Emerging research focuses on the role of time in the context of mobility and explores the conditions of ‘wait’ and ‘stuckness’ as conceptual tools for understanding the tempos and socio-cultural implications of mobile experiences. This paper contributes to this research by exploring these conditions in the context of work and geographical mobility, with a special focus on people who migrate and follow their working partners in international professional migration and temporarily live in Switzerland. The increasingly mobile and changing conditions of some professional sectors have made transnational career trajectories imaginable also for many partners. Yet, at times, their working life is not easily reconstituted on the occasion of the move, and the timing for job-search and unemployment can extend indefinitely. I will discuss how mobile professionals’ partners, by transiting from a working situation to another one that is not yet in place, experience a condition of stuckness between identities, phases of life and destinations of migration. I will ask how the subjective experience of stuckness can trigger and at times block a person’s capacity to imagine work under conditions of geographical mobility.

中文翻译：

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（Im）移动想象。在尾随，感觉卡住并想象在移动中工作

新兴研究侧重于时间在移动环境中的作用，并探索“等待”和“停滞”作为理解移动体验节奏和社会文化影响的概念工具的条件。本文通过在工作和地域流动的背景下探索这些条件来为这项研究做出贡献，特别关注在国际专业移民中移民和跟随他们的工作伙伴并暂时居住在瑞士的人。一些专业部门日益流动和不断变化的条件使许多合作伙伴也可以想象跨国职业轨迹。然而，有时，他们的工作生活并不容易在搬家之际重新安排，求职和失业的时间可能会无限延长。我将讨论移动专业人士的合作伙伴如何通过从一种工作环境过渡到另一种尚未到位的工作环境，体验身份、生活阶段和迁移目的地之间的卡住状态。我会问，卡住的主观体验如何触发并有时阻碍一个人想象在地理流动条件下工作的能力。