Table Of ContentWaiting and the Temporalities of
Irregular Migration
This edited volume approaches waiting both as a social phenomenon that
proliferates in irregularised forms of migration and as an analytical per-
spective on migration processes and practices.
Waiting as an analytical perspective offers new insights into the complex
and shifting nature of processes of bordering, belonging, state power, exclu-
sion and inclusion, and social relations in irregular migration. The chapters
in this book address legal, bureaucratic, ethical, gendered, and affective
dimensions of time and migration. A key concern is to develop more the-
oretically robust approaches to waiting in migration as constituted in and
through multiple and relational temporalities. The chapters highlight how
waiting is configured in specific legal, material, and socio-cultural situa-
tions, as well as how migrants encounter, incorporate, and resist temporal
structures.
This collection includes ethnographic and other empirically based mate-
rial, as well as theorizing that cross-cut disciplinary boundaries. It will be
relevant to scholars from anthropology and sociology, and others interested
in temporalities, migration, borders, and power.
Christine M. Jacobsen is a Professor of Social Anthropology and the Direc-
tor of the Centre for Women’s and Gender Research (SKOK) at the Univer-
sity of Bergen, Norway.
Marry-Anne Karlsen is a Researcher in the Centre for Women’s and Gender
Research (SKOK) at the University of Bergen, Norway, and heads IMER
Bergen (International Migration and Ethnic Relations research unit).
Shahram Khosravi is Professor of Social Anthropology at Stockholm
University, Sweden.
Waiting and the Temporalities of
Irregular Migration
Edited by
Christine M. Jacobsen,
Marry-Anne Karlsen and
Shahram Khosravi
LONDON AND NEW YORK
First published 2021
by Routledge
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©2021 selection and editorial matter, Christine M. Jacobsen, Marry-
Anne Karlsen and Shahram Khosravi; individual chapters, the
contributors
The right of Christine M. Jacobsen, Marry-Anne Karlsen and
Shahram Khosravi to be identified as the authors of the editorial
material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Jacobsen, Christine M., 1971– editor. | Karlsen, Marry-
Anne, editor. | Khosravi, Shahram, editor.
Title: Waiting and the temporalities of irregular migration /
[edited by] Christine M. Jacobsen, Marry-Anne Karlsen and
Shahram Khosravi.
Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2020. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020026545 (print) | LCCN 2020026546 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780367368470 (hardback) | ISBN 9780429351730 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Emigration and immigration—Social aspects. |
Illegal aliens—Social conditions. | Waiting (Philosophy) | Time.
Classification: LCC JV6225 .W35 2020 (print) |
LCC JV6225 (ebook) | DDC 304.8—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020026545
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020026546
ISBN: 978-0-367-36847-0 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-35173-0 (ebk)
Typeset in Times New Roman
by codeMantra
Contents
List of contributors vii
Acknowledgements xi
1 Introduction: unpacking the temporalities of irregular migration 1
CHRISTINE M. JACOBSEN AND MARRY-ANNE KARLSEN
PART I
The multiple tempos of waiting 21
2 The violence of accelerated time: waiting and hasting during
‘the long summer of migration’ in Greece 23
KATERINA ROZAKOU
3 ‘They said wait, wait – and I waited’: the power chronographies
of waiting for asylum in Marseille, France 40
CHRISTINE M. JACOBSEN
4 Filling the apps: the smartphone, time and the refugee 57
THOMAS HYLLAND ERIKSEN
PART II
The social relations of waiting 73
5 Mo’s challenge. Waiting and the question of methodological
nationalism 75
KARI ANNE DRANGSLAND
vi Contents
6 Migration control, temporal irregularity and waiting:
undocumented Zimbabwean migrants’ experiences of
deportability in South Africa 96
JOHANNES MACHINYA
7 Waiting out the condition of illegality in Norway 113
MARRY-ANNE KARLSEN
8 ‘Go fund me’: LGBTI asylum seekers in Kakuma
Refugee Camp, Kenya 131
B CAMMINGA
PART III
Legal temporalities and waiting 149
9 The truth of the body as controversial evidence: an investigation
into age assessments of migrant minors in France 151
SANDRINE MUSSO
10 An end to asylum? Temporary protection and the erosion of
refugee status 170
JESSICA SCHULTZ
11 ‘Doin’ hard time on planet earth’: migrant detainability,
disciplinary power and the disposability of life 186
NICHOLAS DE GENOVA
12 Afterword: waiting, a state of consciousness 202
SHAHRAM KHOSRAVI
Index 209
Contributors
B Camminga is a postdoctoral fellow at the African Centre for Migration
and Society, Wits University, South Africa, and the co-convenor of the
African LGBTQI+ Migration Research Network (ALMN). Their work
considers the interrelationship between the conceptual journeying of the
term ‘transgender’ from the Global North and the physical embodied
journeying of transgender asylum seekers from the African continent.
