A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. 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 racialized bodies dwell in their assigned residence while their selves inhabit a suspended translocal space of moral economies, nightmares, and furtive dreams. This book illuminates a distinctly modern form of purgatory, offering both a perceptive critique of state responses to the so-called refugee crisis and nuanced psychological portraits of a demographic rarely afforded narrative depth and grace.
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.
"Within the magnitude of academic work on asylum seekers and African migrants in Europe, Undoing Nothing is an exceptional book. Not only is it beautifully written and meticulously researched, but it provides us with an analytical approach that manages to capture the ambivalent being and presence that characterize the circumstances of many migrants within the EU. The book thus moves us away from dramatic and sensational descriptions of refugee predicaments and toward a detailed and perceptive analysis of the ways people navigate and manage their lives in the interstices between being stuck and in motion, surviving and aspiring. An essential read for anyone working on everyday spaces of marginality."—Henrik Vigh, Professor of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen
"Paolo Boccagni's ethnography of the absurd confronts the existential question of what it means to live in limbo while waiting for asylum. This is a serious work from a leading thinker on how migration shapes experiences of being 'home.'"—David FitzGerald, Professor of Sociology, University of California, San Diego
"A must-read book in the age of legal and existential liminality for asylum seekers. Boccagni shows how young racialized West African men live their everyday lives in the context of an asylum-seeker center that is framed as 'apparent nothingness.' The challenge is, How to undo this nothingness?"—Ilse van Liempt, Associate Professor of Human Geography, Utrecht University
226 pp.6 x 9Illus: 25 color illustrations
9780520404106$34.95|£30.00Paper
Jun 2025