Waiting: feminist perspectives on the spacings/timings of migrant (im)mobility

Abstract

Waiting is a banal and ubiquitous practice that is linked in myriad ways to mobility and (im)mobility in the contemporary era. Yet, to date, experiences of waiting have received scant conceptual and/or research attention among scholars. Introducing a themed section of Gender, Place and Culture, this article highlights how a focus on temporal and spatial encounters with waiting and (im)mobility among migrants extends established areas of interest among feminist geographers and related interdisciplinary scholars while also augmenting scholarship in mobility studies. Key themes are introduced. These include attention to the ways waiting is imbricated with regional and international geopolitics and analyses of waiting as an active practice that involves reflection, incorporation into, as well as resistance within, the everyday spaces that migrants encounter. With an emphasis on how contributions to this themed section speak from or to a range of feminist concerns, this introduction suggests that the intersection of feminist perspectives and mobility studies engages valuable new research questions and offers possibilities for crucial insights into migrant encounters with the spacings/timings of (im)mobility.