Paolo Boccagni is Professor in Sociology at the University of Trento. A former ERC grantee, he has researched and written on migration, home & homing, diversity, displacement, and social welfare. Starting from everyday life, his fieldwork tries to scale up and out local insights and findings by way of comparison, resonance, metaphor, and functional equivalence. He has recently completed a research cycle on the lived experience of home, with a main focus on people with a migration background and on shared housing. He is now starting a new research pathway on the meanings and impacts of different forms of absence, and on related struggles for re-establishing forms of social presence. Other emerging research concerns involve nothingness, ambivalence, and (ir)relevance; the tensions between mobility and immobility; the encounter with death after migration and displacement; the social production of memory and the role of future-related imaginaries and practices; the promise of participatory and narrative research methods. His teaching is mainly in sociology, social work, migration studies and qualitative research methods. He often participates in seminars and book presentations, in Italy and elsewhere, and in evaluation processes of grant applications for EU and European national funding bodies. His recent books include the Handbook on home and migration (ed., Elgar, 2023), Vite ferme (“Still Lives”, Il Mulino, 2024), Undoing nothing: Waiting for asylum, struggling for relevance (2025) and Death in Migration: Foregrounding loss, grieving and memory out of place (coauth., 2026). He can be reached by email [paolo.boccagni@unitn.it] and on linked-in.