Lost encounters? The time-scale temporalities involved in countering gang-master and labour exploitation policies

This paper offers a reflection on the ‘lost encounters’ between government policies’ temporalities and individual life trajectories’ of asylum seekers and refugees in Italy, focusing on how these time discrepancies may reveal the conditions to remain in, or fall into, exploitative working situations and/or social marginalisation/isolation. As Robertson (2019), Jacobsen, Karlsen and Khosravi (2020) suggest, we apply the multiscale and relational category of temporalities to analyse state practices of migration governance, by considering state policies and regional projects to counter work exploitation in agriculture. Our analysis considers the following levels of multiscale interactions: subjective – migrant subjects’ biographical temporalities; micro-relational – migrant subjects and social operators; meso – actors involved in projects’ implementation temporalities and their interactions; and macro – state/political temporalities, which form the core of our analysis. To examine these multiple relations, we chose the angle of subjective and micro relational temporalities.