Claiming Time: Refugees and Asylum Seekers Dealing with the Production of Different Temporal Regimes by Asylum and Reception Policies

As editors of this Special Issue, more than a year after the IMISCOE Conference on the relationship between migration and temporality, we have begun to reflect criti- cally on what we may have taken for granted in the initial stage of our work, namely, the role that is generally attributed to time and temporality in the lives of migrants, asylum seekers, and refugees. Whereas initially we felt focused our efforts exclusively on uncovering the forms of subjection and disciplining of time imposed by governmental agencies and insti- tutions when controlling borders and territories, now we are concerned with the forms of denial of time and coevalness that inspire many analyses of contemporary migrations. In this introduction, therefore, we will scrutinize the expression “claiming time,” using a much richer horizon of meanings to examine our initial attempt to show how migrants strive to claim time within the dispositif of control, reception, and discipline.