ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that ‘waiting,’ as an analytical lens, can provide critical new knowledge about the socio-cultural dynamics of contemporary migration, the complex and shifting nature of processes of bordering, belonging, state power, exclusion and inclusion, and social relations in irregular migration. Offering a thorough reading of literature on waiting and migration in anthropology and beyond, the chapter identifies a need to develop more conceptually robust approaches to time and temporality and calls for greater awareness of how waiting, as a social and temporal practice, is represented and replicated in migration research. Two ways to further develop waiting as a productive analytical lens in migration studies are proposed. The first is to conceptualise waiting as constituted in and through multiple and relational temporalities. The second is to highlight the significance of the geopolitical and chronopolitical locations of waiting. These propositions are concretised through a discussion about such themes as the exceptionality of waiting in migration, the temporal structures of waiting, waiting as a temporal relation to the past–present–future, affect and agency in waiting, the political economies of waiting and the temporal architectures and materialities of waiting.
