Thick leisure. Waiting time in a migratory context

The contribution, based on an ethnographic research, looks at leisure through the lens of solidarity processes of active citizenship that involve refugees in marginal urban spaces in the city of Rome. In particular, it considers the relation between the dimension of leisure, as interpreted by activists and volunteers of the Baobab Experience association, in relation to the dimension of waiting among migrants in-transit, refugees and asylum seekers. The study’s context encompasses a series of informal locations where refugees are provided food, provisional shelter and basic services, and are invited to fill the time not spent in bureaucratic paperwork, with quality time. Refugees living in these urban informal encampments experience externally imposed constraints that force them in a suspended time condition which includes: the juridical administrative dimension; internal EU regulations which limit geographical mobility; material deprivation due to the precariousness of street life; and affective deprivation due to loosening family ties. We define such situation as structural suspension. In short, refugees have plenty of dilated time. In response to this, activists, jointly with other organizations as well as with the refugees, have proposed an array of projects – that we interpret as leisure events – which might convert the waiting time into meaningful time, launching such slogans as: “We also want roses”. In the essay activists and refugees will be perceived as subjects engaged in ongoing creative solidarity processes of active citizenship and grassroots inclusion within the hosting society through the privileged means of leisure.