Refugee sociality, time and the state: social temporalities of displacement in the Germany-Turkey chronotope

Ziss, Paladia Yolanda ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0000-6222-0955 (2024). Refugee sociality, time and the state: social temporalities of displacement in the Germany-Turkey chronotope. University of Birmingham. Ph.D.

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Abstract

Time has become a central tool of refugee governance, through the imposition of temporary legal statuses, arbitrary delays and accelerations at border crossings and in asylum procedures, and the production of uncertain futures. But how does temporal governance shape the social lives of refugees? This thesis builds on the growing literature on temporalities of migration and refugee socialities to argue that state governance of time not only shapes refugees’ temporal experiences of the present and the future but also their social relations with people near and far. Methodologically, it draws on a multi-sited connected case study, conducted through seven months of ethnographic fieldwork in networks of refugees and non-refugees in Frankfurt and Istanbul in 2021 and 2022. The thesis employs Bakhtin’s notion of the “chronotope” (Bakhtin, 1981) to understand social temporalities of displacement as dialogical, affective and multiscalar. In different “chronotopes of displacement”, state temporalities of refugee governance interacted with social temporalities of refugees’ social lives to shape lived experiences of time. Refugees’ biographical times were negotiated within shared times with family and friends, and collective times as members of social groups. Chronotopes of displacement contained particular rhythms, tempos, sequences, and narratives of pasts and futures in particular localities and were coloured by distinct emotions.
The thesis first shows how “Germany-Turkey“ constitutes an uneven and overlapping chronotope in which refugee governance employs time to maintain refugees in conditions of legal and symbolic temporariness and connected histories of migration shape state governance of displacement today. Second, the thesis discusses “chronotopes of survival” in Turkey, a collective temporal experience of displacement in which refugee governance interacted with economic crisis and capitalist exploitation to dispossess refugees of their future, affecting the possibilities to live “normal” social lives. Third, refugees’ transnational family lives across Germany-Turkey were shaped by “chronotopes of separation”: legal temporalities like status duration or age prevented refugees from sharing futures with the people they loved in the spaces of their own choosing. Fourth, across the localities of Frankfurt and Istanbul, refugees actively built “chronotopes of connection”, based on shared experiences, affinity, mutual obligation and reciprocity. How refugees experienced displacement in the present was contingent on possibilities to share times with others as members of social collectives both in the Now and in the future. Simultaneously, by sharing times, refugees made new times within and against state-imposed temporalities.
Through the concept of chronotopes of displacement, the thesis argues that time is socially and collectively experienced, shaped by multiscalar relations of temporal power, and a central tool to understanding whether and how refugees are included or remain excluded from social collectives. By advancing our understanding into how displacement is simultaneously an existential and social experience of time, how refugee governance works across transnational social fields, and how state temporalities of governance are negotiated within refugee social networks, the thesis makes a significant contribution to refugee and migration studies, the sociology of forced migration and the sociology of time.

Type of Work:

Thesis (Doctorates > Ph.D.)

Award Type:

Doctorates > Ph.D.

Supervisor(s):