Eleanor Paynter

When we think about migration, we often have movement in mind, journeys by foot, boat or plane, the crossing of borders the idea of return. On this podcast we've focused on human border crossing as a set of movements interconnected with many other kinds, for example of goods, microbes, animals, and ideas. But what happens when people can no longer cross a border? What do we learn about migration when we focus on questions of time? Welcome back to Migrations: A World on the Move, a series brought to you by Cornell University's Migrations initiative. I'm Eleanor Paynter, postdoctoral associate of migrations and your host for this podcast that seeks to understand our world through the interconnected movements that shape it. In season two, we're thinking about waiting, about the experiences of people living in limbo, from U.S. detention centers, to refugee camps in Lebanon.

Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh

Some people may want to leave, some people may be desiring to return because camps are spaces of refuge, of destruction, of violence, but they're also spaces of belonging and of longing as well for many people.

Eleanor Paynter 

About the time that passes as we wait for laws to change or for justice to be achieved.

Gerard Aching

You pursue freedom, you pursue justice, because after freedom, there should have been equality. And since we're still waiting for that, that that wait continues.

Eleanor Paynter

And about the myriad ways that waiting shapes experiences of migration, and the systems and structures that regulate borders.

Molly O'Toole

You know, I think people are sort of holding on, right, to everything until that moment where they cross. And then if anything after that, they're still in limbo, and maybe forever in limbo in the United States.

Eleanor Paynter

In the coming episodes, you'll hear conversations that take up waiting as a form of violence. Waiting as a process of both urgency and delay. And in all this, waiting not as a passive state, but an active one - a place of planning, of action, of possibility. And these conversations were guided by the work of people like anthropologist Shahram Khosravi, who you'll hear later this season. In the anthology, "Waiting: A Project in Conversation," Khosravi writes, "We all wait, but we wait differently. Waiting is not a neutral condition, but rather a hierarchical interwoven complex of gender, race, and class. Waiting, thus, is preeminently a political issue." With this in mind, we speak with scholars, practitioners, activists, and artists about waiting as a lens on the present, the past, and the unknown future. Waiting offers us a lens for thinking about the critical connections between migration and racial justice, freedom, language, environment, belonging, and rights. Stay tuned for new episodes of season two coming soon on migrations.cornell.edu/podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.