Undoing Nothing: Waiting for Asylum, Struggling for Relevance (1)

By: Paolo Boccagni

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Synopsis: 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.

Book Quality:: Publisher Quality
Book Size:: 226 Pages
ISBN-13:: 9780520404113
Related ISBNs:: 9780520404106
Publisher:: University of California Press
Date of Addition:: 06/03/25
Copyrighted By:: Paolo Boccagni
Adult content:: No
Language:: English
Has Image Descriptions:: No
Categories:: Nonfiction, Social Studies, Law, Legal Issues and Ethics, Politics and Government, Sociology
Submitted By:: Bookshare Staff
Usage Restrictions:: This is a copyrighted book.