Intra-Acting Assemblages: New Materialist Exploration of a Family Artifact and Belonging in Finnish Canadian Migration

This new materialist study explores the entanglement between material culture and transnational belonging and investigates the ways an artifact—an inherited vintage coffee creamer—represents transnational migration trajectories and belonging within one Finnish Canadian family across generations. The analysis, completed through a new materialist lens, demonstrates that the artifact is entangled in the trajectories and stories of family members’ lives. The artifact takes on a dual role. First, it offers a context and framework for discussion between the participants in the situation. Second, it acts as a voice in the life narratives of their family trajectories. The material artifact is a mediator, a participant in the implementation of mobility in times and spaces. Intra-action, embedded in the Finnish coffee-drinking tradition, reflects many-sided belonging and mobility patterns and connects the creamer and the study participants to places, family members, time periods, and even emotions. This study is located at the intersection of research on material culture, new materialism, intra-action, belonging, and migration. It emphasizes that things are not just things and highlights the relevance of material culture—here, one artifact—in family-migration trajectories across times and places and representations of transnational belonging.