Abstract
A temporal injustice is inherently built into the asylum-seeking system. Asylum seekers lack control over their biographical and their everyday time. In Norway, most asylum seekers live in reception centres while their applications are processed. This article develops a conceptual framework for understanding the asylum centre by drawing on geographical literature on architecture and contributions from migration studies on temporality. It analyses the ways in which the reception centre becomes a focal point in the asylum seekers’ lives and how people’s lived experiences, the asylum institution and the materiality of the buildings housing the centres come together in the particular temporalities produced by the asylum-seeking process. People’s agentic capacities within institutional and material structures are conceptualised as ‘orientations’. The paper analyses the lived experience of residents in three different reception centres in Norway. The temporal frames operating in the reception centres are expressions of power that produce blurred, uncertain and clashing temporalities. In this context, the reception centre operates as a material disorientation device where institutional durability, temporary dwelling and decaying as well as sub-standard materialities are significant aspects of the asylum seekers’ experience. However, some residents are able to re-orient their perspective and find ways of coping with the uncertainty and waiting. These strategies are identified as ‘reorientations’ to show how the governance and the inhabitation in the centres come together and how people engage with the reception centre through stubborn everyday strategies of inhabiting the centre. In conclusion, the paper reflects on the limited possibility that improving the material conditions may have for a better experience of the asylum-seeking process: it is the interaction between the material, the institution and the lived experience that creates the temporal injustice.
Highlights
Asylum seekers’ experiences are distinguished by uncertainty and lack of control over own time
In Norway, while waiting for the outcome of the application, people are housed in reception centres, buildings generally not built for long-term living, often overcrowded and substandard and where people mostly share bedrooms and facilities with other residents
Inspired by work within the geographies of architecture we seek to conceptualise and develop a framework for how to understand the role of the reception centres by exploring how people’s lived experiences, the institution and the materiality of the buildings come together in the particular temporalities that are produced by the asylum-seeking process
Summary
Asylum seekers’ experiences are distinguished by uncertainty and lack of control over own time. By bringing in the asylum-seeking experience as an interaction between the nature of the institution and the buildings housing it, the article contributes to a discussion of the critical and political potential in geographical research on architecture as called for by Kraftl (2010). Existing debates on theorising the role of the subject in experiencing architecture has focused on the role of emotion and affect (Kraftl & Adey 2008) and on the capacity of the subject to contextualise their experiences (Rose et al 2010) These insights help to explore how asylum seekers’ lived experiences in buildings are shaped by the precarious temporalities produced in the interaction between the material and social spaces in the reception centre. Careful considerations were made regarding how to relate to the asylum seekers in order to negotiate practical ethical concerns such as power imbalances, the role of the researcher and the purpose of the research, making sure
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