ and a decision to look for any job anywhere. Shortly after searching online she was contacted by recruiters from Korea who were ready to place her in a job immediately: ‘‘and then I got excited and then I was here in a month’’: I thought I wanted to be a teacher so in my senior year I taught second graders and then also when I was [an assistant] at the correction facility I did like group thing so that was like teaching, [. . .] so I kinda felt like yeah, teaching experience, sure. I could do [that] for English. [. . .] I was so excited, it wasn’t awkward but then [the manager] took me to, he took me to the school like that night [immediately after I arrived] and then I met everybody and I thought the school was really, like literally fun. [. . .] It seemed like pretty seamless, it’s like within a month I had a whole life’’ Instead of constraining herself to the impersonal meanings and temporal norms of the transition between study-graduation-workdomestic life, Ella begins to find ‘joy’ in the idea of being a teacher. Re-interpretation of her earlier teaching experiences set in motion a different way of living as an English teacher. The disruption of her perceived future trajectory of work and settlement has presented an opportunity to Ella to realise her capacity for genuine individuality and having ‘‘a whole life’’. Anxiety, then, is accompanied by joy that emerges in the discovery of what matters to oneself. It is allied with cheerfulness and creative longing; anxiety brings about an orientation towards new possibilities for life, for rediscovering ‘‘individualised potentiality-of being’’ (Heidegger, 1996: 310). In the moment of joy, individuals experience themselves as incomplete or unfinished and they are able to reveal themselves in their totality (as a ‘‘whole’’ being’’). Instead of covering up their incompleteness (simply ‘drifting’), migrants can seize opportunities to do things ‘‘where their heart is’’. Sallie’s (New Zealand) narrative is exemplary and we focus on her story exclusively now to generate a nuanced conceptualisation of temporality, anxiety and joyful attunement. Unlike many participants, Sallie had employment success before Korea in different public sector roles, culminating in a position as a ministerial advisor. Although her lack of enthusiasm for these positions influenced her mobility, it was the potential loss of a loved one that generated an impulsive response: ‘‘Eventually after 12 or 14 years I’ve had enough of [working in the social services sector], and so I moved into working for [. . .] the Government departments in Ministerial Adviser to the Minister of Building and Housing. [. . .] [Lauren] and I have been together for

two years as she said, and then we had some trouble and we separated, and then [Lauren] said she was going to Korea, and I just said ‘‘Okay, I’m coming too’’. After her move Sallie encounters the world in its ‘‘empty mercilessness’’ (Heidegger, 1996:393), absolutely foreign to her. Anxiety here has been shown to hold in it the experience of individual’s possible impossibility. In Heidegger’s (1996:358) terms, an overcoming of this anxiety and confronting such ‘‘emptiness’’ (what he also refers to as ‘‘nullity’’ or ‘‘death’’, impossibility of every way of existing) produces ‘‘unshakeable joy’’. In this context, we can understand Sallie’s sudden decision to migrate into the unknown with her girlfriend Lauren as her response to incompleteness. What matters most for Sallie is not career, or where her travels lead her, but rather her relationship with Lauren and its potential to take her forward in the world. In the moment of joy migrants are struck by the insignificance of entities in the world that have conditioned their temporal engagements. Two things are revealed. Firstly, no number of circumstances in a given moment can exhaust the possible significance of our existence (Hoy, 2009). Joy highlights the impossibility of ever fulfilling oneself if an individual clings to present objects. Hence joy must also accompany anxiety in that it oscillates around intense feelings of uncertainty that challenge the idea of ‘endless’ time. Sallie continues: ‘‘I was mentally unprepared about even being here. [Lauren] went straight into her bedroom and started arranging her bedroom – that’s the first thing she did! After the furniture and everything. And I’m like watching her and going ‘What is she doing?!’ And then, what I did, I went, I sat on the deck and I cried. I cried for about half an hour. I was hot, I was, as I said, tired, disorientated, not in the zone at all for being here.’’ Sallie’s anxiety here emerges in relation to circumstances that surround her, things that were familiar but which are suddenly beyond her control. The world is disclosed as being dictated by public demands that are also thoroughly unfamiliar. Secondly, loss of control also makes it possible to project oneself onto possibilities that might better realise one’s capacity for genuine individuality. For Sallie, despite her feelings of being unsettled, migration also provided her the opportunity to see herself anew through the eyes of others and to imagine a future as a teacher where her individuality might be fulfilled. She describes these feelings through her initial experiences at school: ‘‘So they took me into the auditorium, and all the classrooms have big TV screens in their room, and they asked me to introduce myself to the students [. . .]. [I] was completely thrown, yeah. But the kids would just yell it out to me all the time ‘‘I love you’’, ‘‘You’re so pretty’’, ‘‘You’re so beautiful’’ and I’m like ‘What do I say?’, but they made me feel so good. And, they were just incredibly excited that I was there. [. . .] So I’ll never forget it, it was a fantastic experience. [Now] I love teaching English as a second language to kids, and I want to do that as a career now [. . .] I had no idea whether I’d even like teaching, and I love it. I love teaching English to Korean kids, I really love it. I’d come home, and sometimes I’d come home frustrated and tired, all of those things, but on the whole, I come home with a real sense of peace that I’m enjoying what I do, and I’m happy. And I feel blessed to feel like that.’’ Sallie’s anxiety reveals what really matters to her and brings up an opportunity to change her everyday practices. Joy, in this sense, is not necessarily about this particular thing, becoming a teacher, but rather a broader transformation of self and world, where individuals stop getting lost in the banality of their existence by taking opportunities that otherwise would not be considered.

