(CANCELLED) Gender Studies Seminar: “Navigating temporal dispossession and the expanding economy of super-exploitation”

This seminar is cancelled due to illness.

The Gender Studies Seminar Series invite researchers to share their insight on key issues for gendered and sexualized lives and knowledges, and to engage in critical discussions about the development of gender studies as an interdisciplinary and intersectional research field. Bringing together scholars from various research fields and theoretical traditions, this seminar series offers a platform for critical reflexions and new insights. Seeking to provide a space for intellectual exchanges around the role of knowledge production in turbulent times.

The fall 2024 Gender Studies seminar series put the focus on critical contributions and interventions into conditions for knowledge production and struggles for social justice – in the court room, in everyday enactments of situated knowledge, in intersectional modes of protest, and within contexts of emergent authoritarianism. 

Sarah Philipson Isaac has a PhD in Sociology from the University of Gothenburg. 

Abstract 

Using the analytical frame of ‘temporal dispossession’, in the present article, I examine lived experiences of navigating the state production of informalization. This is connected to the increasingly blurred lines between migration regimes and labour market politics in Sweden. With temporary residence permits having become the new norm for asylum policies in Sweden, time and labour market productivity are central to the distribution of vulnerability and life chances, as labour market participation functions as the only means of qualifying for permanent residence. Theoretically engaging with ‘temporal dispossession’ and racial capitalism, I highlight how dispossession operates in and through the border regime, specifically through temporal governance, and how the latter is weaponized to dispossess people of their life chances. 

Empirically, I focus on how the interlocutors inhabit, negotiate, and defy the precarization of asylum through their labour market participation. Their work, however, is marked by superexploitation, as they are pushed to the margins of the labour market, often in informalized, underpaid, or unpaid positions with the promise of future employment and stability. The analysis focuses on the strategies of defiance enacted by the interlocutors and their different ways of interrogating contemporary capitalist formation through their experiences of devaluation at the intersection of asylum and labour.