The power-chronographies of waiting for asylum in Marseille, France

Christine M. Jacobsen

In both research and public debate, there has been a proliferation of representations of refugees, asylum seekers and irregular migrants waiting, in refugee camps, asylum reception and detention centres, and at border crossings. This paper examines how the waiting time of undocumented migrants and asylum seekers in Marseille is produced, managed and lived at the intersection of a range of social institutions and differences. I am particularly interested in how migrants ‘recalibrate’ or synchronise their body clocks, their sense of future or the present, to the tempo, duration and directionality of laws, built environments, services and technologies – or ‘temporal architectures.’ While the request to recalibrate by waiting is ubiquitous for undocumented migrants and asylum seekers, such waiting is configured in a broader regime of accelerated migration control which produces gaps and time–spaces of waiting during which protection from deportation is weak and access to welfare and healthcare is extremely limited. Paying attention to multiple and relational temporalities, the analysis demonstrates how temporalities related to reproduction, health and labour intersect with, and are recalibrated to, the temporalities of the state and its management of migration.

Christine M. Jacobsen is a Professor of Social Anthropology and the Director of the Centre for Women's and Gender Research at the University of Bergen. Jacobsen currently heads the research project Waiting for an uncertain future: the temporalities of irregular migration and a WP in the EU-funded project The right to International Protection: A Pendulum between Globalization and Nativization? . She works ethnographically in Norway and France, and has published on topics such as migration, Islam in Europe, secularism, feminism, multiculturalism, sex work, and irregular migration, including the forthcoming edited volume Waiting and the Temporalities of Irregular migration .

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