Moving while Waiting for the Future: Mobility and Education in Šid, Serbia

Abstract

The status of the “double transit” countries is associated with the ex-Yugoslav (Western) Balkan countries used to depict perspective towards the EU for both the local population and the people on the move coming from the Global South. This article explores mobilities in the Serbian town, Šid, both during the 1990s and in the aftermath of 2015, by analyzing ethnographic fieldwork notes and interviews conducted during joint research. Considering its location, on the very border with Croatia, also forming the external border of the EU, this town has been a stopover and a transit place during various migration movements. The lives of people involved in these movements may seem very different at the moment, but they are connected by similar experiences of mobility and/or “stuckedness.” We ask how one can relate concepts of transit, waiting, hope and stuckedness to the process of education in Šid. Like transit and waiting, education always anticipates some kind of future; it represents “a ticket to the future.” In considering the entangled perspectives of local Šid inhabitants and migrants from the Global South today, we will critically consider the concept of “waiting for the future.”