Waiting in the asylum determination process: Just an empty interlude?

Abstract

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.

The Management of Time and Waiting by Unaccompanied Asylum-Seeking Girls in Finland

“…In contexts of asylum seeking, waiting is often presented as unremittingly bleak -an arid stretch of time, where the clock ticks, but no movement happens. Particular when such time is measured only in reference to future outcome, dread and hope are noted to combine (author citation withheld for peer review, Allsopp et al 2015;Rotter 2016, Conlon 2011, creating vortexes of uncertainty. Here, a 'yes' attached to an outcome of remaining in the country of asylum, and a 'no' that foreshadows further forced migrations from that country towards potential dangers elsewhere, leads many asylum seeking children to surmise that they lead 'half-lives' (Brighter Futures 2013: 15), unable to find ground in which to root, and grow up.…”

Finding purpose through altruism: The potential of ‘doing for others’ during asylum

“…During the passive, stagnant wait for an asylum decision (Rotter, 2015) altruistic occupations provided a means of retaining a sense of self. All participants had been adversely affected by asylum, either through the lack of personal agency, reduced opportunity, reliance on charity or the attitudes of people in the wider community (Bennett et al 2012;Cheung and Phillimore, 2013;Morville, 2014;Gower, 2016).…”

Regímenes de movilidad y expropiación del tiempo: la espera como cronopolítica

“…De este modo, mientras aprenden a asumir las dilaciones en la gestión de sus peticiones, deben enfrentarse a la necesidad y la responsabilidad de activarse. Se trata de la presión de la aceleración, de la urgencia por convertir su no tiempo en una suerte de tiempo productivo susceptible de ser transformado en capital (Rotter, 2016) 16 , aunque sea desde una posición de subalternidad (Wacquant, 2010).…”

“…16. Rebecca Rotter (2016), en su estudio sobre las experiencias de peticionarios de asilo en el Reino Unido, señala que, frente a la visión tradicional de la espera como no tiempo o tiempo no productivo, las personas participantes en su estudio relatan el tiempo de espera (entre 2 y 9 años) como un tiempo estructurado, intencional y agencial. La pretensión de la autora es poner en valor precisamente esta última dimensión, lo cual no contradice lo que venimos argumentando porque espera y actividad no son per se incompatibles, sobre todo cuando esta última se produce en el contexto de perpetuación de la propia espera.…”