No Destination? Unveiling the Traces of the Future Among Young Asylum Seekers in “Waithood”

ABSTRACT What is the future like for young men who feel spatially and temporally stuck, like dozens of thousands who fled West Africa and reached Europe over the last decade, only to end up in the “waithood” of asylum reception? Is there any meaningful destination ahead of them? On the surface, their social and legal precarity is hard to reconcile with future aspirations, let alone anticipations. However, the alluring vision of a future “good life”, which informed their migration pathways, may survive the clash between the linear, accelerated time of migration and the circular, static time of asylum. As my ethnography in a reception centre of Northern Italy shows, meaningful traces of the future emerge across the residents' fragmented narratives, practices, and material cultures. These are multi‐sensory signals about the possibility of a certain future, and assertions about its moral worth. Unveiling them casts light on the subjective understanding of the future on multiple scales, as an aspired gendered transition to autonomy and adulthood. It also shows that anticipation matters, even when it only draws on an implicit register of emotions, atmospheres, and daily routines. It is a way of preparing oneself for an unpredictable future – and of coping and making sense of the suspended temporality of asylum.