Their first monograph Transgender Refugees & the Imagined South Africa
(Palgrave 2019) received honourable mention in the Ruth Benedict Prize
for Queer Anthropology from the American Anthropology Association
and the CLAGS: Sylvia Rivera Award in Transgender Studies. The book
Beyond the Mountain: Queer Life in Africa’s ‘Gay Capital’ (Unisa Press,
2020), co-edited with Dr Zethu Matebeni, explores the conflicting itera-
tions of race, sex, gender and sexuality that mark Cape Town.
Nicholas De Genova is a professor and chair of the Department of Compar-
ative Cultural Studies at the University of Houston. He held teaching
appointments in urban and political geography at King’s College Lon-
don, and in anthropology at Stanford, Columbia and Goldsmiths/Uni-
versity of London, as well as visiting professorships or research positions
at the Universities of Warwick, Bern, Amsterdam and Chicago. He is the
author of Working the Boundaries: Race, Space, and ‘Illegality’ in Mex-
ican Chicago (2005), co-author of Latino Crossings: Mexicans, Puerto
Ricans, and the Politics of Race and Citizenship (2003), editor of Racial
Transformations: Latinos and Asians Remaking the United States (2006),
co-editor of The Deportation Regime: Sovereignty, Space, and the Free-
dom of Movement (2010), editor of The Borders of ‘Europe’: Autonomy of
Migration, Tactics of Bordering (2017) and co-editor of Roma Migrants in
the European Union: Un/Free Mobility (2019). For more information see:
www-nicholasdegenova.com.
Kari Anne Drangsland is a PhD candidate at the Centre for Women’s and
Gender Research (SKOK) at the University of Bergen (UiB). Her PhD
project is part of the international research project Waiting for an Uncer-
tain Future: The Temporalities of Irregular Migration, where she works
viii Contributors
with temporalities related to irregular migration in Hamburg, Germany.
Drangsland graduated as a human geographer from UiB in 2007. For the
past 13 years, she has worked as a researcher, consultant and university
lecturer within the field of migration, planning and urban studies. Her
professional career has been guided by a profound interest in matters of
migration, bordering and spatial planning. Working with such topics, she
has initiated and co-produced several projects in the field of art, design
and architecture, focusing on new forms of research dissemination.
Thomas Hylland Eriksen is a professor of social anthropology at the Uni-
versity of Oslo. He has published textbooks, essays, polemical books and
monographs, including Small Places, Large Issues (2014/1995), Ethnicity
and Nationalism (2010/1993) and Overheating: An Anthropology of Accel-
erated Change (2016). He is currently involved in research on the coro-
navirus, on small scale and globalisation, the smartphone and waiting.
His most recent books in English are Boomtown: Runaway Globalisa-
tion on the Queensland Coast (2018), The Mauritian Paradox (co-edited
with Ramola Ramtohul, 2018) and Ethnic Groups and Boundaries Today
(co-edited with Marek Jakoubek, 2019). For more information see: http://
hyllanderiksen.net.
