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Paper Short Abstract:

The paper draws on ethnographic research among undocumented migrants in Norway and France, and argues that conceptualizing temporality as multiple, uneven and relational contributes to strengthening analytical understandings of migration, while simultaneously avoiding chronopolitical othering.

Paper Abstract:

Recent work in the anthropology of migration has criticised a tendency to place migrants in a different temporality from non-migrants, arguing that such analysis is a denial of coevalness in Fabian’s sense. The critique of how the chronotopes of migration research function as ‘othering’ devices, echoes calls to ‘de-migranticise’ migration studies that has gained traction within the field. We sympathise with these calls to complicate the migrant/non-migrant binary and to problematise how the temporalizing frames of research may contribute to a chronopolitical othering, and thereby to reproduce racialised and (post)colonial structures of power. Utilising a shared temporal framework, for instance, ‘neo-liberal capitalism’ and its embodied effects as an analytical frame, can destabilise neat partitions between migrants and citizens. However, such an approach also risks obscuring important temporal differences. We therefore argue for an approach that does not assume, a priori, a temporal difference between ‘migrant’ and ‘citizen’, but still allows us to recognise and investigate how chronopolitics and temporal multiplicities are implicated in constructing and reinforcing difference, in governance, and in the lived experiences of differently situated people. In making this argument, we draw on anthropological and feminist perspectives that conceptualise time as multiple, uneven and relational, as well as our own ethnographic research with undocumented migrants in Norway and France within the project “Waiting for an uncertain future: the temporalities of irregular migration”.