Navigating Wait Space in Uncertain Times: Young Women and Precarious Labour in Turkey

Despite dramatic increases in university graduates over the last 30 years, unemployment rates among youth with advanced education in Turkey remain some of the highest in the world. With levels of unemployment among university graduates almost equal that of high school graduates, the promise of social mobility and formal waged work that higher education once promised, no longer holds credibility. Many young people, instead find themselves in waithood—a state characterised by uncertainty, joblessness, and obstacles to independent adulthood. Studies tend to view waithood temporally as a period of indeterminacy and frustrated futures, but we argue, waithood also encompasses spatial dimensions that are liberatory in so far as they communicate a demand for a liveable life. Examining how young women in Turkey navigate both the state’s conservative politics, and restricted employment opportunities, we use the term “wait space” to capture what an attentiveness to the intimate connection between space and time and work offers to our understanding of the politics and possibilities of work beyond the wage.