Thematic Focus
This panel at the 19th IMISCOE annual conference engages with an emerging ‘temporal turn’ in the social sciences in recent years. Specifically, it reflects on how temporal experiences of migration and the life course intersect. We follow Catherine Allerton’s (2021) assertion that age and our positions in the life course play central roles in our perceptions of time and experiences of migration, and should receive more analytical attention. Relational approaches to migration and age further invite us into thinking about the connections, tensions, and interdependencies between both phenomena. In this panel, we propose age as a vantage point for understanding the lived experiences of time and migration. For example, a focus on youth, midlife or later-life experiences can reveal the discordance (Cwerner 2001) between how migration regimes construct these life stages and migrants’ own shifting self-understandings and aspirations at different points in their lives.
We invite contributions based on qualitative and ethnographic research that use different categories of age, intergenerational and life course perspectives as productive entry points into understanding the temporalities of migration. Themes can include:
- Defining and using age categories in our own research methodologies
- How age and migration regimes come into tension, and how people deploy or contest age in navigating migration policies
- How identity and belonging shift over time and across generations
- Age as a lens onto protracted displacement
- Age as a way of understanding social change and (dis)continuities in migration
Please submit a 250-word abstract by 30 November 2021 to:
Panel Organisers
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Victoria Kumala Sakti (Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity)
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Dora Sampaio (Department of Human Geography and Spatial Planning, Utrecht University; Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity)
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Megha Amrith (Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity)
