FACULTY OF CULTURE AND SOCIETY | Dissertation defence
Dissertation defence – Hilda Gustafsson

Over the past three decades, Swedish family migration policy has undergone a gradual restrictive and selective shift. As a consequence, some families seeking residency in Sweden today face a number of requirements, while others can immigrate with relative ease. Against this backdrop, the present thesis examines two temporal dimensions of the current Swedish family migration landscape.

First, it explores families’ experiences of waiting while seeking permission to live together in Sweden. Second, it examines how time is employed as a mechanism of governance in family migration, with a particular focus on the Swedish migration regime. Accordingly, the thesis asks: how is time used as a governance mechanism by the Swedish family migration regime, and how do families seeking to live in Sweden experience waiting?

The thesis consists of a covering essay and three peer-reviewed articles which draw on two empirical materials. The first material is analyzed in Articles 1 and 2 and comprises 22 joint and individual semi-structured interviews with people with experience of Swedish family migration: individuals with work permits, Swedish citizens, student permit holders, refugees, EU citizens, and their family members who sought to live in Sweden. Most of these families lived forcibly transnational lives while awaiting a decision from the Swedish Migration Agency. The second material consists of previous research on temporal governance and is analyzed in Article 3.

In the first article, families’ experiences of waiting in the context of Swedish family migration are examined. Unlike much previous research, it approaches waiting as a collective phenomenon and argues that it must be understood as a joint, rather than solely individual, experience. Through three families’ narratives, the article shows how waiting is negotiated transnationally between individual family members, and lived through shared activities and experiences. It highlights the mutual adaptations required by family members to meet the Swedish migration regime’s requirements, and how togetherness becomes a common future goal toward which families strive.

The second article examines how temporal borders, defined as the mechanisms through which migration regimes regulate families’ time, intersect with notions of deservingness in the Swedish family migration regime. The article, co-written with Dr. Rikard Engblom, combines interviews from the present thesis with interviews from Engblom’s thesis on asylum seekers’ experiences of waiting in Sweden. The article shows how age limits, maintenance requirements, and global visa regimes interact with factors such as race, ethnicity, legal status, gender, ability, and nationality, and how these policies thereby reproduce global mobility hierarchies. As a result, access to family migration in Sweden – and thus the waiting time before families can live together – is unevenly distributed among families.

The third and final article theoretically explores how a family perspective can be foregrounded within scholarship on temporal governance. Following the principles of an integrative literature review, it synthesizes the existing literature before proposing the concept of chrononormativity as a theoretical tool for incorporating family perspectives into future analyses of temporal governance. Referring to the social and institutional normalization and privileging of certain life courses, chrononormativity brings together relational and temporal perspectives that have previously often been treated separately. In doing so, it draws attention to the family – which has often been either invisibilized or treated as a descriptive unit within current scholarship – and to critical life course perspectives, highlighting the complex hegemonic timelines imposed by migration regimes on families.

Overall, the thesis makes both theoretical and empirical contributions to the temporal turn in migration studies and to scholarship on Swedish family migration. Theoretically, it widens our understanding of waiting and temporal governance by centering a previously underexplored family perspective, showing that the negotiation and interdependencies of family life are key to grasping these phenomena fully. Empirically, the thesis contributes new knowledge on the implications of Sweden’s increasingly restrictive and selective family migration regulations across multiple legal statuses, moving beyond the dominant focus on refugee families in existing research.