Migrating borders and moving times

Offers a sustained and systematic focus on the intersections of time and space in contexts of border crossing, considering the historical transformations of borders over time and the way 'border time' is shaped by and shapes the borders. This study 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, the 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. These accounts are based on fine-tuned ethnographic research sensitive to historical depth and wider political-economic context and transformation, in which 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. With its multidisciplinary and comparative perspective on Europe's borders, this book will be of interest to a broad range of scholars in border studies, migration studies, European studies, anthropology, politics, geography, sociology and history. Migrating borders and moving timesanalyses migrant border crossings in relation to their everyday experiences of time and connects these to wider social and political structures. Sometimes border crossing takes no more than a moment; sometimes hours; some crossers find themselves in the limbo of detention; for others, the crossing lasts a lifetime to be interrupted only by death. Borders not only define separate spaces, but different temporalities. This book provides both a single interpretative frame and a novel approach to border crossing: an analysis of the reconfiguration of memory, personal and group time that follows the migrants' renegotiation of cross-border space and recalibrations of temporality.An electronic edition of this book is freely available under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND) licence.