ABSTRACT
Waiting is an integral and intuitive state of being in ethnography. However, nowadays there are wide concerns in neoliberal academia around time, mobility and doing more in shorter timeframes – all of which can reduce time in the field. Based on multisited ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Delhi in 2019, focused on documenting the lived experience of internal migrant workers in the informal sector navigating the legal system, this chapter argues for the role of ‘waiting’ as a methodological tool in its own right. The contribution is twofold. First, the chapter shows that waiting offers an opportunity to contextualize the social and political worlds of the participants. This ensures a methodological commitment to ethnography in the presence of institutional and time constraints. Second, waiting provides the space to build trusting relationships between the researcher and the participants in the field which is otherwise all about domination and inequality. This is especially valuable in migration and mobility studies where the field cannot be marked spatially and where the researcher must submit to the clock of the research sites and the routines of its people.
