Undoing nothing: Waiting for asylum, struggling for relevance

• Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies
• MPC: Migration Policy Centre

In this MPC Seminar, Professor Paolo Boccagni will discuss his book, 'Undoing Nothing', which explores the often overlooked struggles of Italian asylum seekers.

What does everyday life look like for young men who flee to Europe, survive, and are then assigned temporary housing? Hypersurveillance or parallel normality, irrelevance, or even nothingness? Based on four years of ethnographic research, Undoing Nothing recounts the untold story of Italian asylum seekers' struggles to produce relevance—that is, to carve out meaning, control, and direction from their legal and existential liminality. Their ways of inhabiting space and time rest on a deeply ambivalent position: together and alone, inside and outside, absent and present. Their racialised bodies dwell in their assigned residence while their selves inhabit a suspended translocal space of moral economies, nightmares, and furtive dreams.

Drawing from his book, Paolo Boccagni (Professor of Sociology at the University of Trento) will explore different angles of Italian asylum seekers' experiences: a critique of state responses to the so-called refugee crisis and nuanced psychological portraits of a demographic rarely afforded narrative depth.

This book is open access and can be downloaded for free on the University of California Press' website.