Paolo Boccagni will give a lecture at the Department of Sociology and Interdisciplinary Social Sciences of USF – University of South Florida, next April 16 at 10.30. The lecture belongs to the Spencer Cahill Annual Lecture Series.

Worldwide, asylum reception centers and “camps” are micro-spaces that embody the humanitarian side of the refugee regime. As such, they are of increasing interest to scholars in the areas of (forced) migration, housing, and border studies. Only a fraction of this literature, however, draws on ethnographic fieldwork undertaken within these infrastructures. One example is the four-year ethnography I conducted in an asylum center in northern Italy which housed young male asylum seekers, mostly from West Africa, while they were waiting for their applications to be processed (a book with University of California Press is forthcoming). My lecture unpacks the racialized and gendered tensions, dilemmas, and inequalities that inform everyday life in a forced waiting modus among young Black men who have “made it” to Europe but remain potentially deportable. I argue that everyday life in an apparently meaningless and empty time-space is made up of continuous boundary-making among residents and with service providers. In the rooms and shared kitchens that operate as proxies of domestic spaces, residents do not simply “wait”. They engage in forms of space appropriation (and occasionally form attachments) that illustrate the ubiquity of homemaking even in temporary and unhomely settings. As long as someone is stuck in it, a refugee room offers little of an external view, however, it provides a unique internal window into its occupant’s everyday life experience, practices, and future prospects.