Out of sync: temporal governance and agency in refugee families with temporary protection status in Denmark

Abstract

Over the past decade, a series of legal changes have intensified Denmark’s temporal governance of refugees. This development reflects a more widespread turn towards temporary protection and return across the Global North. Drawing on eleven months of fieldwork and interviews with thirty refugees in Denmark, the article applies a temporal lens to analyse how this development is experienced and navigated by refugee families subjected to conditions of prolonged uncertainty, with a focus on how it affects their intergenerational relationships. We find that temporal governance spurs three ‘temporal modalities’ that we call acceleration, entrapment, and rupture, the consequences of which refugees engage with through different tactics related to generational status and social situation. Furthering a conceptualization of displacement as ‘temporal dispossession’, the analysis shows how the temporal governance of refugee families in Denmark permeates the intimate domestic space, bringing family members out of sync, and raising well-founded fears of family separation.