Authors

Rozafa Berisha¹;  ¹ University of Prishtina, Albania

Discussion

As crucial sites of everyday sociality, café routine in Southern Mitrovica coalesces dominant temporal experiences of youth. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2019, this paper takes young women’s invocation of the emic term ‘s’po rrihet’ as a starting point from which to explore female experiences of waiting. This is a primarily descriptive term for sentiments akin to boredom inflicted by a sense of limited opportunities offered by a specific place. In this paper, I analyze this individually felt yet collectively shared sentiment through affect. I follow young women’s historicisation and politicisation of this affect to argue that while it trickles down in the café routine, this is a geopolitically shaped one. It is enmeshed within a larger protracted waiting for state-consolidation and EU membership, a process into which individual and collective hopes for a more prosperous future are attached to. In this sense, this affect crystalizes a wider sense of inhabiting a ‘not-yet’ timespace denoting stagnation, waiting and the sharply felt dissonance between the promised and the possible. This paper adds a gendered perspective to the study of youth temporalities, inquiring into what do female experiences of waiting in the context of the everyday tell us about the ways individual hopes, aspirations and understanding of the future possibilities shape in particular social and geopolitical conditions.