The chronopolitics of exile: Hope, heterotemporality and NGO economics along the Thai–Burma border

Norum, Roger; Mostafanezhad, Mary; Sebro, Tani

doi:10.1177/0308275x15617305

Cited by 14 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 48 publications

(53 reference statements)

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“…When power is viewed solely through the lens of subjective dispositions, our vision of political agency becomes similarly constrained. No one could deny that affects like "hope" are a much-needed resource for refugees who suffer under the grotesque inequalities that capitalism produces (Norum et al 2016). But if Aisha's effort to inspire confidence could be undermined through her employer's power to enforce workplace standards, what hope can we have that positive affects might be fostered through lasting projects without meeting a similar fate?…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In recent years, anthropologists of work have explored how precarious employment shapes laboring subjects' orientations to time (Allison 2012;Millar 2014, 44-5;Molé 2010). In a similar vein, scholars of humanitarianism have examined their subjects' temporal sensibilities through studies of refugees hope (Norum et al 2016), uncertainty (El-Shaarawi 2015, boredom (Gatter 2020), and habits of "frantic waiting" (Wagner 2017). These two vectors of research have even intersected in the argument that programs meant to help refugees and asylum seekers end up reproducing the sense of insecurity and anticipation that characterizes the "precaritization" of labor and life (Lilja et al 2018;Shrestha 2019).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Managing the Humanitarian Workplace: Capitalist Social Time and Iraqi Refugees in the United States

Sheldon

2021

Anthropology of Work Review

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This paper offers an ethnographic account of tensions around time that arose at a small nonprofit offering employment‐assistance programs for newly arrived Iraqi refugees in a large American city. Iraqi refugees have been subjected to multiple interventions, each of which put them on a strict timeline for results. Their experience gives rise to critical insights into the abstract, managerial representations of time that coordinate each of these successive programs. Staff responded to these concerns by attempting to correct clients’ expectations about the future, but this effort remained bound to the same temporal standard and therefore produced further frustrations on the part of clients. Meanwhile, the one employee who attempted to implement an alternative project ended up being disciplined by her employer for misusing time on the job. Tracing this dynamic of tension, conflict, and reconfiguration across multiple standpoints, the paper demonstrates how humanitarian work unfolds through the same contradictions between abstract and concrete forms of time that characterizes commodity‐directed labor under the capitalist mode of production as a whole. This finding complicates theoretical models of political subjectivity that have hitherto informed anthropological critiques of humanitarianism and points to abstract social time as a specifically capitalist mechanism of power at work.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Managing the Humanitarian Workplace: Capitalist Social Time and Iraqi Refugees in the United States

Sheldon

2021

Anthropology of Work Review

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“…Since 2010, when the Myanmar military government transitioned to civilian rule, Myanmar has been seen as increasingly open for economic development. As Norum, Mostafanezhad, and Sebro (2016) wrote, the change in governance has been accompanied by a move in international development and humanitarian assistance funding from the border areas to inside Myanmar. In 2015, advocates from different migrant support organizations within Thailand mentioned that the government's interest in the potential for economic development in the border region was as a means of "solving" the persistent problem of camp residents precluded from resettlement and unwilling to repatriate.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Destitution Economies: Circuits of Value in Asylum, Refugee, and Migration Control

Coddington

Conlon

Martin

2020

Annals of the American Association of Geographers

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In this article, we argue that destitution economies of migration control are specific circuits of exchange and value constituted by migration control practices that produce migrant and refugee destitution. Comparative analysis of three case studies, including border encampment in Thailand, deprivation in U.S. immigration detention centers, and deterrence through destitution in the United Kingdom, demonstrate that circuits of value depend on the detachment of workers from citizenship and simultaneously produce both migrant destitution and new forms of value production. Within destitution economies, migration and asylum's particular juridico-political position as domestic, foreign, and securitized allows legal regimes to produce migrants and asylum seekers as distinct economic subjects: forsaken recipients of aid. Although they might also work for pay, we argue that destitute migrants and asylum seekers have value for others through the grinding labor of living in poverty. That is, in their categorization as migrants and asylum seekers, they occupy a particular position in relation to economic circuits. These economic circuits of migration control, in turn, rely on the destitution of mobile people. Our approach advances political geographies of migration, bordering, and exclusion as well as economic geographies of marketization and value, arguing that the predominance of political analysis and critique of immigration and asylum regimes obscures how those regimes produce circuits of value in and through law, state practices, and exclusion. Furthermore, law, state power, and forced mobility constitute circuits of value and marketization. Conceptualizing these migration control practices as destitution economies illuminates novel transformations of the political and economic geographies of migration, borders, and inequality.

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“…But this work must not assume a linear process of subjectification or governance. Hope instead becomes a zone of struggle: sometimes providing the grounds for accumulation and inequality, but also for the emergence of sociality or resistance which challenge those processes and construct more equitable relations (Cross, 2015; de Boeck, 2011; Han, 2011; Harms, 2013; Lorey, 2015; Molé, 2010; Norum et al, 2015; Ozolina-Fitzgerald, 2016; Pettit, 2018; Sanchez, 2018; Weszkalnys, 2016).…”

Section: Hopementioning

confidence: 99%

Introduction: Hope, labour, disconnection

Pettit

2021

Environ Plan D

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The chronopolitics of exile: Hope, heterotemporality and NGO economics along the Thai–Burma border

Abstract: In this article, we foreground chronopolitics -the politics of time

Cited by 14 publications

References 48 publications

Managing the Humanitarian Workplace: Capitalist Social Time and Iraqi Refugees in the United States

Managing the Humanitarian Workplace: Capitalist Social Time and Iraqi Refugees in the United States

Destitution Economies: Circuits of Value in Asylum, Refugee, and Migration Control

Introduction: Hope, labour, disconnection

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