Migrating Borders and Moving Times: Temporality and the Crossing of Borders in Europe

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.