A conversation on Undoing Nothing Waiting for Asylum, Struggling for Relevance

Abstract

What is daily life like for young people who flee to Europe, survive and are then assigned to temporary accommodation? Hyper-surveillance or parallel normality, irrelevance or even nullity? Based on four years of ethnographic research, Undoing Nothing tells 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 way of inhabiting space and time is based on a deeply ambivalent position: together and alone, inside and outside, absent and present. Undoing Nothing illuminates a distinctly modern form of purgatory, offering both an insightful critique of the state's responses to the so-called refugee crisis and nuanced psychological portraits of a population rarely granted narrative depth and grace.

Speakers

Andrea Brighenti, University of Trento  

Francesca Decimo, University of Trento  

Ester Gallo, University of Trento  

Hans Lucht, Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS) 

Luca Pes, University of Trento  

Bruno Riccio, University of Bologna   
 

Chair

Giuseppe Sciortino, University of Trento