Christine M. Jacobsen is a professor of social anthropology and the di-
rector of the Centre for Women’s and Gender Research (SKOK) at the
University of Bergen, and has been a visiting fellow at Centre Norbert
Elias, Marseille, and the Gino Germani Institute, Buenos Aires, and in-
ternational fellow at Institut Convergences Migrations, Paris. Jacobsen
currently heads the international research project Waiting for an Uncer-
tain Future: The Temporalities of Irregular Migration and a WP in the
EU-funded project The Right to International Protection: A Pendulum be-
tween Globalization and Nativization? She works ethnographically in Nor-
way and France, and has published on topics such as migration, Islam in
Europe, secularism, feminism, multiculturalism, sex work and irregular
migration, including the edited volume Eksepsjonell velferd? Irregulære
migranter i det norske velferdssamfunnet (Exceptional Welfare: Irregular
Migrants in the Norwegian Welfare State, Gyldendal 2015).
Marry-Anne Karlsen is a researcher at the Centre for Women’s and Gender
Research (SKOK) at the University of Bergen and was a postdoctoral fel-
low in the international research project Waiting for an Uncertain Future:
The Temporalities of Irregular Migration. Karlsen heads IMER Bergen
(International Migration and Ethnic Relations research unit). She has
a background in both human geography and social anthropology. Her
research interests include the intersection between migration control and
welfare policy, the local reception of asylum seekers and refugees, and the
role of time and gender in migration processes and governance. She has
conducted extensive ethnographic fieldwork among irregular migrants in
Contributors ix
Norway, and her current book project Precarious Inclusion. Migration
Control and Access to Welfare (Routledge, forthcoming) explores the en-
counter between service providers and irregular migrants.
Shahram Khosravi is a professor of social anthropology at Stockholm Uni-
versity. Khosravi is the author of the books: Young and Defiant in Tehran
(University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), The Illegal Traveler: An Auto-
ethnography of Borders (Palgrave, 2010), Precarious Lives: Waiting and
Hope in Iran (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017) and After Depor-
tation: Ethnographic Perspectives (Palgrave, 2017, edited volume). He has
been an active writer in international press and has also written fiction.
Currently he is working on an art book on waiting.
Johannes Machinya is a mellon postdoctoral fellow co-hosted by the Wits
Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER) at the University
of the Witwatersrand and the African Studies Center (ASC) at the Uni-
versity of Michigan. Currently he is working on Historical and Contempo-
rary Expressions of Populism in Africa and Beyond. He was also a mellon
doctoral fellow at the Wits History Workshop’s Local Histories and Pres-
ent Realities’ research programme. He is a sociologist whose interests
are in transnational migration, migration control, migration and politics,
and migration and labour.
Sandrine Musso is an assistant professor in social and medical anthropology
in the Department of Anthropology of Aix-Marseille University and a
senior researcher at the Centre Norbert Elias in Marseille. Her research
focuses on migration and health, on postcolonial minorities and AIDS in
France. She has published several articles and book chapters on these sub-
jects. She is a member of the National Council of AIDS (Conseil National
du Sida) that delivers opinions and recommendations on the issues that
society faces as a result of these epidemics. Musso is currently engaged
in several international research projects related to migration, notably
Waiting for an Uncertain Future: The Temporalities of Irregular Migration
and Sexual Humanitarianism: Migration, Sex Work and Trafficking.
Katerina Rozakou is an assistant professor in social anthropology at the De-
partment of Social Anthropology of Panteion University in Athens. Her
research focuses on the state, irregular migration, bureaucracy, humani-
tarianism, volunteerism and solidarity. She has worked as a postdoctoral
researcher at the University of Amsterdam and Princeton University, and
she has held research positions at the University of Crete and the Univer-
sity of the Aegean. Her first book project Out of ‘love’ and ‘solidarity’: Vol-
untary Work with Refugees in Early 20th Century Athens (in Greek, 2018)
examines the construction of the volunteer as a moral Greek and Euro-
pean citizen. The book explores the relationships between refugees and
residents of Greece who tried not only to help them but to incorporate
