Paper short abstract:

This paper engages with the temporalities of migration from the perspective of the everyday ways in which mothers in the British asylum system carve out strategies to continue living and making life, navigating the ordinary rhythms of caring and the coercive temporalities of state-corporate neglect.

Paper long abstract:

Time organizes people’s experiences of navigating the British asylum process, but it also folds, as a deeply coercive force, into the intimate textures of everyday life and life-making. Drawing on fourteen months of fieldwork conducted with mothers living in asylum accommodation in London, this paper sheds light on how time is built into everyday experiences of mothering and caring, opening ways to rethink the place of time within the governing assemblages of the asylum regime and the state-corporate's power in impacting people's ability to make and sustain life. How might we engage with the temporalities of migration from the perspective of the everyday ways in which mothers carve out strategies to continue living and making life? This paper builds on a temporal gaze into tensions that seam together the rhythms of domestic intimacy and the temporal orderings of daily life in asylum accommodation to argue how mothers attempt to stitch together, through the labours of caring, the violent disjunctures that take place between the state-corporate practices of deprivation and neglect and their own projects of building homes and families. Challenging narratives that assume ‘dispossession’ or ‘stand by’ as fixed signifiers of how time is imposed on and lived by migrants, this paper points instead to the time of those mothering in asylum accommodation as a more complex, ongoing, co-constituted project of life-making, concluding that the temporalities and rhythms of seeking asylum are always negotiated and resisted, as mothers find new modes of sustaining life through other rhythms.