Frantic Time: boredom and uncertainty among newcomers in Germany.

Dr Leonie Schulte

Department of Anthropology, University of Wisconsin-Madison

The talk attends to protracted experiences of boredom among newcomer communities  in Germany. Experiences which emerge from prolonged waiting, uncertainty and  temporal dispossession within the integration and professional recognition processes newcomers are required to undergo to enter the labor market. Through ethnographic research spanning seven years among newcomers from Syria and Ukraine, the paper  examines how bureaucratic procedures, particularly professional recognition and language integration programs, constrain newcomers' agency over their time. The paper complicates conventional notions of boredom, arguing that it arises from the intersection of hope, waiting, and confinement, rather than empty time. This boredom is characterized by the frantic navigation of bureaucratic institutions and the opaque requirements of the German government, engendering a sense of meaninglessness and pervasive uncertainty. In so doing, the talk foregrounds the temporal and affective experiences of displacement and the everyday, compounding impacts of European migration governance. As I argue, expressions of boredom act as key modes of political engagement and social critiques of a policy regime which chokes and unequally distributes the ability to strive towards livable futures.

Leonie Schulte is an assistant professor of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she is also affiliated with the department of German, Nordic and Slavic+ and the Center for German and European Studies. She is also an affiliated faculty member at the Berlin Institute for Empirical Integration and Migration Research (BIM), Humboldt University. Her research over the last ten years uses ethnographic methods to examine the impacts of Germany’s language and integration policies on newcomer communities.