Waiting Time

Abstract

This article analyses the relationship between time and subjectification, focusing on the temporal structures created within Danish asylum centres and politics, and on children’s experiences of and reactions to open-ended waiting. Such waiting leads to existential boredom which manifests in the children as restlessness, fatigue and despair. The article argues that in Danish asylum centres children live neither in the present nor in the future; they live without a justified existence and thus in processes of de-subjectification.