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This discussion reveals the complexity of embodied times of travelling to Korea to teach English. Indeed, in contrast to assertions about planful and socially constructed migration, these narratives reveal pre-reflexive and affective mobilities. Migration for many participants emerged unexpectedly and narratives of mobility were almost always entangled in uncertainty about present situations. The temporality of migration, then, must be understood through attunements such as joy and anxiety that cannot be owned nor managed. Anxiety is challenging but it also opens up possibilities for being otherwise in the world, for being an English teacher in Korea. Ella and Sallie’s narratives point to the manner that migration can radically transform their view of themselves, allowing them to grasp opportunities and re-invent themselves. Crucially, transformation takes place not through a singular linear trajectory of life, nor a calculated geographic and temporal pathway, but rather through recognition of the possibilities of being otherwise that only emerge in the withdrawal of the familiar. 7. Conclusion Our ambition has been to re-examine the temporality of life course and migration through a Heideggerian analysis of the lives of English teachers in Korea. Our analysis has problematized the certainty of notions of time in life course (as planful, mainly social, and mappable) and has offered a more relational and complex reading of temporality. At first glance, it is tempting to view the mobility of English teachers to Korea as indicative of life course research on youth ‘transition’, self-development and future trajectories. The narratives here, however, suggest that this reading overemphasises individuals’ capacity to manage time as an objective, external entity that leads to particular endpoints. The sense of time articulated by most teachers was characterised by the uniform ordering of the public realm, an anonymous structure available to all and belonging to none. Within this timeless public world, many lost their sense of life as stretching from birth to death and were instead ‘floating’ and ‘drifting’, disconnected from issues of self-development. Teachers often found themselves in an ambiguous position of being ‘in-between’: youth, adulthood, education, work, travel, migration. In this context many develop compartmentalised conceptions of time oscillating around recurring twelve-month contracts or the banality of everyday life. This experience manifests in individual senses of disconnection from past and future, and a social milieu where transience is accentuated. Teachers may imagine or believe that this in-between time will end one day and that they will have a different life, but many are ‘‘making present’’ (Heidegger, 1996), drifting along and doing nothing to change their lives and open up alternative futures. Our analysis also points to the generative possibilities of different attunements, which express relationships with time and engagement with the world. Most notably, the narratives were characterised by uncertainty and anxiety about where they had been and were going. This was apparent in stories of coming to Korea, which emphasised the unexpected opportunity of English teaching in relation to life difficulties – underemployment, debt, relationships and boredom. Arrival in Korea rarely resolved these issues but rather forced teachers into unfamiliar socio-cultural settings that accentuated anxiety. For many teachers, this generated obsession with everyday matters and passing of time that characterised their lives. In some instances, however, anxiety was also linked to joyful attunement, and to the discovery or recognition of what one likes doing and what one wants to be. For some, the rupturing of their everyday lives through migration and encounter with the unfamiliar was personally fulfilling because it presented them with possibilities that otherwise would have been unforeseeable.

