Introduction: Migration studies and critical temporalities

Abstract

As a fast-moving field of study, the sociology of migration has experienced various paradigmatic shifts in recent decades, largely reflecting mutually constitutive interests in both the place of human agency, subjectivity and capacity to act in migration processes, and the effects of the rapidly evolving geopolitical, sociocultural and economic landscapes on migration systems. In this Introduction, the editors suggest that the recent focus on ‘time and temporality’ in migration studies represents a significant, and possibly paradigmatic, shift that understands migration and its antonym (non-migration) not as contradistinctive phenomena but umbilically conjoined. As the articles collected in this monograph issue show, giving specific focus to the role time and temporality play in migration trajectories enlarges our awareness that migration itself is never always about trans/national mobility but often also about not moving at all.