Paper short abstract:

Both deceleration and acceleration are features of contemporary French migration control. The paper discusses the consequences of such temporal bordering for the lives of un/documented migrants in Marseille.

Paper long abstract:

Recent research in migration studies points to 'time' as crucial to the production and experience of migration and migrant 'illegality'. In this presentation, I take ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Marseille as a point of departure for discussing some approaches to the temporalities of irregular migration. It has been suggested that migration control is slowing migration flows down, creating spaces of waiting at borders that are increasingly located not only at the territorial edges of nation states, but distributed across national territories. The paper pays attention to socially produced conditions of prolonged waiting, as well as the practices through which such conditions are encountered, incorporated and resisted by migrants in Marseille. While waiting is a ubiquitous feature of migrant 'illegality', the ethnography demonstrates that a general representation of the temporality of irregular migration as one of limbo, stasis and passivity, often found in academic reports as well as in popular portrayals, does not capture the multiple times of irregular migration. Rather, different temporalities are instituted by state efforts to govern migration, and these intersect with migrant's own gendered expectations and relations to the past, present and future. The paper discusses how recent French policies have suggested 'acceleration' as a means to improve governance of migration; speeding up both the processing of asylum applications and the deportation of irregularized migrants, and the consequences this has for un/documented lives in Marseille.

Paper short abstract:

Not only does illegalization take a toll on migrant families, but it can also thwart their creation in the first place—and hasten their demise. This paper explores the impact of illegalization and sociopolitical abjection on a Nigerian nuclear family of 5 who never met in one place—and never will.

Paper long abstract:

For illegalized migrant families and families-in-potentia, the biopolitical fortification of nation-state boundaries can produce jarring temporal disjunctures and truncations. Not only do migrants' illegalization and sociopolitical abjection take a toll on families, but—given the acutely time-sensitive nature of human reproductive endeavors—they can even thwart migrants' ability to create families in the first place. Illegalization can thus meddle with life's beginnings, and it can hasten life's end as well. The physiological consequences of illegalization and sociopolitical abjection can exacerbate migrants' levels of embodied stress, heighten their vulnerability to injury and disease, and foreshorten their lives. This paper explores these conjugated consequences of illegalization for a Nigerian nuclear family of 5 (mother, father, and three children) who never met in a single place—and who never will. Drawing on 16-years of longitudinal fieldwork, the paper explores how this Nigerian couple struggled over two decades (1990s-2010s) and three countries (Nigeria, Israel, and the United Kingdom) to create, then unite the family they desired. The paper considers the material, psychic, and spiritual resources needed to launch this familial project (among them financial savings, familial support, carefully cultivated social networks, religious faith, conjugal trust, and patience), as well as the spatial, temporal, legal, and sociopolitical obstacles that stood in their way. I argue that this particular family's legacy of bold experimentation raises profound questions not only about the moral status of borders and border-crossers, but also about the extraordinary ways in which conjugal commitment—and, no less, love—figure in human efforts to flourish and thrive.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the idea of "deferred return" for Egyptian parents living in Paris from the perspective of migration as a process of navigation of time.

Paper long abstract:

This paper proposes an understanding of migration as time navigation based on the emerging literature on temporality (Bear: 2014, Ringel: 2013), and ethnographic examinations of time narratives for Egyptian parents living in Paris, with whom I have conducted fourteen months of fieldwork. The paper posits the idea of 'deferred return' as the spatio-temporal structure of the management family life for Egyptian parents in Paris. The dream of return is always deferred because of the barring problems of obtaining the right papers for some parents. Engaging in various practices of hope, waiting, and hesitating, Egyptian parents view their stay in Paris as a temporal, provisional and transitory. Therefore, their migratory experience is not necessarily a navigation of space, but a navigation of time that is characterised by various attempts to manage it, fill it, plan it and dream about it. Instead of viewing migration as a movement in space/place, this paper proposes an idea of migration as a future-driven movement of people, animated by the prospect of a "better future" and sustained by the double promise of securing access to Europe and returning to Egypt. For most of the Egyptian parents I have worked with, they see their current places of residence through temporal lenses: they are ephemeral, temporary; they are the site of the preparation for a certain future to come.

Paper short abstract:

The paper will problematize how the time is socially and politically shaped through the example of one of the biopolitical tool to do it : the measure of bone-age.

Paper long abstract:

In this presentation, I examine how time is made "real" through practices of standardization and regimes of "measurement." Special attention is paid to the measurement of the "bone age" of underage migrants living in Marseilles, France. Between 2007 to 2015, NGO's challenged the scientific validity of bone age analysis and organized protests against the misuse of the method by immigration officials. Since 2016, due to the success of these protests, and advice from medical and ethical institutions, examinations of the bone age are now secondary to other mechanisms of age determination and they also now require the consent of the migrant in question. Although the legality and scientific validity of this method are now in question, I have found in my fieldwork that minor migrants often still socially interpellated as "naturalizable" through determinations of their bone age. This paper will present the preliminary result of my research work and fieldwork about this form of biopolitical tool of measurement and migration control.

Paper short abstract:

Acknowledging the need to further the understanding of the temporalities of border production, this paper explores the politics of the future at the border site of the German "Ausbildungsduldung".

Paper long abstract:

The past years critical border scholars within geography and anthropology have explored the role of temporality in the production of borders. Studies often have focused on external border sites where the "temporalities of control" produce effects such as waiting, immobility, uncertainty. In this paper, my point of departure is somewhat different. I endeavor to explore the temporality of borders from the vantage point of what Allison Mountz (2011) has called an "unconventional border site". This border site is the new legal construct of "the Ausbildungsduldung" in Germany. As part of the Integration Act of 2016, this regulation foresees a five-year suspension of deportation for declined asylum seekers starting vocational training. I suggest that investigating the temporalities of this particular border site might contribute to deepening the understanding of the temporalities of borders. The Ausbildungsduldung is closely associated with the future. Whereas scholars have focused on "temporal borders", such as deadlines and time limits and the different tempos of the border, I pay attention to the politics of the future of the border. I base my analysis on eight months of ethnographic fieldwork amongst irregular migrants in Hamburg in 2017 and 2018.

