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Accepted Paper:
Contingency conveniences: Anticipation as a temporal practice of SEF inspectors at the Portuguese airport border
Mafalda Carapeto
(Instituto Superior de Ciências Sociais e Políticas da Universidade de Lisboa)
I aim analyze, through the lens of temporality, how anticipation can be understood as a temporal practice when inspectors of SEF are controlling the foreign citizens at the Portuguese airport border. The consequence is the production of contingency conveniences, meaning different forms of access.
Paper Abstract:
This communication is about state's borders and its government. It aims to reflect on how, in contemporary times, the Portuguese state, through the practices of its inspectors, governs the European external border and the mobility of the travelers across it. It follows my ethnographic fieldwork, carried out at an airport in Portugal, where from June 2021 to April 2022, I followed the daily lives of the Portuguese Immigration and Borders Service (Serviço de Estrangeiros e Fronteiras - SEF) inspectors in the various groups, shifts and functions. The intention is to analyze, through the lens of temporality, how anticipation can be doubly understood as a temporal practice when controlling the foreign citizens at the Portuguese airport border: on the one hand, it is produced through contingency conveniences of logistical, organizational, and personal nature, and on the other, produces different access speeds to the national territory. While mobilizing these two temporal dimensions, the inspectors reorganized spatial and situational frameworks, complicating ideas of action and non-action in their encounter with the travelers. While the rules inspectors enforce are vague, the situations in which they apply it are for most of the time unstable and unpredictable as there are different organization levels to depend on: they own personal agenda, the institution itself, and the airport dynamics.