Zombies, Miracles, and Memory: Towards a Research Agenda on Mobility, Temporality, and Political Possibility

This article introduces a research agenda for reimagining political possibilities by placing multiple temporalities at the centre of analyses of human mobility. While recent scholarship in migration studies has taken a ‘temporal turn’ by exploring how states use time to regulate movement – through delay, stoppage, or acceleration – we call for a broader conceptual shift: from understanding time as a tool of control to recognising temporality as a terrain of friction, fragmentation, and political imagination. In so doing, we unsettle metanarratives of justice rooted in teleological conceptions of citizenship and incorporation. We illustrate the geopolitical stakes of this move with three examples from diverse geographies, summarised with reference to three key ideas: zombie citizenship, miracles, and memory. Zombie citizenship refers to a legal status that suspends people in fragmented temporalities, effectively excluding them from any national historiography or membership rights. Miracles refer to attempts to respond to ‘stuckedness’ by abandoning linear notions of progress and embracing the miraculous claims of preachers and profits. Memory signals a terrain in which historical contestations of human mobilities open space for reimagining sovereignty. In each case, we explain how temporal infrastructures both constrain and enable forms of solidarity, division, and political claim-making. These sketches are not typologies but heuristics that provoke fresh inquiry into how time and mobility interact to shape political life. We call for a normative and analytical recalibration that centres on temporal multiplicity as a constitutive force in contemporary geopolitics and migration.