Migration is intertwined with time in myriad ways and at multiple scales. In individual lives, migration propels change over time and entails engagement with personal pasts and futures. Time and temporalities are structuring migration experiences, when refugees are granted temporary protection, labour migrants are offered temporary employment and rights of residency, and undocumented migrants are living with uncertainties for the future. The governance of migration is also the governance of migrants’ relations to and experiences of time. Governance of migration happens in time – sometimes in the form of rapid changes in times of “crisis”, but perhaps also through postponement when the urgency has passed.

Attention to time and temporalities illuminates processes of othering and patterns of inequalities, as well as forms of resistance and adaptations to policies and institutions. The rapid changes in laws, regulations, policies and practices of migration also have repercussions on the topics, theoretical approaches, and methodologies of migration scholars. These and other perspectives on time and migration have flourished as part of the emerging ‘temporal turn’ in migration studies. The theme ‘migration and time’ brings out disciplinary, methodological and theoretical diversity of migration research with a shared focus. 

EXCEL Project team will be represented by Isabel Pires at this conference, with the the paper “I’ll take the oranges, the Garam Masala and the skin whitener please”. Beauty images, beauty consumption and the desire for white beauty in the migrant Asian population in modern Lisbon.