Collection
Claiming time: refugees and asylum seekers dealing with the production of different temporal regimes by politics of asylum and reception
This Special Issue investigates how refugees and asylum seekers deal with the politics of time (Low 2003) that run within asylum policies, including the different production of temporal regimes along diverse types of migrant centres. By bringing together papers and case studies that map the trajectories of time undertaken by individuals in their daily routines and life experiences, we attempt to set up a reflection on the notion of a ‘landscape of time’ (Andersson 2014). If, on the one hand, the interactions between spatial confinement and temporality of immigration controls realise multiple forms of (im)mobility of refugees and asylum seekers; on the other hand, the practices of routinisation, acceleration, stasis and waiting – exercised by individuals both inside and outside the centres and across the borders – can also be read as a tactic aimed at claiming time; a time which is differently experienced, according to the current system of social and civil stratification.
Therefore, moving within these premises, the Special Issue focuses on how the ‘chronopolitics’ of the asylum and reception system affect daily lives and biographical trajectories of refugees and asylum seekers, both during their experience of migration and within the so called ‘reception system’. In particular, it deepens existing knowledge on:
- biographical transitions and their (re)significations within temporal constraints of (im)mobility;
- management of time for satisfaction of basic essential daily needs and the relationship between productive and reproductive work within different (im)mobility and temporal regimes;
- relationships between temporal, biographical, existential and geographic (im)mobility;
- temporal interstices, tactics and practices of resistance within (im)mobility;
- rhythm analysis: Space, time and everyday life of refugees and asylum seekers inside and outside the reception system.
Editors
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Francesco Della Puppa
Francesco Della Puppa is Associate Professor in Sociology at the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage of Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. PhD in Social Sciences at the University of Padua, he carries out teaching and research activities on issues relating to international migration, migrant families and family reunification, transformations of masculinity in migration, migrant labour and racial discrimination, refugees and asylum seekers, digital labour. He likes to explore the possibilities that the language of comics and graphic novels offer to social sciences.
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Giuliana Sanò
Giuliana Sanò is a Social Anthropologist and Assistant Professor at the University of Messina. She has collaborated with several national and international universities and research institutes. She has conducted ethnographic research in Sicily, Calabria, Trentino and Veneto. Her main research interests include international migration, migrant labour, the reception system for refugees and asylum seekers, the internal mobility of migrants, and social transformations in urban and rural areas. She is the author of the book Fabbriche di plastica. Il lavoro nell'agricoltura industriale: a study dedicated to agricultural labour in Sicily.
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Giulia Storato
Giulia Storato has a PhD in Social Sciences. Currently, she is postdoctoral research fellow at the Department of Cultures, Politics and Society at the University of Turin. She is also teaching at the University of Padova. In past years, she collaborated with Cà Foscari University of Venice and Franco Demarchi Foundation in Trento in research projects with refugees and asylum seekers living both inside and outside the reception system, focusing in particular on their working, housing and mobility trajectories.
