"It's Better Life Here Than There": Elasticity and Ambivalence in Narratives of Personal Experience

This article investigates when and how narratives of personal experience and displacement reference and characterize dimensions of time and space, with a focus on how temporal elasticity might serve as an interactional resource. Examining the dynamic, situated, and intertwined nature of such narratives, the analysis looks at how past-present-future/there-here experiences are described and characterized in the qualitative research interview. By illuminating the ways in which temporal elasticity and temporal border crossing are dynamic, emergent, and dialogic resources for the narrator, the analysis demonstrates a powerful way to investigate the experiences of simultaneity (Levitt & Glick Schiller, 2008) that accompany movement (of people, ideas, and practices) across spatial and temporal borders.