Abstract
Among the flurry of recent migration scholarship, Paolo Boccagni’s Undoing Nothing: Waiting for Asylum, Struggling for Relevance stands out. Empirical and detailed in the best sense, fully concentrated on its migrant protagonists and devoid of sensationalism, it explores themes that resonate far beyond the academic or existential field of migration. It also serves as a model of qualitative social research.
Boccagni conducted four years of ethnographic fieldwork in a northern Italian housing facility for asylum seekers—“the center”—working primarily with young West African and Central Asian men. His fieldwork began in the center’s common areas and gradually extended into residents’ private rooms. At times reminiscent of a Kammerspiel, Undoing Nothing unfolds entirely within the center; yet it is far from a book solely about refugee housing. The center is more than a housing facility, and Boccagni skillfully interweaves reflections on concepts such as home, time, and autonomy with rich descriptions of life inside “a place where nothing ever happens, or so people say” (p. 7).
The men have succeeded in one significant respect: they have crossed and survived international borders designed to deter them. In other ways, they have not succeeded: they remain far from realizing aspirations for an autonomous and fulfilling life, temporally stuck in the asylum procedure and physically stuck in the center—often for years—while they wait for a decision. Migration is a clear turning point—a time of acceleration and transformation—but once they apply for asylum and enter the center, the men face stillness, an existential immobility at odds with their hopes. They wait indefinitely, though not forever, until their case is decided and they must leave abruptly. The journey, however brutal, has a clear goal; what follows is marked by ambivalence.
Although formally engaged in the enforced and indefinite activity of waiting, they actively struggle for relevance through small everyday actions, “[carving] out some special timespace” (p. 63). Contrary to what the center’s appearance and the residents’ occasional indifference to its materials and rules might suggest, the residents are far from “being simply housed in it” (p. 5). They work to fashion a place, if not always a home. In the context of an asylum center, “home” can be as minimal as a smartphone or one’s own body. At the same time, the losses of migration put other experiences of grief into perspective. As one interlocutor remarks, “once you have abandoned your dear ones, no subsequent separation will be as tough” (p. 28). Boccagni portrays this peculiar situation with just the right balance of gravity and wit, and with a talent for embedding deeply personal stories in larger political contexts, often through subtle allusions.
Boccagni’s analytical focus on “nothing” is not a purely academic conceit; “doing nothing . . . is no literary device” (p. 3). First, migrants like his interlocutors often bear the public image of doing nothing, a stereotype that can become a self-fulfilling prophecy when investments in asylum seekers are cut on the grounds that they “do nothing” anyway. Second, the men are both publicly resented for supposedly doing nothing and tolerated only as long as they remain invisible and inactive. Most importantly, they themselves describe their days as spent doing nothing—not merely echoing external stigma but articulating genuine frustration, disappointment, and a sense of falling short of their own aspirations. The insult of “doing nothing” is compounded by ideals of masculinity and adulthood, which fuel the desire to undo nothing. Saying one is doing nothing thus captures an emotional state as much as an actual practice.
Nothing is a crucial frame for the material settings, actions, conversations, and relationships Boccagni describes, but what happens in the center is certainly not nothing. As he notes, it is an “obvious statement that things happen even in apparently empty and meaningless spaces” (p. 171). Residents watch TV, make phone calls, converse, scroll through their phones, listen to music, exercise on the stairs, nap, pray, do laundry, or clean and decorate their rooms. They all share a problem: “how to make time go by” (p. 79)—a problem that seems both trivial (time will pass regardless) and ironic (wasn’t the point of migrating to use time more productively in Europe?).
Sometimes residents do leave the center: “after extended rounds of body washing and care” (p. 81), they take a walk or go for a jog, look for free Wi-Fi or work, buy groceries, or occasionally attend a class or appointment. Activities outside help defeminize their position. They feel feminized by the sheer amount of life that takes place indoors, and they feel infantilized by the center’s rules and curfews and, more broadly, by their lack of language proficiency, money, and autonomy.
Although Boccagni focuses unwaveringly on the experience of migrant residents, he occasionally lets staff members’ comments enter the narrative, adding to the book’s theatrical quality. The center’s employees appear as minor actors whose remarks nonetheless help set the stage. They sweep scattered date seeds onto prayer rugs to prompt residents to pick them up. They wonder why the young men don’t volunteer, given that they have so much time, and why, like the sick or elderly, they sit in their beds for hours, “holing up here the whole day” (p. 77). At the same time, they remark, perhaps as one might about children: “At the end of the day, they’re happier than us!” (p. 138). Boccagni uses the staff’s bewilderment to probe the ambivalences shaping residents’ lives: beds are sites of retreat, refuge, and sovereignty as much as sociality; being cared for is both infantilizing and tempting; happiness is complicated. Besides the cast of characters, the book also contains numerous theatrical scenes: the clock on the wall turns until the battery dies, and the NGO running the center does not replace it.
Readers accustomed to more conventional migration scholarship may find some themes underexplored: residents’ interactions outside the center, their reasons for migrating, their motivations for seeking asylum, their experiences with European bureaucracy, their trajectories after leaving, or the effects of the pandemic and Italian political economy. I, for one, appreciated Boccagni’s steady focus on life inside the center and on residents’ daily horizons. People’s touch points with world events—even when discursively positioned at the center—are often subtle. Rising nativism, Italy’s economic challenges, or the COVID-19 pandemic all affect the center and its residents, for example by reducing psycho-social and educational support or limiting job opportunities, but they remain the supporting cast. In the center—“an experiential bubble of parallel normality” (p. 3)—the residents are the main actors, however ironically, given how little influence they have over the center or their own presence in it.
Asylum centers may seem an obvious site for fieldwork, yet surprisingly little long-term ethnographic research is conducted exclusively within them. Boccagni’s first achievement is to reveal this little-known world—one of ethnography’s original promises. Beyond being a pleasure to read, the book offers insightful observations that are sophisticated without affectation and empirically rich without losing sight of the whole. Readers interested in ethnography, gender, housing, home, or the politics of time—as well as migration and asylum—will find much to ponder. I have also found a new ethnography to shelve among my favorites.