Veranstaltungsprogramm

Postmigration has been framed to point to a “critical epistemology” of migration, going beyond its meaning of “after” migration. Recent research employing postmigrant perspectives uncovers the critical and transformative character of cultural practices of young descendants of migrants, namely the postmigrant generation. Scrutinizing this critical potential in relation to practices of remembering migration would provide new insights in terms of contextualizing migration experience and its temporalities. This paper traces the configurations of temporality in postmigrant narratives of family migration history. Its empirical discussion is built upon the qualitative analysis of four in-depth interviews with young women having family migration history from Turkey and living in Germany, as well as a close reading of selected autosociobiographical texts from postmigrant authors of Turkish background. Alongside postmigrant perspectives and a reflexive critical approach towards the social construction of migrant/migration, this paper refers to the notion of youth transitions and discusses youth as a liminal temporality and experience. Accordingly, this contribution will depart from the following questions: How does remembering mediate migration experience? How do the ways in which past migrations (struggles, disappointments, othering processes) are recalled function in (re)shaping senses of the present and imagining the future? Does intergenerational transfer of migration experience point to a transgression of past-present-future categorizations hinting a continuity, or rather different ways of negotiating time and temporalities as well as mobility and migration?

This contribution focusses on conflict over conditions of work and life in selected sectors strongly characterised by migration. It draws on an empirical, DFG-funded research project based on case studies in the cleaning sector and seasonal work in agriculture. At the interface between labour sociology and migration studies, we discuss the relevance the temporal dimensions of labour, migration and social reproduction and its impact on the potentially conflictual negotiation of working and living conditions. Why are certain conflicts carried out and others not? How is this shaped by the temporal dimension of migration, work and life arrangements as well as temporal rationalities of the respective sectors? We argue that the temporal dimension is crucial for understanding struggles over work-life arrangements. More in detail, we suggest that temporal rationalities of migration, labour and social policies overlap and influence (struggles over) work and life, for example through time limits on work and residence permits, social security entitlements and employment relationships. At the same time, we identify migration-specific time horizons of workers that influence how conflicts in and around work and life are perceived and dealt with by those involved. The idea of transition may be crucial: staying in the country or in the job only for a fixed period of time or until certain things are achieved. This paper aims at combining the perspective on the temporality of the governance of migration and labour with a view on the subjective experiences of time by migrant workers, and the interrelations between both levels of analysis. Finally, we focus on time related strategies like waiting, speeding up or slowing down certain processes. These aspects of individual and collective behaviour in conflict situations can be combined with other aspects such as mobility. In contrast to other contributions in the field of labour sociology, we do not only address conflict in the work-sphere, but also its interrelations with social reproduction and the (migration) biography of workers: Temporal discrepancies and interlinkages between work and life, and also between different points in time are crucial to understand, why there is a huge diversity of strategies in relation to work-related conflicts (and alleged consent/conformity) in sectors characterized by migration.

Migration studies have long been shaped by linear frameworks emphasizing unidirectional movement from origin to destination. Yet, many workers in the EU, including those we study with and about in our project VISION: Envisioning Convivial Europe, are continuously on the move. We highlight their lives of in-betweenness through critically engaging with conviviality, briefly defined as the everyday practice of living together in solidarity while negotiating categories of differences. Conviviality has been mainly advanced in Western European urban settings characterized by migration-driven diversification across intersecting dimensions such as nationality, ethnicity, religion, age, and legal status. However, much of the existing research on, and the theorization of, conviviality is aspatial, taking for granted a single locality as site for living together. This paper challenges such a sedentarist perspective by exploring “in-between space”—both geographical and social—experienced by mobile/migrant workers from western Polish towns and villages and various Romanian regions employed in Brandenburg.

Drawing on in-depth interviews and recurrent fieldwork in Brandenburg, Lubuskie region, and Romania, we explore the mobility trajectories of migrant/mobile workers integrated in the German labor market under the European “freedom of movement” framework. They are neither settled into the countries of employment nor fully rooted in their hometowns; instead, structurally speaking, they navigate liminal spaces in-between. By engaging with liminality through a convivial lens, we analyze their experiences of moving between regions, jobs, and personal aspirations, while being attentive to the convivial moments that emerge–or a lack of it–along the way and in multiple locations. Our analysis further de-essentializes nationality-based categorizations by unpacking how mobile workers who pursue, for instance, long-term settlement—whether from Poland or Romania—often share more commonalities in their experiences of spatial and temporal in-betweenness than with co-nationals engaged in more circular, daily or weekly transborder forms of mobility. By examining these workers’ multidirectional mobility patterns and experiences and applying a convivial lens to liminality across multiple locations and in-between spaces, this paper contributes to spatializing the notion of conviviality.

