Migrating borders and moving times explores how crossing borders entails shifting time as well as changing geographical location. Space has long dominated the field of border studies, a prominence which the recent ‘spatial turn’ in social science has reinforced. This book challenges the classic analytical pre-eminence of ‘space’ by focusing on how ‘border time’ is shaped by, shapes and constitutes the borders themselves.
Using original field data from Israel, northern Europe and Europe's south-eastern borders (Kosovo, Albania, Montenegro, Sarajevo, Lesbos), our contributors explore ‘everyday forms of border temporality’ – the ways in which people through their temporal practices manage, shape, represent and constitute the borders across which they move or at which they are made to halt. In these accounts, which are based on fine-tuned ethnographic research sensitive to historical depth and wider political-economic context and transformation, ‘moving’ is understood not only as mobility but as affect, where borders become not just something to be ‘crossed’ but something that is emotionally experienced and ‘felt’.
6 New pasts, presents and futures: time and space in family migrant networks between Kosovo and western Europe Carolin Leutloff-Grandits For many families in Kosovo, migration is an integral part of life. This is true even if they do not themselves migrate but, rather, seem ‘stuck’ in a village such as the one in south Kosovo where I conducted fieldwork between 2011 and 2013.1 In fact, in this village, and throughout almost all of Kosovo, there is what one might term a ‘culture’ of migration. Every person has close family members who are living or have lived
have already endured precarious crossings of the Mediterranean to reach European shores and ultimately the destinations in Germany, Sweden or Britain that seem to promise them a future, are trapped at borders in Macedonia, Hungary, Croatia and Slovenia where newly constructed fences impede their progress. The fact that citizens of states like Kosovo, Albania, Macedonia and Serbia may themselves be among those who strive to leave, given the difficult conditions they face at home, does not seem to have tempered these new border-crossing policies of foreclosure. Migrant