WAIT Newsletter

What we have been up to
Dear friends and followers, the WAIT-project is entering a new phase. This last year our researchers have carried out fieldwork and spent time as guest scholars at our partnered institutions. Marry-Anne Karlsen has been in Johannesburg, at the African Centre for Migration and Society at the University of Witwatersrand and Kari Anne Drangsland at the Universität Hamburg.

In January, the core research group got together in Bergen to exchange experiences from the field, and to identify central themes that have been common throughout their different sub-projects.

-Our goal at this point has been to unpack different understandings of waitinghood in irregular migration, rather than narrowing the focus, says project leader Christine M. Jacobsen. According to her, the group has concerned itself with developing a strategy for working comparatively.

-We have also felt the need to discuss the ethical aspects of our research, and the unequal power relations that structure the encounters of ethnographer and migrants in the field. Jacobsen argues that the feminist perspectives that inform the project have been useful in this regard.

This fall the work will center on analysis and dissemination. The WAIT project is part of the strategic focus on migration at the University of Bergen, and Jacobsen recently presented the project at an EU-workshop on the European asylum system. In August Thomas Hylland Eriksen will hold a key-note lecture at the Nordic Migration Research annual conference, New (Im)mobilities: Migration and Race in the Era of Authoritarianism. At the conference, WAIT will organize the workshop Il/legal time: Exploring the temporalities of irregular migration. Also in August, Sharam Khosravi will hold a key-note lecture at the biennial of the European Association of Anthropology (EASA) in Stockholm, which focuses on the themes staying, moving, settling. At EASA researchers from WAIT will convene for the panel Trapped in space, stuck in time? Exploring irregular migration, time and im/mobility.

-This shows that the problematics raised through the project elicit significant interest and attention, both nationally and internationally, says Jacobsen.

Researchers in the field

–Meeting the migrants have made a big impression, but as anthropologist it is also through these meetings that I think best, says Christine M. Jacobsen, researcher and project leader of the WAIT project. Through ethnographic research, the project examines how laws, norms and power relations structure irregular migrants' experience of time and their possibility to carry out their life projects.

WAIT

Researchers in the field

Falling out of time