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Accepted Paper:

Temporalities of migrants' civic mobilization  
Anna Horolets (University of Warsaw)

Paper short abstract:

The paper explores how the Polish female migrants' civic engagement through a Chicago based advocacy organization are shaped by the different temporalities and how it is inscribed in the conflicting regimes of migrant integration.

Paper long abstract:

In the proposed paper, I approach migrants' civic mobilization from the perspective of leisure studies. Being a multifaceted and debatable concept, leisure can be understood also as a right (e.g. Veal 2015). Contemporary economic migrants, especially the undocumented ones, experience difficulties in pursuing their labor rights, including the "right to leisure". Frequently migrants are also not "at leisure" to mobilize and openly demand the improvement of their situation.

The paper is based on the material gathered during the ethnographic fieldwork in Chicago, where I came across a labor rights' advocacy organization that directly sought to engage immigrants working in domestic sector. Using the organization's offer, migrants formed new networks that opened opportunities for their political engagement. I will present a case study of the Polish female migrants who worked as cleaners and carers and participated in the activities of the organization.

In this paper, I will demonstrate how temporalities are crucial for civic mobilization. I will specifically focus on the relations between the engagement and the different temporalities that research participants were entangled in: migrants' life cycle; their work and leisure cycle; the organization rhythms; and the U.S. political life dynamics. I will also demonstrate how the engagement with the organization is linked to the migrants' transnational identities, and how their lived experience of civic engagement is both dependant on and resistant to the conflicting regimes of migrant integration.

Panel P074
Migration and Transnational Social Networks in Europe and the Americas [ANTHROMOB]
  Session 1 Wednesday 22 July, 2020, -