Displacing Times: borders, time, and the social lives of refugees across Frankfurt and Istanbul

When people flee war and violence, social relations come under strain. Refugees often wait for years for legal status, travel documents or family reunification, uncertain when they will see family and friends again. Unsure about their future in a new place, some struggle to make connections, while imposed ties can simultaneously become oppression. Social lives are linked to state border regimes that enact power through time: slowing down border crossings and keeping people in legal limbo. Simultaneously, shifting social networks carry new possibilities and potentialities – for the future of societies and of refugees themselves. 

The book project Displacing Times: borders, time, and the social lives of refugees across Frankfurt and Istanbul (proposal under review at Bristol University Press) explores how time shapes refugees’ social lives in displacement within increasingly restrictive border regimes in Germany and Turkey. The book draws on seven months of multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in 2021 and 2022, studying the networks, social lives and relationships of people who have fled wars, violence and persecution in the Middle East to Frankfurt, Germany and Istanbul, Turkey. It explores how refugees manage state temporal mechanisms, such as insecure status, work schedules and age cut-off points, in existing and new relationships in various social contexts – the nation-state, work, families and neighbourhoods – and within structures of patriarchy, racial capitalism, and (neo-)imperialism. Overall, the book shows how bordering separates refugees from family, friends and neighbours – in space across geographies but also in time across presents, pasts and futures. At the same time, refugees work to rebuild social relations across times and spaces – through sharing moments, caring for each other over time, and working in solidarity for better futures. 

This work-in-progress workshop will present and seek feedback on a draft of the first chapter which outlines the key conceptual arguments. First, it argues how “Germany-Turkey” form a common migration regime with overlapping laws, practices, discourses and connected histories of migration, racism, capitalism and empire. Second, building on recent scholarship on the relationship of time and migration control (Tazzioli, 2018; Griffiths, 2021; Zehfuss and Vaughan-Williams, 2024), the chapter outlines how this migration regime enacts power through temporal bordering, understood as state mechanisms that separate refugees from individual, social and societal futures and denythe sharing of collective times and spaces. These mechanisms include temporal diversions that redirect desired biographical projects such as starting a family or building a career. Through temporal separations, refugees are spatially separated from family, friends and neighbours in the present but also prevented from envisioning shared lives in the future. Through temporal othering, refugees are constructed as others who have not belonged in the past and remain outside imaginaries of national futures, with implications for their mobility, membership and social lives. Third, the chapter argues that refugees contest temporal bordering through practices of sharing times with family, neighbours, locals, or other refugees. By spending time with each other, engaging in enduring care, and building solidarity across spaces and times, they struggle to wrest back control over the present and the future, and retain connections to individual, social and political pasts. Overall, the book argues to conceive of “displacement” as an arena of chronopolitics – struggles between different actors over the meaning and value of shared futures.

The work in progress session focuses on the following questions:

• How can we reconceptualise contemporary forms of bordering in space and time?
• (How) does a focus on time help understanding, and challenging, contemporary politics of displacement and belonging in an age of racism, imperialism and sexist violence?