Closing conference

Waiting for uncertain futures: Time and migration

As the WAIT project at the Centre for Women's and Gender Research (SKOK) is in its final year, we marked the end of the project with a digital closing conference.

The WAIT project uses theories of temporality and the concept of 'waitinghood' as tools for producing new and critical insights into the cultural conditions and implications of migration.

Photo:

Flickr Creative Commons

Main content

WAIT - Waiting for an uncertain future: the temporalities of irregular migration

The WAIT project has focused on the temporal aspects of migration and investigated how temporal structures related to irregular migration are shaped by legal regimes, cultural norms and power relationships, and how they shape subjective experiences and life projects. The project adds a temporal perspective to dominant spatial approaches in migration studies, and advances theories of temporality in the humanities and social sciences. Waiting has been scrutinized ethnographically in four European migration-hubs: Oslo, Stockholm, Marseille, and Hamburg, and analytically through targeted theoretical tasks. Waiting as an analytical perspective offers new insights into the complex and shifting nature of processes of bordering, belonging, state power, exclusion and inclusion, and social relations in irregular migration.

At the closing conference 1 and 2 October, core researchers and network partners presented their research. Speakers included: Bridget Anderson , Nicholas De Genova , Kari Anne Klovholt Drangsland, Thomas Hylland Eriksen , Christine Jacobsen, Helge Jordheim , Marry-Anne Karlsen , Shahram Khosravi, Odin Lysaker, Sandrine Musso , Jessica Schultz , Jo Vearey, Sarah Willen, Katerina Rozakou, Johannes Machinya and Frode Eick.

Programme

Due to the on-going Covid-19 pandemic, the conference was held on Zoom.

Recording of the sessions can be found below each program post:

Thursday October 1

14.30-16.00 CET:

Welcome and presentation of the WAIT project by Christine M. Jacobsen

Presentations of project work by Marry-Anne Karlsen, Kari Anne Drangsland, Christine M. Jacobsen and Shahram Khosravi (text read by Christine M. Jacobsen)

WAIT conference plenary session - audio only

Producer:

The WAIT project

Short presentations of chapters in the WAIT book by Katerina Rozakou, Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Johannes Machinya, Sandrine Musso, Jessica Schultz and Nicholas De Genova.

Presentation of chapters from the book "Waiting and the Temporalities of Irregular Migration."

Producer:

Anders Rubing

WAIT-prosjektet

16.00-16.30 CET: Break

16.30–18.00 CET:

Roundtable 1) Temporality and waiting as analytical prisms in migration studies

What does the analytics of waiting contribute to understanding the legal and socio-cultural underpinnings of irregular migration? How does taking time seriously change our understanding of migration and the way we study it? How does studying migration change our understanding of time and the way we study it?

Chair: Marry-Anne Karlsen

Participants: Helge Jordheim, Thomas Hylland-Eriksen, Bridget Anderson and Christine M. Jacobsen

WAIT conference day 1 - Roundtable 1

Producer:

The WAIT project

Friday October 2

14.30–16.00 CET:

Roundtable 2) The impact of prolonged waiting on health, well-being, and dignity

How is waiting produced through laws, regulations, and bureaucratic practices? What are the consequences for migrants' rights, health, well-being, and dignity?

Chair: Jessica Schultz

Participants: Sarah Willen, Odin Lysaker, Jo Veary and Frode Eick.

WAIT conference day 2 - Roundtable 2

Producer:

The WAIT project

16.00–16.30 CET: Break

16.30-18.00 CET:

Film screening: Waiting by Shahram Khosravi and Dagmawi Yimer

Waiting - Shahram Khosravi & Dagmawi Yimer

Producer:

PARSE

Roundtable 3) The aesthetics, ethics and politics of knowledge production and dissemination

How can we produce and disseminate knowledge on irregular migration in ways that do not cause harm or perpetuate violent and exclusionary structures? Which challenges have we met in the WAIT project?

