Paolo Boccagni will give a hybrid lecture at Malmo University, as a part of the ReROOT project, next 31 March at 2.30 CET. The lecture is on Temporalizing infrastructures: How time and temporalities shape the encounters between asylum seekers and multiple infrastructuring

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Temporalizing infrastructures: How time and temporalities shape the encounters between asylum seekers and multiple infrastructuring 

This lecture illustrates the promise of a time-sensitive approach to local infrastructuring, in light of the multiple and contrasting temporalities in which newcomers, and particularly asylum seekers, are embedded. The difference time makes, as an external constraint and as a lived experience, does not apply only to the changing configuration of local arrival infrastructures and of migration corridors and flows. More fundamentally, asylum seekers’ trajectories are entangled in different temporalities that shape both the room of action of (post)arrival infrastructures and the negotiation of refugee inclusion. Drawing on a burgeoning literature in forced migration studies, including my ethnography of everyday life in an asylum centre in Italy, I explore three areas of friction on the perception and control over time, along and across the divide between asylum seekers and their local counterparts. Across these areas of discussion and contention, I aim toward a comparative framework on the main forms and questions of temporality emerging within asylum seekers’ interactions with arrival infrastructures, beyond the here-and-now.