Bridget Anderson is the Director of Migration Mobilities Bristol and Professor of Migration, Mobilities and Citizenship. Her work explores the relations between migration, temporalities and future making claims, with a particular focus on precarity, labour market flexibilities and citizenship rights. She has pioneered an understanding of functions of immigration in essential economic sectors.
She is the author of Us and Them? The Dangerous Politics of Immigration Controls (Oxford University Press, 2013) and Doing the Dirty Work? The Global Politics of Domestic Labour (Zed Books, 2000). She co-edited Who Needs Migrant Workers? Labour Shortages, Immigration and Public Policy with Martin Ruhs (Oxford University Press, 2010 and 2012), The Social, Political and Historical Contours of Deportation with Matthew Gibney and Emanuela Paoletti (Springer, 2013) and Migration and Care Labour: Theory, Policy and Politics with Isabel Shutes (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
In this paper I’ll explore what we can learn at the intersection of labour, migration and precarity. I will start by considering two ways in which the temporal turn enriches the study of migration and mobility: Firstly, it encourages a processual approach to migration that moves away from fixity and ‘the migrant’ and towards ‘migrantisation’. Secondly, through drawing attention to temporality as a mechanism of governance it invites us to reflect on how the state governs through time. This is not peculiar to ‘migrants’, and the lens of temporal governance can help us unmake some of the constructed divisions between migrants and citizens. I will then explore some of the ways in which the labour precarity framing, which is very popular in labour migration research, can both further and undermine this project of unmaking differentiation. It can further it by capturing a particular kind of worker subjectivity and highlighting the relevance of social reproduction to lived experiences of contemporary work, and it can undermine it by introducing hierarchies of vulnerability and by distracting analysis away from taking migration as a class issue.
Vanessa May is Professor and Head of Sociology at the University of Manchester and a founding member of the Morgan Centre for Research into Everyday Lives. Her research interests include belonging, temporality, family life, and qualitative methods. Vanessa has published in a number of journals including Sociology, British Journal of Sociology, Sociological Review, and Time & Society. She is the author of Families (Polity) and Connecting Self to Society: Belonging in a Changing World (Palgrave Macmillan), and co-editor of Sociology of Personal Life (2nd edition, Red Globe).
My talk explores the intersections of belonging, time and migration-related precarity. Belonging – which can be defined as a fundamental sense of comfort and ease within oneself and one’s relational, social, cultural and material surroundings – is an inherently temporal experience. I revisit my work on the temporal nature of belonging, a core feature of which is a concern with people’s everyday lives and with relationality. In particular, I examine how the temporal horizons of past, present and future inform a person’s sense of belonging and how temporal belonging intersects with space and materiality. These insights are placed in conversation with recent work on the temporality of migration experiences, which foregrounds the structural foundations of temporal precarity. My aim is to consider how such a dialogue could enrich both the belonging literature and scholarship on migration.
Professor Cathrine Degnen's research focuses on how people create meaning and make sense of their social worlds in contexts of social transformation. She has built a significant body of work exploring this central interest in two key empirical areas: older age and everyday life, and the anthropology of Britain.
In Cross-cultural Perspectives on Personhood and the Life Course (2018) she build on and extended some of her research interests in later life to explore the category of the person across the life course. Other writing projects include Reflections on Polarisation and Inequalities in Brexit Pandemic Times and the 2017 Sociological Review Monograph, Reconfiguring the Anthropology of Britain: Ethnographic, Theoretical and Interdisciplinary Perspectives
Generation or relative age is a common way humans define social difference. In Europe and North America, old age is frequently perceived as a period of decline and loss, a condition ‘successful ageing’ paradigms exhort individuals to avoid for as long as possible. Explicit and implicit ageist beliefs, discourses, and practices marginalize later life, portraying it as undesirable and inferior. This paper explores how imagined generational relationships with time – younger people as future facing, older people as ‘out’ of time – enrol linear, future-oriented temporal perspectives in reproducing ageism. The aftermath of the Brexit referendum followed closely by the covid-19 pandemic serve as my ethnographic examples. These two extraordinary events permit me to highlight how chronocracy (Kirtsoglou and Simpson 2020) – that is, the denial of coevalness or coexistence in time through everyday temporal regimes – reinforces unequal power dynamics, and to explore how generational groups are differently valued in contemporary England.