*ReROOT contributors in bold.
Chair and Organiser: Susanne Wessendorf
Discussant: Tamlyn Monson
Discussant: Tamlyn Monson
Malte Gembus: ‘That’s where we go for help’ – a school and a community centre as arrival spaces for newcomers in East London.
Carolien Lubberhuizen: Permanent temporary newcomers – A temporal lens on arrival infrastructures for and by migrant workers in agricultural areas in the Netherlands and Belgium
This paper addresses questions of temporality involved in the arrival infrastructures around labour migration in two agricultural areas, Westland in the Netherlands and Haspengouw in Belgium. Even though low-skilled labour migration within the EU is often assumed and regimented to be of either temporary or seasonal nature (King, Lulle & Melossi 2021), people’s mobilities and temporal orientations are often more complex. Drawing on ethnographic research, this paper brings different scales of temporality together in order to better understand the kinds of arrival that are (re)produced in these settings and what this means for the provision and access to resources and rights. On the one hand, by exploring the temporalities involved in labour migration regimes, contracts, and seasonal nature of agricultural labour, I show how the arrival infrastructural ecosystems (re)produce an assumed temporariness that is based on and creates permanent insecurity and precarity. On the other hand, by comparing these temporalized infrastructures with social experiences of time, I look at the ways the permanent ‘for the time being’ and everydayness of infrastructures around work and housing are negotiated within life-long trajectories and futures. Through these negotiations, the temporalities involved and reproduced in different arrival infrastructures intersect, often constrain and sometimes enable certain future social mobilities. The paper therefore also proposes to deconstruct the temporal notion of arrival by showing how these arrival infrastructures and infrastructuring practices around agricultural labour migration reproduce the idea of a temporary newcomer.
Shila Anaraki: Obscuring guest-host relations in the network of temporary shelters and homes
Carolien Lubberhuizen: Permanent temporary newcomers – A temporal lens on arrival infrastructures for and by migrant workers in agricultural areas in the Netherlands and Belgium
This paper addresses questions of temporality involved in the arrival infrastructures around labour migration in two agricultural areas, Westland in the Netherlands and Haspengouw in Belgium. Even though low-skilled labour migration within the EU is often assumed and regimented to be of either temporary or seasonal nature (King, Lulle & Melossi 2021), people’s mobilities and temporal orientations are often more complex. Drawing on ethnographic research, this paper brings different scales of temporality together in order to better understand the kinds of arrival that are (re)produced in these settings and what this means for the provision and access to resources and rights. On the one hand, by exploring the temporalities involved in labour migration regimes, contracts, and seasonal nature of agricultural labour, I show how the arrival infrastructural ecosystems (re)produce an assumed temporariness that is based on and creates permanent insecurity and precarity. On the other hand, by comparing these temporalized infrastructures with social experiences of time, I look at the ways the permanent ‘for the time being’ and everydayness of infrastructures around work and housing are negotiated within life-long trajectories and futures. Through these negotiations, the temporalities involved and reproduced in different arrival infrastructures intersect, often constrain and sometimes enable certain future social mobilities. The paper therefore also proposes to deconstruct the temporal notion of arrival by showing how these arrival infrastructures and infrastructuring practices around agricultural labour migration reproduce the idea of a temporary newcomer.
Shila Anaraki: Obscuring guest-host relations in the network of temporary shelters and homes
