Call for Papers RGS-IBG Annual Conference 2015, Exeter
Time to move? Exploring the temporal geographies of international migration
Liz Mavroudi, Loughborough University; Anastasia Christou, Middlesex University; Ben Page, University College London
This session wishes to focus on the ways in which geographers have engaged with notions of time in relation to international migration, mobility and diaspora. According to Griffiths et al (2013, 2), "there has been limited attention paid to the temporalities of migration". This session will attempt to address this by playing explicit attention to the impact of time on migrant lives, identities, journeys, emotions, labour, politics, socio-cultural and linguistic practices and decision-making to name but a few. We also wish to highlight how these potential changes are linked to factors such as gender, age, status and class and explore not only the perspectives of migrants themselves, and their agency and subjectivity, but also the position of states as they attempt to manage and categorise migrants. We are also interested in exploring migration and stasis - how time appears to stand still, how it is held on to, through memory and nostalgia, how it may lead to boredom and frustration because of an inability to move - and how stillness may be enforced through e.g. detention, immigration policy and status. In the process, we wish to examine how time-space can become disjunctured, fractured, and multi-scalar and how being 'on the move' is saturated with different conceptualisations of time and how it can create both opportunities and hindrances to migration journeys and experiences.
In what we envisage as a broad-ranging and inclusive session, we welcome both theoretical considerations on the temporal geographies of migration, as well as empirical case studies that critically assess the role that time plays in relation, but not limited to, the following:
•The impacts of the passing of time on migrants' lives, identities and socio-cultural and political practices and how they negotiate and manage such changes
•The times of migration: past, present and future patterns and processes of migration
•Time and P/politics in migration studies: states, institutions, NGOs, migration agents and the managing, ordering, representing and categorising of migrant time; migrant agencies, strategies to deal with the politics of time
•Generational differences, in/exclusions and tensions within and between migrant groups
•Migration ,time and memory, nostalgia, waiting/wanting to return to homes/homelands
•'Migration as a process of becoming' (Griffiths et al 2013): longitudinal migration journeys through the life course
•The specific experiences of young people, children and women: the times of childhood, adolescence, motherhood, and old age.
•Time and moving in and out of migrant 'categories'
•Cyclical, temporary, transit migration, seasonality, the rise of long-term 'temporary' migration
•Time, vulnerability, insecurity - changing statuses, changing immigration policy
•Time and dis/connectedness: the importance of differing (dis)connections
•Voluntary and involuntary stasis and immobility
•Emotions in migrant time: feeling joy, celebration, trauma
•Temporalities and materialities of migration: realities of life in movement, transit and stasis
•Rhythm time: the wandering, endless, constant, repetitive migrant; migration as moving and being.
•The sensual, visual, performative, affective times of migration
•Virtual migrant time: the impact, use and role of the internet
Please send abstracts of max 250 words to Liz Mavroudi at [log in to unmask]; Anastasia Christou at [log in to unmask] and Ben Page at [log in to unmask] by 16th February 2015
Reference:
Griffiths,G., Rogers, A. and Anderson, B. (2013) Migration, Time and Temporalities: Review and Prospect, COMPAS Research Resources Paper, March.
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