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.

Paolo Boccagni

Event Speaker

Alexandra Délano Alonso

Senior Research Fellow