Book Talk: Undoing Nothing — Waiting for Asylum, Struggling for Relevance
Sociologist Paolo Boccagni presents his ethnography of young West African asylum seekers in limbo in northern Italy — examining how waiting erodes identity and how people resist erasure.
Why we picked this
Boccagni's subject is waiting itself — what it does to people when their time is no longer their own. The ethnographic setting is Italy, but the structural question about how forced suspension destroys relevance and selfhood applies to every country running an asylum system.
What happens to a person when they are made to wait indefinitely — when the state suspends their life while reviewing their claim for protection? Sociologist Paolo Boccagni’s Undoing Nothing: Waiting for Asylum, Struggling for Relevance (University of California Press) follows young men in their early twenties, mostly from West Africa, as they inhabit temporary housing in northern Italy in a state of enforced suspension. The ethnography is an account of what waiting — institutionally mandated, open-ended, without clear horizon — does to people’s sense of self, purpose, and social existence.
Boccagni’s analysis focuses on what he calls “relevance” — the sense that one matters, that one’s actions have consequences, that one exists in meaningful relationship to others and to time. The asylum system, he argues, doesn’t only restrict movement; it attacks the conditions under which relevance is possible. His subjects resist this erosion through micro-practices of dignity and connection that the official system fails to register. The book contributes to intersecting literatures on mobility and displacement infrastructure, temporality and inequality, and the politics of waiting.
The talk is free and in-person at The New School, a university with a long history of engagement with migration, displacement, and stateless persons — its founding was itself an act of solidarity with European scholars fleeing fascism. For anyone working on immigration policy, social theory, or the ethics of border regimes, this is a rigorous empirical account of what the system looks like from inside the waiting room.