Chair: Christine M. Jacobsen

Participants: Nicholas de Genova, Kari Anne Klovholt Drangsland and Dagmawi Yimer

WAIT conference day 2 - Roundtable 3

Producer:

The WAIT project

Conference

01.10.2020 - 14.30–02.10.2020 - 18.00

Zoom

Kamilla Stølen

Registration deadline

30.09.2020 - 15.00

Add to calendar

The WAIT project

Project period: 2016-2020

Funded by: The Research Council of Norway - Cultural Conditions Underlying Social Change (SAMKUL)

The SAMKUL-programme funds research about the cultural prerequisites underlying today's society and societal development.

Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Prosjekt WAIT

Professor Thomas Hylland Eriksen explains the WAIT project.

Producer:

SKOK

Waiting at St. Charles train station, Marseille.

Photo:

Christine Jacobsen

The WAIT project has focused on the temporal aspect of migration.

Photo:

Tomas Salem

Tilknyttet innhold

WAIT

The WAIT project uses theories of temporality and the concept of 'waitinghood' as tools for producing new and critical insights into the cultural conditions and implications of migration.

Shahram Khosravi, On Pandemic and Borders, Four Rooms

Shahram Khosravi on the pandemic and borders

In April, WAIT researcher Shahram Khosravi was interviewed about the pandemic and borders as part of a series of conversations called Four Rooms.

Waiting for uncertain futures in pandemic times

Reflections from researchers at the WAIT project on the complexity of waiting in pandemic times.

Closed door with signs stating "We are closed" and "Covid-19"

How is the Covid-19 pandemic affecting migrants with precarious legal status?

In this blog post, four researchers connected to the WAIT project reflect on how the Covid-19 pandemic is affecting migrants with precarious legal status in Europe.

Queue number held up towards screen with time tables

Kari Anne Drangsland published in the journal Time and Society

Ph.D candidate Kari Anne Drangsland has been published in acclaimed journal Time and Society.

WAIT researcher Kari Anne Drangsland

PhD candidate Kari Anne Drangsland has contributed to the WAIT project with ethnographic field research in Hamburg, Germany.

WAIT researcher Odin Lysaker

Professor Odin Lysaker is one of the core researchers in the WAIT group.

Guest researcher Knut Graw

Knut Graw (University of Leuven) has been a guest researcher at Centre for Women's and Gender Research this spring.

WAIT's midway conference

On February 6-9, 2019, the researchers on the WAIT project gathered in Athens.

Waiting around? On temporal irregularity and im/mobility among Afghans within Europe

Read the newest blog entry from PhD candidate Halvar A. Kjærre on his research amongst Afghans in Europe.

Migration researchers in the field

"Meeting the migrants have made a big impression on me, but as an anthropologist it is also through these meetings that I do my best thinking."

Falling out of time

What are the moral consequences of irregular migrants’ prolonged waiting?

Places of silence at the edge of comfort

Read Kari Anne Drangsland's reflections on how silence is telling of the normative structures that shape irregular migrants' experience of waiting.

Tramspotting in Oslo

In the latest blog entry from the WAIT project, Marry-Anne Karlsen writes about how irregularized migrants' sense of waiting is produced.

Waiting in Sweden

Social anthropologist and WAIT researcher Shahram Khosravi is currently carrying out fieldwork among irregular migrants in Stockholm.

Two irregular migrants under a highway bridge in Vintimiglia

Waiting at the borders of Europe

Read the WAIT project's first dispatch from the field from social anthropologist and project leader of WAIT, Christine M. Jacobsen.

The criminalization of young men in Iran

Shahram Khosravi from Stockholm University has recently published his newest ethnographic book, Precarious Lives: Waiting and Hope in Iran.

Human geography perspectives on time

Doctoral candiate Kari Anne Drangsland is the last addition to the research stab at SKOK.

Kick-off seminar in Paris

WAIT researchers and network partners met for the first time to present, discuss and share ideas about the research that lies ahead and to kickoff the WAIT-project.

Research and critical thinking inspire students

"For this course you want to read the material and be prepared", exchange student Anna Tydén says.

WAIT project engages with architecture students

This spring, students from the Bergen School of Architecture can participate in a workshop linked to the multidisciplinary WAIT project.

Teaching current research

The new course "Gender, Migration, and Time" at the Centre for Women's and Gender Research will give students direct insight into the current research from the WAIT project.

30.03.2021