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Our paper also offers three conceptual contributions to understanding time in relation to migration and life course. Firstly, the discussion here stresses the importance of addressing the situatedness of migrants, their being-there in the world in ways that cannot be accounted for within a measurement of spatio-temporal extension. This situatedness demands that we examine the geographies of migration beyond pre-determined locations and highlight the ways in which migrants develop places of activity through their involvement in the world. Our analysis expresses migration as a process highlighting the particularity of the world and migrants’ own lives. This focus on mobile being challenges an objective reading of migration as movement across space–time locations in which no single location has priority over others and movement to Korea appears simply part of the flat ordering of the world. A normative life course approach would suggest that English teachers are subordinated to the ordering of labour migration regulations, recruitment and employment systems, socio-political arrangements where age, origin, and status of migrants are more important than relational embeddedness. While such an approach can offer a mapping of migrants on the move in relation to location and life stage, it also tends towards timelessness and placelessness. Indeed, the projective activities of English teachers, their very relation with the world, are seen to develop subsequently after their movement with the opening of a public, intersubjective world. Our approach, by contrast, prioritises the groundedness of human experience and its interpretation in social structures. In doing so we have also shown the importance of the ‘‘placing’’ and ‘‘timing’’ of migration, where mobility generates a spatio-temporal region that is always taking place, is brought into presence as a specific combination of regulations, habits, relationships. Secondly, this discussion also develops a holistic understanding of migration as a happening of the world. Rather than focusing on ‘locating’ lives or identifying abstract ‘occurrences’ we have focused on bringing together teachers’ objective and engaged or existential being (more-than-individual affects). In this way our paper considers migration as more-than-subjective experience and problematizes the descriptive focus on ‘understanding migrant experience’ that dominates contemporary migration research. We have stressed the reciprocity that emerges between English teachers and the lives they live, the factors that structure their lives in Korea and their responses to them. Migration research tends to operate through dualisms of time–space, where migratory movements are conceived as something determined by others or managed and owned by migrants themselves. We have framed migrants’ way of being as temporality that is both objective and subjective. Migrant temporalities are hence inherently worldly as they find their existence framed by public temporal norms (contracts, Korean temporal expectations and structures). At the same time, migrants and the entities they encounter are themselves time and within time, so disclosure of the world in their feelings or attunements also provides the conditions for the possibility of their existence. Finally, through this recognition of the multiple and relational constitution of English teachers’ mobile being, we have also reasserted the openness of possibility for spatio-temporal differentiation and gathering of things in migration. We do not focus on the possibility to manage migration – instead, our paper explores how English teachers take part in its openness and indeterminacy, and participate in its constitution. Moreover, by analysing attunements generated through interactions between teachers and the Korean context we have shown how the opening in migration experiences goes beyond the particularity of that experience. The happening of English teacher migration is always an opening into the world that is not constrained to a particular mode of becoming, for example the mode of describing education achievements or employment progression. Rather, this happening is always an opening into the

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multiplicity of relations in which the migration of English teachers is enmeshed, it draws attention to the inexhaustible possibilities that can be generated through their mobilities. This highlights the value of celebrating ambiguity and excess in mobile lives and challenges the reduction of life events to specific paradigms, which claim to explain and shape how life transitions come about. The accounts from English teachers discussed in this paper do not express migration-related experiences as all that they are, only as what they are. This final point clearly has considerable significance well beyond the scope of this paper. Indeed, there is a wider need in migration studies to explore the possibility that the time– spaces of migration emerge in ways that do not come from the acts of migrants themselves or the broader systems they are situated within. The Heideggerian approach deployed in this paper offers considerable potential for this task, highlighting the situatedness of migrants and the complex more-than-subjective dimensions of migration while recognising the enduring openness of the world and its possibilities for generating different ways of being and being mobile. Acknowledgements The Korea Foundation provided support for the research discussed in this paper as part of a Field Research Fellowship for Francis Collins. The constructive critiques of three anonymous reviewers have been valuable for refining the arguments articulated in this paper. The usual disclaimers apply. References Al-Saji, A., 2004. The memory of another past: Bergson, Deleuze and a new theory of time. Cont. Philos. Rev. 37 (2), 203–239. Ansell, N., van Blerk, L., Hajdu, F., Robson, E., 2011. Spaces, times, and critical moments: a relational time–space analysis of the impacts of AIDS on rural youth in Malawi and Lesotho. Environ. Plan. A 43 (3), 525–544. Arnett, J.J., 2000. Emerging adulthood: a theory of development from the late teens through the twenties. Am. Psychol. 55 (5), 469. Bailey, A.J., 2009. Population geography: lifecourse matters. Prog. Hum. Geogr. 33 (3), 407–418. Bailey, A.J., Wright, R.A., Mountz, A., Miyares, I.M., 2002. (Re) producing Salvadoran transnational geographies. Ann. Assoc. Am. Geogr. 92 (1), 125–144. Beck, U.G., Beck-Gernsheim, E., 2002. Individualization: Institutionalized Individualization and its Social and Political Consequences. Sage, London. Berry, J.W., 1992. Acculturation and adaptation in a new society. Int. Migr. 30 (1), 69–85. Bissell, D., 2009. Visualising everyday geographies: practices of vision through travel-time. Trans. Inst. Br. Geogr. 34 (1), 42–60. Blatterer, H., 2007. Contemporary adulthood reconceptualizing an uncontested category. Curr. Sociol. 55 (6), 771–792. Brooks, R., 2009. Transitions from Education to Work: New Perspectives from Europe and Beyond. Palgrave MacMillan, Basingstoke. Chang, K.S., 2010. South Korea under Compressed Modernity: Familial Political Economy in Transition. Routledge, Oxon. Clausen, A., 1993. American Lives: Looking Back at the Children of the Great Depression. University of California Press, Berkeley.

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