This paper examines temporality in family reunification procedures for refugees in Germany and France. We conceptualize refugees’ family reunification as a transitional phase. During this phase, temporality means the longer an unpredictable procedure takes it becomes ever more precarious and poses challenges for maintaining family life across borders. The paper explores how the governance of refugee family reunification creates long waiting times and affects the living conditions of refugees and their families. The temporal course of the reunification poses specific risks, as the validity of papers can expire due to long waiting periods, and family relationships are exposed to high stress levels. Facing long-lasting, unpredictable procedures and dependencies from state officials have already been emphasized as experiences of refugees during asylum procedures. During the pending stages of the reunification procedures, refugees’ life prospects are again exposed to administrative regulations and practices.

Instead of merely considering temporality and its link with precarity as inherent in refugees’ conditions as such, we ask how uncertainties are institutionally created and affect refugees’ family reunification as well as their family life. To understand how differing institutional regulations matter, our paper explores the reunification procedures for refugee families in Germany and France from a comparative perspective. In doing so, we are particularly interested in the refugees’ strategies to navigate the family reunification procedure and maintain their family lives across borders.

The paper is based on narrative interviews with refugees who applied for family reunification in Germany or France. For data evaluation, the documentary method was employed to analyse temporality in the family reunification procedure and the possible consequences for the refugee applicants and their family lives.

Key terms: Temporality, refugee family reunification, doing family, transnational families, immigration bureaucracy.

Uncertainty is widely recognized as an inherent aspect to refugee experiences, shaping both their journeys and protection seeking processes. Scholarly literature highlights how legal and bureaucratic structures create temporal uncertainties, disrupting refugees’ futures and creating protracted states of insecurity. While much of this literature frames uncertainty negatively, this paper aims to shift the focus beyond psychological modes of coping and resilience. Building on scholarship that acknowledges refugees as active agents in navigating an uncertain future, we explore the creative ways in which Ukrainian protection holders in Germany engage with their indeterminate future to mobilize their agency in shaping their present. Specifically, we investigate the mechanisms through which these processes unfold and their evolving nature over time.

Our analysis draws on a longitudinal qualitative panel study with Ukrainian protection holders in Germany, based on 50 interviews conducted across five waves (September 2022-April 2024) with ten women who fled Ukraine following the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. Unlike other refugee groups, displaced Ukrainians are granted residence and work permits under the EU Temporary Protection Directive without undergoing the asylum process. They also differ demographically, being predominantly highly educated women with dependents. These legal and social conditions shape their experiences of uncertainty in distinctive ways.

We argue that their socio-spatial autonomy (Weiß 2017, 2018, 2021) allows Ukrainian protection holders in Germany to construct imaginaries of multiple futures. While the uncertainty regarding their long-term residence in Germany or return to Ukraine weighs heavily on our interviewees, it concurrently allows for a myriad of future imaginaries, all while viewing the present in Germany as some kind of bracketed reality; a temporary ‘time of exception’. However, our longitudinal data reveals that these present-making strategies are not static. As the war persists, we observe a gradual shift towards an orientation and anchoring in Germany.

By reframing refugee uncertainty beyond its negative implications, this paper contributes to a more nuanced understanding of how displaced individuals navigate uncertain future through productive present-making, while also revealing the temporal limits of these strategies.

Various studies show that the everyday lives of children and their families in institutional accommodation contexts for refugees – which the families themselves call “camps” – are characterized by waiting and uncertainty about the future (cf. Bombach 2023; Brekke 2010; Lewek/Naber 2017; Vitus 2010). Although camps are intended as temporary accommodation, many families spend several months and years in various types of camps, for example due to ongoing asylum procedure or tight housing markets in European cities (Kreichauf 2023). Over time, these accommodation contexts sometimes become permanent places. In forced migration research this uncertain time of arrival is therefore also referred to as “permanent temporality” (Hailey 2009), “waiting time” (Vitus 2010), “life on hold” (Brekke 2010) or „life in limbo” (Wagner/Finkielsztein 2021). While there has been some research on how adults experience and deal with waiting, boredom, and uncertainty in refugee camps (Griffith 2014, 2021; Schäfer 2019; Wagner/Finkielsztein 2021) children’s perspectives on temporality in camps have rarely been the focus. Based on this, this contribution asks how children, in contrast to their parents, spend and experience time in refugee camps.

Drawing on ethnographic material from my PhD-project about the everyday lives of children and their families in different refugee camps in Switzerland, I show how children have different ways and strategies to deal with boredom and uncertainty than their parents do. While parents often wait “like a stone”, experiencing every day in the camp as the same, children are allowed to and also required to play and have fun because of their social position as children. Furthermore, school-aged children have the right and obligation to attend school. They leave the camp – in contrast to their parents – to attend a “reception class” for newly immigrated children at a public school. Children in accommodation contexts are therefore institutionalized in two different ways: as refugees and as children. In this context, Western European concepts of normality in relation to childhood often come into play. This has profound consequences for the way children spend and experience time in refugee camps compared to their parents. Until now, there has been little research in migration studies that takes these generational differences into account.