Subversive Mobilities and Vernacular Legal Navigation: Uzbek Migrants in Nordic Migration Regimes

This article examines the subversive mobilities and vernacular legal navigation of Uzbek migrants in Finland and Sweden, highlighting their tactical responses to restrictive Nordic migration regimes. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork (2022–2025), including interviews, focus groups and digital ethnography, we explore how migrants with precarious statuses navigate legal ambiguity, administrative opacity and discretionary enforcement. Through informal knowledge networks, cross-border mobility and performative compliance, Uzbek migrants creatively reinterpret and circumvent institutional constraints. We advance the concept of subversive mobilities (Cohen et al., 2017) and introduce ‘vernacular legal navigation’ to theorise how migrants engage with law as a plural, culturally mediated field. These practices reveal tensions between formal legal frameworks and migrant agency, contributing to socio-legal and migration scholarship. By bridging strategic mobility and everyday legal consciousness, we re-theorise migrant agency as adaptive, relational and situated within the moral and bureaucratic complexity of European migration regimes.

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