CRS/EUC/Sociology Book Launch: Undoing nothing: Narratives and Practices of everyday life in a place for asylum seekers

October 31, 2025

11am - 12:30pm (Toronto/EDT)

This is a hybrid event

In person: HNES 141 (EUC building, Keele Campus, York University)

Virtually: https://yorku.zoom.us/meeting/register/CmSYa-96SR2j5cqgDK9GQg

Guest speaker: Paolo Boccagni, Professor of Sociology at the University of Trento

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.

Bio:

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.