Presentations by Streams

“Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes. It’s awful.” This quote from Samuel Beckett’s tragicomedy ‘Waiting for Godot’, depicts waiting as a waste of time; a conventional understanding in a world where value is produced through movement and progress. Social scientists, however, have engaged with the phenomenon of waiting as “waiting for something to change” (e.g., Hage 2003; Miyazaki 2004) and “waiting for nothing to change” (Frederiksen 2017) and emphasized the power imbalance in the ways in which waiting is experienced. We draw from these important contributions, but also interrogate the normative and progress-oriented conception of waiting as a ‘wasted time’ (Bendixsen and Hylland Eriksen 2018, 89), and consider it as productive in its own right.
Bringing together ethnographies on memory, future-making, cross-border mobility, and housing in Georgia, Kosovo, Moldova, Ukraine, and Latvia, we explore the similarities and differences in the ways in which waiting is experienced. To do so, we tackle, but are not confined to questions like: How is waiting conceptualised by our interlocutors? How do they negotiate and act upon waiting? What does waiting reveal about past experiences, and hopes, dreams and anticipations about the future? What are the historical, social, political, economic, and intimate entanglements that put people in a waiting position?
Our empirical material elucidates the lived experiences of waiting and the multifaceted conditions of their production. Based on a thick description of what happens in the ‘meantime’ (Jansen 2015), we discuss a variety of engagements with and responses to waiting, of differently positioned individuals. We aim to uncover why and how waiting is political, but also examine the forces and agencies beyond state institutions. Lastly, we consider waiting to be a productive lens to examine the interplay of structural conditions and individual and collective hope, uncertainty, and endurance more broadly.