This Week Doesn't Really Exist

This Week Doesn't Really Exist explores the experiences of cross-border workers and their daily commutes between the regions of Lubuskie in Poland and Brandenburg in Germany. In their narratives, the road emerges as a structuring principle of mobile lives within the ‘inner peripheries’: both the spatial and temporal logic of everyday life, as well as the affective emphasis within the narratives, is centred on travel. Given the dispersed nature of our field, we adopted a multi-sited approach, following the workers to their places of residence. This fieldwork strategy, documented in the film, responded to the limited time available to our research participants and allowed us to understand their experiences of everyday mobility better. While the film’s soundtrack aims to amplify marginalised voices, articulating the spatiotemporal dimensions of cross-border labour, the visuals aim to convey the experience of being on the road, creating a point of convergence between researchers and research participants. 

doi: 10.13140/RG.2.2.31071.27041