Amanda Poole of the Department of Anthropology co-authored an article with Jennifer Riggan of Arcadia University, titled "Time with/out Telos: Eritrean Refugees' Precarious Choice of Im/possible Futures in Ethiopia and Beyond."
Why do so many refugees engage in irregular onward movement despite grave risks and the presence of programs intended to stop them from migrating? In this article, Poole and Riggan argue that refugees' active engagement with projects of time-making frames their decision making. Refugees' time-making projects involve ordering time in linear or non-linear sequences through orienting themselves towards the past, present, near future, or distant future and, in doing so, creating a relationship between distinct temporalities, refugee bodies, and the spaces they inhabit.
Based on more than two years of multi-sited, multi-leveled ethnographic research which analyzed the relationship between refugee discourse about onward movement and its relationship with educational programming intended to stop it, Poole and Riggan identify the interplay of three distinct forms of temporality among refugees: the empty or "animal" time endemic in the camp; teleological time such as is inherent to educational processes; and "prophetic time," a concept they draw from Jane Guyer's (2007) work on futurity to describe a form of time that organizes the present through attachment to distant futures and faraway places.
They push theories of temporal trauma and precarity by considering the ways in which refugees are not merely "stuck." While empty time is traumatic because it is an index of precarity, teleological time embedded in education programs is a violent illusion that shifts the blame to refugees for their mis/use of time. In response to traumatic empty time on one hand and the violence of teleological time on the other, refugees turn to various incarnations of prophetic time, which they argue often frame decision making about migration.
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