This paper explores the intersections of migration, hope and visions of the future in contexts of precarity by focusing on Nepali migration experiences at home and abroad. It examines Nepali foreign labour migration by analysing the notion of hope and how it shapes the everyday experience of waiting and imaginative future(s) among Nepali individuals and their families. Based on over 15 months of multi-sited anthropological fieldwork in Nepal, Portugal, and the UK, this research describes, analyses and bears witness to how Nepali individuals and their families engage with the ideas and practicalities of migration and its ongoing ensuing trajectories.

It draws on the imaginative aspects of migration among Nepalis, which are continually (re)shaped through everyday activities, commitments, and pursuits within the conditions of hope and waiting that migration begets amidst conditions of precarity. It discusses hope, both in the individual and collective sense and examines how it underlines precarious migratory undertakings among Nepalis by paying close attention to local understandings indicative of the conditions of hope in Nepal. In examining the social and economic realities associated with migratory comings and goings amidst precarity by positioning everyday human experiences to discussions of migration, this paper claims hope as a relational and analytical tool for capturing migrants’ lived experiences.

Approaching hope as an analytical framework implies both potentiality and uncertainty; the former encompasses desires, dreams, and social imaginaries of the good life in the horizons of the future, while the latter examines unpredictable or precarious life contexts and how people confront them. Hence, this paper further espouses waiting and the ways in which waiting is experienced – not simply as a condition of precarity but also as phenomena imbued with inspiration for actions and hopeful undertakings within the context of foreign labour migration. By drawing on various theoretical approaches to waiting and engaging with numerous ethnographic examples, I articulate understandings and experiences of waiting within the social and political landscape in Nepal – to illustrate how hope and imagination alongside the conditions of waiting are interwoven within migratory aspirations and undertakings, as they ongoingly shape each other and mould people’s everyday experience and imaginative future(s).