Paper short abstract:

Based on field research in a carpentry training center for former refugees and migrants in Brussels, the paper explores the damaging forces of having one's time wasted by zooming in on one life history.

Paper long abstract:

Through recounting the life story of the fifty-five-year-old Cise, I will argue that rather than providing Cise with tools that would help him to move forward in his life, the long-life learning program was generating exactly the opposite: after all the efforts in hoping for something better to come, Cise found himself again stuck in a 'Waiting Room' (Jovanovic 2016) that was continuously produced alongside the furniture we made. By exploring how waiting patiently was taught and encouraged within the training, I will argue that the course mirrors a larger structure of bureaucratic strategies that manipulates people's time in order to transform them into 'patients of the state' (Auyero 2012). Despite the endurance Cise showed in countering the circumstances and making himself a life, little by little, the persistent feeling of not moving anywhere lead not only to an inability to move forward but ultimately made him 'sick at heart'.

Cise's increasing distress in the aftermath of the training does not only call for the necessity of continuity and long term engagement in anthropological research but also calls for deeper insights into the damaging forces of feeling stuck in time.

Paper short abstract:

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, the paper explores the spatiotemporal practices of former officers of the Yugoslav People's Army and their families who live in “collective centres”. It focuses on the categories of hope and home in situations of being “distimed” and “displaced”.

Paper long abstract:

The (post)-Jugoslav’s wars have caused forced and irregular migration

and numerous displacements between former republics of Yugoslavia.

Among those, who had or were forced to move were also officers of the

Yugoslav People's Army (JNA) and their families. Many of them came to

Serbia in the 1990s, however, they continue to “be spatially stuck”

and “out of time” long after the wars have ended.

Together with their families, they now live in the so-called

“collective centres” (i.e., ex-military buildings, barracks, abandoned

surgeries, laundry and drying rooms, military prisons, former

dormitories, shops or warehouses). Thus, I am interested in how do

people make home and seek future, while being “distimed” and

“displaced”. Former officers of JNA and their families are stuck

between (and betwixt) state recognition and social oblivion; hence,

hope (or its lacking), the experiences of time and place and their

social and cultural organization become an important element in

anthropological problematisations. On the one hand, for some former

officers, the uncertain present-day and harsh living conditions, makes

the past appear to be a "safety net", while the future remains

unknown, hopeless and deprived from meaning. But for others, hope is a

vehicle for muddling through, and the ways it is experienced and used

in future-oriented practices reveal the unspoken fears and traumas of

being “stuck” and “out of time”.

Paper short abstract:

Migration studies tended to emphasize the transition between places. The current paper would combine the transition of holy places and holy times, through the case of Eritreans and the Ethiopian Church in Israel - and how Sabbath became their main worship day.

Paper long abstract:

The current paper contributes to the anthropological research on migration and religious changes by considering the effect of holy time and holy place, based on ethnography I conducted during the years 2014-2018 at the Ethiopian Church and among Eritrean and Ethiopian Christians in Israel.

At the heart of the transformation process is the tension between the services of religious institution and the needs of religious immigrants' community, i.e, the Ethiopian Church that has a persistent presence in the Christian Holy Land (today Israel and Palestine), and the extensive migration from Eritrea to Israel since 2005. These Eritrean immigrants are integrated into the Israeli labor market but due to their poor salaries they required to work many hours and so had little to religious activity.

This creation of a shared religious community for Ethiopians and Eritreans, despite the long-standing confrontation between the two countries, brought to a dramatic religious change: adaptation of the religious calendar of the Ethiopians and Eritreans to fit the Israeli working week - which based on the Jewish calendar and set Shabbat as the main day of rest.

Therefore, I will claim that the desynchronization of working time and religious time can cause to a change in the latter, and that this process may be followed by emphasizing other religious elements, in this case the holy place.

Paper short abstract:

Migration does not by itself connote precarity, while resettlement may not result in stability. This paper aims at analyzing multiple perspectives of Filipino domestic workers in Hong Kong to understand migration and stillness.

Paper long abstract:

Filipino domestic workers use "searching for greener pastures" to explain why they are continuously "on the move" — job hopping, moving to different countries, or finding new partners. They explain: "Not everyone has the luck to find their greener pastures," to highlight the fruitlessness of their migration. They then laughed together and moved on.

Transnational labor migration is often considered an act of sacrifice — the migrants endure homesickness and demanding working conditions for their loved ones. Such migration is, therefore, a transitional and suspended period in lives. Based on my ethnographic research with Filipino domestic workers in Hong Kong, I found that, while migrants do come and go, many of them also stayed for decades. From the perspective of these veterans, Hong Kong is their city. They have plenty of strategies to cope with their circumscribed lives to build a pleasant enough lifestyle. Even for "newbies" who are in the city for much shorter times, uncertainty and precarity are not necessarily the feelings they have. They live every day as normal and stable as other residents of the city do. Like the conversation regarding "greener pastures" showed, I argue that the goal of migrant domestic workers is not finding the greener pastures, but preserving the opportunity to keep searching, adventure, and stay on the move. Migration does not by itself connote precarity, while resettlement may not result in stability. This paper aims at analyzing these multiple and sometimes contradictory perspectives in understanding migration and stillness.