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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.

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Table of contents
- Cover
- Title
- Copyright
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1. The Background
- 2. The Center
- 3. Inside, Outside
- 4. Still, Moving
- 5. Present, Absent
- 6. Dirty, Clean
- 7. Home, Non-home
- Conclusion
- Notes
- References
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Yes, you can access Undoing Nothing by Paolo Boccagni in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Social Sciences & Immigration Law. We have over 1.5 million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.