Carolin Leutloff-Grandits
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New pasts, presents and futures
Time and space in family migrant networks between Kosovo and western Europe

The chapter analyses the shifting and layered temporalities within Kosovo-Albanians’ transnational family networks, illustrating both changing border regimes and divergent experiences and representations of border-crossing. The last three decades have entailed significant changes in Kosovo-Albanians’ past-future spatialities. Before 1989, many Kosovo-Albanians viewed migration to West Europe as temporary. After 1989, Kosovo’s ethnicised conflicts problematised the migrant’s ‘home-time’. Today, many migrants dismiss home-time as stagnant. They plan a future within the European Union for their children. Yet many also hope that their children will marry someone from home, in order to retain links with a static, idealised home, a time-space to which they themselves often hope to retire. Many villagers share at least part of this dream; they hope to flee stagnation and build a future abroad, a dream which, due to increasingly stringent entry regulations, is realised primarily through marriage migration. But marriage, in turn, is pre-eminently a village and family affair. Thus are the different time-space experiences of migrant and non-migrant re-synchronized through the strategies of transborder family networks. These times are brought into alignment, not least by the cyclical temporalities of family festivals (such as marriages) that draw migrants home.

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Migrating borders and moving times

Temporality and the crossing of borders in Europe

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