This event will discuss Paolo Boccagni’s recently published book Undoing Nothing: Waiting for Asylum, Struggling for Relevance (University of California Press 2025). Undoing Nothing unravels the concept of “nothing”, through a beautifully-written ethnography situated in a temporary housing building for asylum seekers in northern Italy.
While much has been written about the infrastructure of refugee camps, detention centers, shelters and temporary housing facilities for asylum seekers, Boccagni’s account centers of the lives of young men in their early twenties, mostly from West Africa, who have been housed for years in this temporary building while they wait for their asylum cases to be resolved, or for a stable enough job that will allow them to pay for their own housing while they wait for a decision about their migration status. A timely and important book that contributes to debates around temporality and spatial politics in contexts of mobility, and also raises significant questions about broader structures of exclusion within host societies.
Presented by Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility at New School for Social Research and The New School.
Paolo Boccagni is Professor of Sociology at the University of Trento. He has extensively researched and written on migration, home, displacement, absence, and everyday life. He is the author of Migration and the Search for Home: Mapping Domestic Space in Migrants' Everyday Lives and the editor of the Handbook on Home and Migration.
Alexandra Délano Alonso is Professor of Politics and Global Studies at The New School and Eugene M. Lang Professor for Excellence in Teaching and Mentoring. As a migration scholar, her earlier writing examines the Mexican state’s relations with its diaspora in the United States and, more recently, the shifting forms of agency and solidarity created by and for migrants at the margins of the state, both in Mexico and in the United States.
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