Mobile temporalities and political possibilities: Expanding the temporal turn in migration studies

Abstract This special issue advances a research agenda on mobile temporalities—the multiple, dynamic temporal orders that intersect with human mobility to shape political life. While the “temporal turn” in Migration Studies has illuminated the governance of migrants through time (waiting, delay, acceleration), we argue that it remains constrained by a linear, incorporative orientation that centers citizenship as the teleological endpoint. We propose a shift from counting time to interrogating temporalities as socially and politically constructed phenomena that collide with movements such as migration, displacement, pilgrimage, and urban circulation. This reframing foregrounds regulatory powers beyond the state, migrants’ temporal agency, and non-linear horizons where waiting, anticipation, or rupture may generate politics irreducible to progress towards membership rights. Convening scholars from politics, sociology, geography, and anthropology, the issue stages a collaborative cross-disciplinary conversation. Little and Nakata theorize “radical incompletion,” bringing indigenous temporalities into debates on borders and sovereignty. Franck and Turner juxtapose refugees and “preppers” to show how anticipatory futures organize (im)mobility. Walker analyzes the time of pilgrimage, highlighting frictions with state time. Kim traces intersecting temporalities of asylum law, Chinese capitalism, and Korean evangelicalism to complicate assumptions about conversion, authenticity, and citizenship as endpoints. Across these studies, we show how mobile temporalities unsettle hegemonic timelines and open political possibilities—from new solidarities to forms of autonomy, refusal or resignation —often missed by linear frames. We invite scholars of migration and time to rethink how time moves through migration and how migration reshapes time, expanding the field’s empirical and normative horizons.