ABSTRACT
This chapter mobilises the concept of ‘power chronography,’ to examine how the waiting time of irregular migrants and asylum seekers in Marseille is produced, managed and lived at the intersection of a range of social institutions and differences. I am particularly interested in how migrants ‘recalibrate’ or synchronise their body clocks, their sense of future or the present, to the tempo, duration and directionality of laws, built environments, services and technologies – or ‘temporal architectures.’ While the request to recalibrate by ‘waiting’ is ubiquitous for irregular migrants and asylum seekers, such waiting is configured in a broader regime of accelerated migration control. The accelerated temporality of migration control produces gaps and time–spaces of waiting during which protection from deportation is weak and access to welfare and healthcare is extremely limited. Paying attention to multiple and relational temporalities, the analysis pries open the ruptures between how migration is imagined collectively and individually, and how it is managed by states. Temporalities related to reproduction, health and labour intersect with, and are recalibrated to, the temporalities of the state and its management of migration, while also opening up towards temporalities that escape the experience of waiting as a form of power.
