Paper short abstract:

Examining a British post-war child migration project, this paper reflects on complex, conflicting, and co-existing temporalities within projects of social engineering, as well as their long-lasting political repercussions.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines a British child migration project, which sent and resettled select, white children from the UK to colonial Southern Rhodesia between 1946 and 1962, as an example for analyzing diverse and complex temporalities intertwined in project forms. Characterized by future-oriented direction and movement, social projects are launched forward in time in order to achieve worthy objectives of social betterment. Project temporality also includes an idea of a compressed timespan: once its objective is reached, the project makes itself unnecessary and dissolves. In the Rhodesia Fairbridge migration scheme, the children were emigrated with the intention that their movement would enable a better future for themselves as well as secure the continuity and improvement of the racially segregated colonial regime. Drawing on my ethnographic research, this paper aims to contribute to thinking about temporal logics of social projects. I focus on three temporal scales or regimes that intertwine within the child migration project. I first consider a rupture with the past and the rationale of futurity as indicative of the temporal logic of projects and planning. Second, I discuss Imperial inifinity as the political temporality, which framed and rationalized this migration project. Third, I consider the sense and experience of time of the migrant child placed in an educational institution, highlighting its spatiotemporal standstill and clockwork discipline. Through this case, the paper reflects on conflicting, antagonistic, and co-existing temporalities within projects of social engineering and governing, as well as their long-lasting political repercussions.