In their own time

Refugee healthcare professionals' attempts at temporal re-appropriation

Bibliographic Data

ID4356096
AuthorsKatarina Mozetič (0000-0003-4693-0329, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway, corresponding author)
Year2022
Volume31
Issue3
Pages415-436
Publication date2022-08-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueTime & Society (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0961-463X • E-ISSN: 1461-7463
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/0961463x221083788
OpenAlexW4224257507
LanguageEN
Citations received10
References cited53

Scholarship on refugee labour market participation regularly alludes to the temporal dimension of the process, yet explicit engagement with it remains limited. I argue that researching the temporalities of refugee employment re-entry is valuable as it discerns the recursive interrelation between social structure and individual agency that advances or curbs the labour market trajectories of refugees. Namely, refugees' perceptions of time inform their integration pathways. In this article, I interrogate how highly educated refugees perceive the temporalities imposed upon them by the integration framework, their efforts of temporal re-appropriation and the ways in which institutional factors inform these re-appropriation efforts and, thus, individuals' sense of integration. To this end, I discuss and compare 11 refugee healthcare professionals' perceptions of licensure procedures in Oslo and Malmö based on material from semi-structured interviews. The refugee professionals reported that the licensure appropriated their time through, for instance, prolonged suspension from work and abundance of pointless waiting time. Seeing time as a precious commodity, they deemed the imposed temporalities as problematic, employing different attempts of temporal agency to speed up the licensure process. When comparing the attempts of temporal re-appropriation between the licensure procedures in Oslo and Malmö, I find that the perceived clarity of the licensure requirements and process, accessibility of support structures and existence of tailored qualification programmes lend licensure a quality of institutional plasticity. This fosters individuals' attempts to accelerate their licensure endeavours, thereby promoting their re-entry into the labour market. However, rather than disrupting the underlying power relations determining the relative value of foreign healthcare qualifications, temporal re-appropriation maintained the established institutional rationale

Agency (philosophy · Appropriation · Deskilling · Epistemology · Licensure · Political science · Public relations · Refugee · Social science · Sociology · Temporalities · Work (physics · Law · Migration and Labor Dynamics · Migration, Health and Trauma · Migration, Refugees, and Integration

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