Temporalities of citizenship among Finnish Somali women: simultaneities, disruptions and accelerations along the refugeeness-citizenship continuum

Abstract

ABSTRACT Time is central to both the regimes and the lived experiences of refugeeness and citizenship. Refugeeness as a spatio-temporal immobility and form of control is extensively studied. However, only a few works address the temporalities of citizenship comprehensively. This paper reveals lived temporalities of citizenship among a group of Finnish Somali women who hold various legal statuses. Building on the mutually constitutive nature of refugeeness and citizenship, I conceptualise these states as representing either end of a continuum along which people shift through time and space. Using the analytical perspective of lived citizenship, I identify various everyday dimensions of the women’s citizenship and their positionings on the continuum. My analysis illuminates how institutional and individual temporalities of citizenship can be aligned (e.g. in global mobility) or disordered (due to othering and loss of daily spatio-temporal agency). The results show how this group of Finnish Somali women negotiate mainstream linear temporalities and enact complex temporal strategies to advance both their own citizenship and that of their local and transnational families.