Paolo Boccagni will discuss his book, "Undoing Nothing" (UC Press, 2025), which 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.

12:00 PM - 1:30 PM
Webinar

What does everyday life look like for young men who flee to Europe, survive, and are then assigned temporary housing? Hyper-surveillance or parallel normality, irrelevance, or even nothingness? Based on four years of ethnographic research, "Undoing Nothing: Waiting for Asylum, Struggling for Relevance" (UC Press, 2025) 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.

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. As Alexandra Délano Alonso recently wrote, the book “brings us in to consider our own ways of seeing, our own ways of engaging with migration contexts, inviting us to slow down and observe . . . our shared accountability for the conditions that allow others to make home, imagine the future, live the ‘good life.’”

Paolo Boccagni is professor of Sociology at the University of Trento in Italy. He has extensively researched and written on migration, home, displacement, absence and everyday life. In addition to "Undoing Nothing," he is the author of  "Death in Migration: Foregrounding Loss, Grieving and Memory Out of Place" and "Migration and the Search for Home: Mapping Domestic Space in Migrants’ Everyday Lives," and the editor of the "Handbook on Home and Migration."

Register for the webinar here.

Download flyer.

Sponsor(s): Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative; UC Davis Global Migration Center; UCSD Center for Comparative Immigration Studies