Waiting in the asylum determination process: Just an empty interlude?

Abstract

In both the academic literature and the public imagination, waiting time is often understood as passive, empty and wasted, particularly when associated with institutional or organisational settings. The purpose of this paper is to challenge this limited conceptualisation, by exploring the experiences of asylum seekers who waited between 2 and 9 years in the UK for a resolution of their precarious immigration status in Glasgow, UK. When asked to describe their experiences of waiting, these individuals tended to articulate the dominant notion of waiting as passive, stagnant time spent ‘doing nothing’. Rather than taking such narrative accounts at face value, I consider broader ethnographic material pertaining to their everyday lives, which attests to a more complex lived experience of waiting. I argue that their waiting was affective, involving a heightened anticipation of the future and reflection on desired and dreaded outcomes; active, as they structured and filled their time with a variety of routines, activities and projects; and, in a more limited sense, productive, as waiting time could be transformed into capital. I conclude that for the asylum seekers involved in this research, waiting was not an empty interlude between events but an intentional and agential process.