The study of time and temporality can provide a critical understanding of the migration process and be analysed to understand temporal governance and migrants' lived temporal experiences. This article draws on Cwerner's understanding of time politics and Griffiths' theorisation of temporal tensions to consider how temporal governance and temporal regulations affect children's lived temporalities. The article draws on ethnographic fieldwork in the tradition of the sociology of childhood to explore children's lived experiences of time and temporalities in the Swedish asylum reception system and the resettlement process. The article shows how the children's lived experiences entailed different dimensions of time and temporalities and considers how time politics and temporal tensions affect childhood conditions. The article particularly explores children's lived experiences of the temporalities embedded in migration politics concerning school and housing. The article argues that children's lived experiences of time and temporality may contribute to an understanding of how the time politics embedded in the asylum reception system and the resettlement affects the conditions of asylum childhoods and in turn has an impact on children's rights.

Sweden’s school-age educare has been identified as important for children’s access to play and meaningful leisure. However, research has not addressed asylum-seeking children’s access to school-age educare or its potential role in asylum contexts. This article draws on data from a 1-year ethnographic fieldwork with children in a Swedish asylum context and explores asylum-seeking children’s perspectives and experiences in a context of non-access to school-age educare. The article shows that the children attached positive meanings to school-age educare and were affected negatively by their exclusion from activities in these centres. The article discusses the potential role of school-age educare for children in asylum contexts and argues that school-age educare could play an important compensatory role for asylum-seeking children’s overall living conditions, both in terms of care provision and in terms of possibilities for play and meaningful leisure.

Detta bidrag bygger på reflektioner kring lyssnande på barn i en asylkontext hämtat från ett etnografiskt fältarbete på ett asylboende under den så kallade ”flyktingkrisen”. Denna studie lyfter fram etiskt lyssnande på barn genomsyrat av lyhördhet för barns olika sätt att uttrycka sig på samt vikten av respekt för barns integritet i forskningsprocessen. I artikeln uppmärksammas även metodologisk reflexivitet genom ett etnografiskt lyssnande på barns verbala och icke-verbala röster. Denna studie lyfter framförallt fram hur lyssnande på asylsökande barns emotioner och affekt kan bidra till en förståelse för barns levda rädslor. Denna studie visar särskilt hur lyssnande på asylsökande barns verbaliserade och icke-verbaliserade förkroppsligade uttryck kan bidra till en fördjupad förståelse för hur barn navigerar i den asylpolitik som sipprar ner i asylsökande barns vardagsliv. Sammanfattningsvis belyses hur lyssnande på barnen i denna studie kan bidra till att förstå den så kallade ”flyktingkrisen” ur ett barnperspektiv.

This contribution is based on reflections on listening to children in an asylum context as part of ethnographic fieldwork in an asylum centre during the so-called ”refugee crisis”. The study highlights ethical listening as a research approach imbued with responsiveness to children’s different ways of expressing themselves as well as the importance of respect for children’s integrity. The article also draws attention to methodological reflexivity through ethnographic listening to children’s verbal and non-verbal voices and how listening to asylum-seeking children’s emotions and affect can contribute to an understanding of their lived fears. It shows how listening to asylum-seeking children’s verbalized and non-verbalized embodied expressions can contribute to a deeper understanding of how children navigate the asylum politics that trickle down into their everyday lives. In summary, this study highlights how listening to the participating children can help to understand the so-called “refugee crisis” from a child perspective.

This thesis explores asylum-seeking children’s everyday politics in relation to their situation in the Swedish reception system. It engages in a theorization of children’s political agency in which a broad definition of politics is adopted to examine and acknowledge the politics embedded in children’s everyday spaces and children’s everyday actions. Methodologically, it draws on a one-year ethnographic fieldwork and participatory methods with 18 children aged 6-12 years in two institutional settings: the school and the asylum centre. The thesis involves three empirical studies, covering arenas that the children themselves identified as important in their everyday lives.

The first study explores the children’s articulated standpoints on “home” underpinned by their experiences of an institutional housing lacking home-like conditions. It shows how the children’s articulations identified spatial and relational conditions of “house” and “home” and how they criticized the asylum centre’s regulated time-space, which denied them these conditions, for example, desired food practices, spaces for play, privacy and family life. Moreover, the children’s experiences of living in an unsafe housing was reinforced through their lived fears, that is, their experiences of threats from the “Police” or “Security” and overly strict treatment from staff members of the “Reception” in addition to their fear of deportation. This study shows how the children’s critique implicitly identified how their right to wellbeing in their housing was restricted or denied.

The second study focuses on children’s politics of play, manifested in what I have called their play tactics in the asylum centre’s strongly regulated time-space. It shows how the children developed a hidden resistance when they navigated in the asylum centre, that is, how they identified and handled the institutional regulations, amid their lived fears. This article specifically analyses how children’s play tactics can be understood as rights claims in a context where the children were denied spaces for play due to the asylum centre’s spatial restrictions, in the form of rules, prohibition signs and threats of repercussions from staff members.

The third study explores belonging and the politics of belonging through the children’s articulated emotions as responses to practices of inclusion or exclusion in the school setting. It shows how the children responded positively, with love and happiness, or negatively, with anger, fear or sadness, depending on how practices and relations affected their sense of belonging in school. This article shows how the children’s articulated emotions contested exclusionary practices that positioned them as Others who could potentially be deported, revealing how the children were emotionally affected when their rights were denied.

In conclusion, this thesis shows how the children were affected by the conditions embedded in asylum politics and how their political agency was evoked and enacted in relation to the politics that permeated their everyday lives. It argues that the children’s ways of engaging in hidden politics should be understood in relation to their uncertain position in this high-stakes context. The combined analyses of children’s everyday politics in the three studies have also illuminated, what I have called, children’s lived rights in an asylum context.

This study illustrates how asylum‐seeking children, through articulated emotions, respond to being affected by experiences that enhance or restrict their sense of belonging. The findings show that, owing to power structures and relations, the children's sense of belonging was made uncertain by temporal, situational and relational boundaries of belonging. However, through their articulations, the children also contested these boundaries. The study argues that the children were moved by their structural situatedness and that their articulated emotions demonstrated their micro‐politics. The study also visualises how children may be affected when their rights are not realised in their lived forms.

This study explores children’s lived rights and articulated politics in the context of housing underpinned by their lived experiences in an asylum centre in Sweden. The findings reveal a discrepancy between the children’s articulated standpoints, where well-being is connected to having a home, and their lived experiences of lacking conditions for both house and home at the asylum centre. This discrepancy enables demonstration of the children’s articulated politics, as they criticize conditions, practices and relational aspects they experience as constraining their well-being at the asylum centre. Thereby, the children themselves identify the structural denial of their right to conditions for well-being and adequate housing. They also express what conditions for well-being should be accessible to them, which is interpreted here as their making rights claims when their formal rights are not fulfilled.

This study explores how children navigate institutional regulation at an asylum centre and how their political acts of resistance are expressed through their struggle to access play. It shows that the children used tactical awareness to identify the displayed strategies of the institutional regulation, which was conditional for their development of tactical acts, through which they handled that regulation. The children’s political acts of resistance and struggle for play, which were hidden to the institution, demonstrated how they claimed their right to play, although this right was still structurally denied. Consequently, their politics is a politics of impediment.