Abstract

Looking into the specific context of Chosunjok migrants living in Jjokbangchon(residential area with households that cannot reach minimum housing), Seoul, this study points out that mobility and sedentariness are interpenetrated by each other. In-depth interviews and participant observation are utilized to include the voice of migrants who have not gotten attention of discourses around Jjokbangchon. Research participants are living in Jjokbangchon while internalizing nomadism at the same time. Their life in Jjokbangchon is interlinked with their history of migration and continuing possibilities to move again. However, their settling in Jjokbangchon is more than meaningless temporary staying because they actively engage in the networks of the place experiencing continual deterritorialization-reterritorialization. Capturing the practice of ‘moving-dwelling’, this study goes beyond the sedentarist/nomadic binary on which many previous studies of migrants are grounded, being wary of simple and fixed meaning-making of each life form-mobility and sedentariness. New spatial imagination which ruptures existing spatial structure solidifying a poverty ‘trap’ by kicking out residents or locking people in the most fragile of homes can be found throughout the research.