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Accepted Paper:
Practicing timespaces in conditions of insecurity
Ilektra Kyriazidou
(Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece)
The paper examines the various ways timespaces are recreated in conditions of insecurity marked by austerity regimes and policies of hostile borders. It focuses on the participations of locals and refugees in collective actions as forms of spatiotemporalizing practices.
Paper Abstract:
The paper follows date entries of a fieldwork diary, narratives about daily life in the field, written during past research on the effects of austerity in a low-income neighbourhood in Thessaloniki, Greece (2015-2016). It describes a historical moment marked by two realities, the blocking of the passage of asylum seekers and the set-back of anti-austerity politics. A historical moment saturated by temporal insecurity and the defeat of hope, as people felt stuck under austerity regimes and hostile borders. The focus is on the common collective actions of locals and newcomers and the participation of the ethnographer in these actions. This form of mutual engagement that concerns a politics of the present, attending to and changing the everyday, depicts embodiments and negotiations of temporal structures and a life that goes on in a somehow hopeful way. Exploring the qualities and complexities of this sense of hope as a collectively recreated ‘timespace of the future’ (Bryant and Knight, 2019), hope emerges as an affective aspect of everyday living that is placed in the present.