Waiting and the Temporalities of Irregular Migration

This edited volume approaches waiting both as a social phenomenon that proliferates in irregularised forms of migration and as an analytical perspective on migration processes and practices.

Waiting as an analytical perspective offers new insights into the complex and shifting nature of processes of bordering, belonging, state power, exclusion and inclusion, and social relations in irregular migration. The chapters in this book address legal, bureaucratic, ethical, gendered, and affective dimensions of time and migration. A key concern is to develop more theoretically robust approaches to waiting in migration as constituted in and through multiple and relational temporalities. The chapters highlight how waiting is configured in specific legal, material, and socio-cultural situations, as well as how migrants encounter, incorporate, and resist temporal structures.

This collection includes ethnographic and other empirically based material, as well as theorizing that cross-cut disciplinary boundaries. It will be relevant to scholars from anthropology and sociology, and others interested in temporalities, migration, borders, and power.

The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.tandfebooks.com , has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

1. Introduction: Unpacking the temporalities of irregular migration

Christine M. Jacobsen, Marry-Anne Karlsen

PART I: THE MULTIPLE TEMPOS OF WAITING

2. The violence of accelerated time: Waiting and hasting during ‘the long summer of migration’ in Greece

Katerina Rozakou

3. ‘They said wait, wait – and I waited’: the Power-chronographies of waiting for asylum in France

Christine M. Jacobsen

4. Filling the apps: The smartphone, time and the refugee

Thomas Hylland Eriksen

PART II: THE SOCIAL RELATIONS OF WAITING

5. Mo’s challenge. Waiting and the question of methodological nationalism

Kari Anne Drangsland

6. Migration control, temporal irregularity and waiting: Undocumented Zimbabwean migrants’ experiences of deportability in South Africa

Johannes Machinya

7. Waiting out the condition of illegality in Norway

Marry-Anne Karlsen

8. ‘Go Fund Me’: LGBTI asylum seekers in Kakuma Refugee Camp, Kenya

B Camminga

PART III: LEGAL TEMPORALITIES AND WAITING

9. The truth of the body as controversial evidence: An investigation into age assessments of migrant minors in FranceSandrine Musso

10. An end to asylum? Temporary protection and the erosion of refugee statusJessica Schultz

11. ‘Doin’ hard time on Planet Earth’: Migrant detainability, disciplinary power, and the disposability of life

Nicholas De Genova

12. Afterword: Waiting, a state of consciousness

Shahram Khosravi

Christine M. Jacobsen is a Professor of Social Anthropology and the Director of the Centre for Women's and Gender Research (SKOK) at the University of Bergen, Norway.

Marry-Anne Karlsen is a Researcher in the Centre for Women’s and Gender Research (SKOK) at the University of Bergen, Norway, and heads IMER Bergen (International Migration and Ethnic Relations research unit).

Shahram Khosravi is Professor of Social Anthropology at Stockholm University, Sweden.