{"id":63842,"date":"2026-06-11T11:33:15","date_gmt":"2026-06-11T15:33:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/pardeeschool\/?p=63842"},"modified":"2026-06-11T11:33:16","modified_gmt":"2026-06-11T15:33:16","slug":"lori-co-edits-special-issue-on-time-migration-and-political-possibility","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/pardeeschool\/2026\/06\/11\/lori-co-edits-special-issue-on-time-migration-and-political-possibility\/","title":{"rendered":"Lori Co-Edits Special Issue on Time, Migration, and Political Possibility"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/span><\/a>\"\"<\/a>Professor Noora Lori\u00a0co-edited a special issue of Migration Studies<\/em> (Oxford University Press, 2026) that was published this June, and co-authored the introduction article titled “Mobile Temporalities and Political Possibilities: Expanding the Temporal Turn in Migration Studies.” Co-written with Anne McNevin (The New School for Social Research) and Loren B. Landau (University of Oxford), the introduction launches a collaborative, cross-disciplinary project that brings together scholars from politics, sociology, geography, and anthropology to rethink how time shapes, and is shaped by, human migration and mobility.<\/p>\n

The special issue grew out of a year-long virtual workshop, “Time, Mobility and Political Possibility,” convened in 2021 when the COVID-19 pandemic redirected what would have been a traditional in-person gathering into a months-long exchange across continents and time zones among sixteen scholars \u2014 Karen Barad, Britany Birberick, Justin Clark, Anja Franck, Giovanna Gini, Andy Hom, Jaeeun Kim, Loren Landau, Adrian Little, Noora Lori, Anne McNevin, Paddy O’Halloran, Senayon Olaoluwa, Simon Turner, Darshan Vigneswaran, and Margath Walker.<\/p>\n

The introduction takes stock of what the authors call the “temporal turn” in migration studies \u2014 a body of scholarship that has illuminated how states use time as a tool of governance, through waiting, delay, acceleration, and the calibration of legal status. This literature has been valuable, they argue, but it has also been limiting: it tends to treat citizenship as the inevitable destination of migration, and to frame time primarily as something done to<\/em> migrants rather than something migrants themselves navigate and deploy. The result is a scholarship that is better at documenting frustration and marginalization than at recognizing the full range of ways migrants orient themselves toward the future.<\/p>\n

Lori and her co-authors propose expanding this agenda around the concept of “mobile temporalities”: the idea that multiple, overlapping temporal orders (bureaucratic, spiritual, economic, Indigenous, ecological) are constantly in motion and collision with each other. When asylum procedures built around bureaucratic timelines collide with a refugee’s crisis-driven journey, or when seasonal labor demands cut against religious calendars, what emerges is not simply a story of power and control, but a space of political possibility.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
‘Migration Studies,’ Volume 14, Issue 2, June 2026<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

As the authors put it, the present moment “shaped by deepening neoliberal inequalities, expanding surveillance infrastructures, and intensifying climate disruptions \u2014 surfaces such collisions in particularly acute ways.” They argue that these collisions demand a more expansive analytical framework, one that takes seriously non-linear temporalities and the political forms they generate.<\/p>\n

The introduction previews the four contributions to the special issue, each of which develops this framework through a specific case. Little and Nakata examine Indigenous temporalities and border sovereignty, developing the concept of “radical incompletion” to challenge fixed, statist conceptions of territory. Franck and Turner bring refugees and doomsday “preppers” into unexpected conversation, showing how anticipation of disaster organizes mobility. Walker analyzes Central American migrant caravans through the lens of pilgrimage time, revealing how the slow, ritual pace of walking creates its own political momentum. Kim traces how overlapping temporalities of asylum law, Chinese capitalism, and Korean evangelicalism shape migrants’ encounters with immigration law in ways that unsettle assumptions about conversion, authenticity, and citizenship as a linear goal.<\/p>\n

Together, the introduction and the special issue make a provocation that reaches well beyond migration studies. The authors are candid about the stakes of their argument: “We suspect our very sense of what politics is and might be is so deeply imbricated in expectations of progressive futures that it constrains our sight lines.” By attending to the ways time itself is socially constructed, contested, and transformed through the movement of people, Lori and her co-authors open space for a richer, more honest account of political life at the margins of global mobility, one that moves beyond frustrated citizenship claims to ask what other kinds of futures migrants may be living toward, resisting, or imagining altogether.<\/p>\n

The full special issue can be read here<\/a> with institutional access.<\/p>\n

Noora Lori<\/span><\/a> is an associate professor of international relations at the Pardee School of Global Studies. She is also the director of the Middle East-North Africa (MENA) initiative. With a broad focus on citizenship, migration, and statelessness, Lori has written about citizenship regimes and naturalization policies, temporary migration schemes, and racial hierarchies in comparative perspective. Her first book, <\/span>Offshore Citizens: Permanent \u201cTemporary\u201d Status in the Gulf<\/span><\/i><\/a> (Cambridge University Press, 2019)<\/span>,<\/span><\/i> received the Best Book Prize from the Migration and Citizenship section of the American Political Science Association (2020). To read more about her work and achievements, visit her <\/span>faculty profile<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Professor Noora Lori\u00a0co-edited a special issue of Migration Studies (Oxford University Press, 2026) that was published this June, and co-authored the introduction article titled “Mobile Temporalities and Political Possibilities: Expanding the Temporal Turn in Migration Studies.” Co-written with Anne McNevin (The New School for Social Research) and Loren B. Landau (University of Oxford), the introduction…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25562,"featured_media":63087,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[11797],"tags":[13022,8578,13018,13519,8602],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/pardeeschool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63842"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/pardeeschool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/pardeeschool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/pardeeschool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/25562"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/pardeeschool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=63842"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/pardeeschool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63842\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":63846,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/pardeeschool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63842\/revisions\/63846"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/pardeeschool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/63087"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/pardeeschool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=63842"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/pardeeschool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=63842"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/pardeeschool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=63842"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}