Understanding poverty and income inequality through time and temporalities

When people migrate across borders, they become subject to – and participate in – new regimes of value and meaning that may take temporal as well as political dimensions. Nevertheless, time is seldom mentioned in the analyses of their experiences (Hurd, Donnan and Leutloff-Grandits 2017, 11). Indeed, the literature on migration often emphasises movement across space to the relative detriment of developing and understanding how migration is also a temporal strategy, involving an evaluation of past experience and a desire to achieve some improvement for the future (Bastia and McGrath, 2011, 11). It is true that, more recently, time and temporality in migration studies has started to become a fertile field of study (Cwerner 2001; King et al 2006; Cojocaru 2016; Baas and Yeoh 2019; Griffiths 2021; Ho 2021; Jacobsen and Carlsen 2022), but this relationship and its critical potential is quite scarce in the analysis of South-South migration dynamics, especially if we think about the potential in disclosing different complex ways in which time is intertwined with inequality. This special issue presents analyses of recent and original field data from various countries in Africa and Asia (Ethiopia, South Africa, Ghana, Burkina Faso, Cote d’Ivoire, China, Nepal) with the aim of discussing the role of time and temporality in shaping migration experiences, situating decision making, and explaining migrants’ strategies in settling, returning, and coping with irregularity. In the contributions, poverty and income inequality are examined as they intersect with other inequalities – social and political, structural – and as they confront the variable of time.