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Tempus mutans: Temporal change in the crafting styles of forced migrants’ narratives about host societies

ORCiD logo with link | University of Łódź | Vilnius Gediminas Technical University
Published online: 4 March 2026
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https://doi.org/10.1075/ni.24096.pop
Abstract
This study examines how migrants’ narrative form changes over time when the host society is treated as an external object of evaluation. Two interview waves with five West African migrants in Southern Italy (2018; 2023–2024) are analyzed across three domains: Economic–Political, Socio–Cultural, and Environmental–Geographical. Paired comparisons are reported only where within-speaker narratives were comparable across waves. Using the crafting-styles framework, the analysis shows a shift from more stable, closure-oriented tellings in 2018 to more reversal-driven, deconstructive tellings in 2023–2024. This form drift tracks changes in evaluation, agency attribution, and the narratability of the host society as a setting for future planning. Methodologically, the study shows how narrative selection and crafting-style patterns support parsimonious longitudinal comparison and strengthen within-case temporal inference beyond content-focused readings, while also clarifying how coherence and closure become harder to sustain under prolonged institutional contact and precarity.
Article outline
  • Introduction: When the Host Society Becomes Tellable
  • Narrative form in motion: Conceptual grounding
    • Narrative selection and crafting styles
    • Host societies as narrative objects: Migration, positioning, and time
  • Rationale, data and methodology
    • Participants, setting, and data collection
    • Data preparation and analytic corpus
    • Coding procedure, rigor, and ethics
  • Findings: Host-society narratives across time
    • Economic — political
    • Socio-cultural
    • Environmental-geographical
  • Discussion and conclusion: Narrative form as a barometer of changing host-society experience
  • Competing interests and funding
  • Author’s note on AI use
  • References
References (72)
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