In both the academic literature and the public imagination, waiting time is often understood as passive, empty and wasted, particularly when associated with institutional or organisational settings. The purpose of this paper is to challenge this limited conceptualisation, by exploring the experiences of asylum seekers who waited between 2 and 9 years in the UK for a resolution of their precarious immigration status in Glasgow, UK. When asked to describe their experiences of waiting, these individuals tended to articulate the dominant notion of waiting as passive, stagnant time spent 'doing nothing'. Rather than taking such narrative accounts at face value, I consider broader ethnographic material pertaining to their everyday lives, which attests to a more complex lived experience of waiting. I argue that their waiting was affective, involving a heightened anticipation of the future and reflection on desired and dreaded outcomes; active, as they structured and filled their time with a variety of routines, activities and projects; and, in a more limited sense, productive, as waiting time could be transformed into capital. I conclude that for the asylum seekers involved in this research, waiting was not an empty interlude between events but an intentional and agential process.

This article introduces a special issue on arts-based engagement with migration, comprising articles, reflections, poems and images. The introductory article starts by exploring the ethical, political and empirical reasons for the increased use of arts-based methods in humanities and social sciences research in general, and in migration studies in particular. Next, it evaluates participatory methods, co-production and co-authorship as increasingly well-established practices across academia, the arts, activism and community work. It then considers how the outputs of such processes can be deployed to challenge dominant representations of migration and migrants. The authors reflect critically upon arts-based methodological practices and on the (limits to the) transformative potentials of using arts-based methods to engage creatively with migration. Sounding a cautionary note, they concede that even collaborative artistic expressions have limits in overcoming unequal power dynamics, conveying experiences of migration and effecting long-term change in a context in which discourse on migration is dominated by short-term political decision-making, and punitive policies force migrants into precarious forms of existence. While the prospect of influencing the political sphere might seem remote, they advocate for the role and power of the arts in instigating, shaping and leading change by inspiring people’s conscience and civic responsibility.

There is an absence of absence in legal geography and materialist studies of the law. Drawing on a multi-sited ethnography of European asylum appeal hearings, this paper illustrates the importance of absences for a fully-fledged materiality of legal events. We show how absent materials impact hearings, that non-attending participants profoundly influence them, and that even when participants are physically present, they are often simultaneously absent in other, psychological registers. In so doing we demonstrate the importance and productivity of thinking not only about law's omnipresence but also the absences that shape the way law is experienced and practised. We show that attending to the distribution of absence and presence at legal hearings is a way to critically engage with legal performance.

Uncertainty is often deemed to be a quintessential fact of life. The social scientific literature often references a generalised or ‘global’ uncertainty, akin to a worldview. Far fewer studies, however, discuss the specific effects of ‘event’ focused uncertainty: how it is managed by groups and individuals, or how this type of uncertainty relates to the concepts of risk, trust, hope and time. This article seeks to identify and analyse key aspects of the condition of uncertainty through an empirical exploration of two very different case studies: asylum applicants waiting for the state to decide whether to grant them the right to remain in the UK, and people with chronic or life-limiting illness who want to hasten their own death with the help of a Swiss right-to-die organisation. In both cases, participants experienced a heightened state of uncertainty because of specific and substantial threats to their well-being: deportation, and protracted suffering through illness. In both cases, the acquisition of knowledge was considered to aid predictions about future events. However, both sets of individuals encountered barriers to acquiring the right kind of knowledge - knowledge which was trusted to be accurate or which came with a guarantee. While all the individuals were constrained in their ability to act to relieve their uncertainty, they found limited ways of doing so. Knowledge and action are thereby found to be crucial to the condition of uncertainty and to the means of overcoming it through restoring a sense of control.

For the thousands of appellants who navigate Britain's asylum appeal courts every year, attending a hearing conducted in a language they do not understand and participating via an interpreter, is usually viewed as a significant disadvantage. The findings of a study that entailed ethnographic and structured observations of over 390 asylum appeal hearings in England and Wales during 2013 and 2014, however, indicate that the presence of interpreters often offers an important source of support in adversity. While the natural assumption may be to associate linguistic incomprehension with detriment, it transpires that there are important exceptions to this rule. Given the toughening of UK border controls in recent years, as well as British reluctance to share responsibilities for international refugees such as those fleeing from violence in Syria, these observations offer rare solace in a bleak policy landscape.