Waiting as analytical perspective provides new insight
Researchers from UiB’s WAIT project have published a new book about waiting as both a social phenomenon in migration and as an analytical perspective on migration processes.
Main content
WAIT – Waiting for an uncertain future: the temporalities of irregular migration is a research project at the Centre for Women’s and Gender Research (SKOK) that lasted from 2016 to 2020. The project used theories of temporalities and waiting as tools for producing new and critical insights into the cultural conditions for and implications of migration. The new book is a result of the work on this project.
A need for new critical perspectives
In the book, Waiting and the Temporalities of Irregular Migration, the authors claim that waiting as an analytical perspective provides new insight into the complex and shifting nature of processes of bordering, belonging, state power, exclusion and inclusion, and social relations in irregular migration. The chapters in the book address legal, bureaucratic, ethical, gendered, and affective dimensions of time and migration.
– New critical perspectives are needed in order to challenge the disastrous consequences of the ways in which migration is currently governed in Europe and beyond, says Christine M. Jacobsen, WAIT’s project leader and one of the editors and authors of the book.
– The focus on temporality and waiting opens up a space for such critical engagement, providing fresh insights into the workings of power.
Relevant in the context of the global pandemic
The book includes ethnographic and other empirically based material, as well as theorizing that cross-cut disciplinary boundaries, and it is relevant for scholars from anthropology and sociology, and others interested in temporalities, migration, borders, and power.
– I hope the book, and the way it develops ‘waiting’ as an analytical perspective, will inspire thinking about the temporal dimension of power and inequality beyond the study of irregular migration, says Jacobsen.
– It is hugely relevant, among other things, to think about waiting and uncertain futures in the context of the current global pandemic.
A taste of the book during WAIT's closing conference
During WAIT’s closing conference 1 and 2 October, Waiting for uncertain futures: Time and migration, several of the authors introduced their book chapters in a video that was shown to all of the conference attendees. See the video here:
Presentation of chapters from the book "Waiting and the Temporalities of Irregular Migration."
Researchers from Greece, Norway, South Africa, France and the US present their chapters in this video.
The WAIT project
- WAIT was led by professor and head of department at SKOK, Christine M. Jacobsen. PhD candidate Kari Anne Drangsland, researcher Marry-Anne Karlsen and professor Randi Gressgård at SKOK were also involved in the project.
- The project was financed by the Research Council of Norway as part of the SAMKUL programme – Research Programme on the Cultural Conditions Underlying Social Change.
- Read more about WAIT on the project's website.
Waiting and the Temporalities of Irregular Migration
- Waiting and the Temporalities of Irregular Migration was recently published as an e-book on the publisher’s website, where it is openly available for download.
- The editors of the book, who have also contributed with chapters, are researchers connected to the SKOK’s WAIT project: Christine M. Jacobsen, Marry-Anne Karlsen, researcher at SKOK and Shahram Khosravi, professor at Stockholm University.
- Among the other contributors to the book are researchers at SKOK and the Faculty of Law at UiB, University of Oslo, University of Witwatersrand in South Africa, University of Houston in the US, Centre Norbert Elias in France, and Panteion University in Greece.
Book presentation at SOAS, University of London
On 28 October, Jacobsen held a lecture at SOAS where she presented the book and her own chapter: They said wait, wait – and I waited' - The power chronographies of waiting for asylum in Marseille, France.
