On 3 November, at 12pm local time, Paolo Boccagni will give a lecture at the University of Ottawa, as a part of the Migration and Diaspora Studies group activities. The lecture revisits, and elaborates upon, some aspects of the recently published monograph Undoing Nothing. See more details below…

Wearing sedentariness, Dreaming of mobility. Slippers, sneakers, and the tension between survival and success in a place for asylum seekers Paolo Boccagni (University of Trento)

In the Italian asylum center in which I did fieldwork between 2018 and 2022 (Undoing Nothing, University of California Press, 2025), certain objects and belongings are more than background affordances. Once properly contextualized, they are silently telling about the concerns, dreams and nightmares of the young male residents, as they struggle with social, legal and existential suspension. This especially holds for two unremarkable pairs of objects that are literally embodied in their routines. On one hand, the slippers residents wear in the centre, as a part of an informal and almost careless dressing code, might evoke imaginaries of comfort and mastery over place. In fact, they articulate a sense of unwanted sedentariness – of “being home” with “nothing to do”, as people complain, instead of pursuing the new masculine life of advancement, based on an ethics of sacrifice and dedication, that migration should afford. Parallel to slippers, and far less in use, are the sneakers on their room shelves. Their number and visibility is as remarkable as the way in which they are cleaned and taken care of, much more than the surrounding room space. While raising occasional curiosity and weird doubts among the staff, to my eyes as habitual guest these sneakers evoke advancement, modernity, success – or rather, a failure to achieve much of this, and a persistent aspiration toward it.  As of now, most sneakers lie there, still and unused – like their owners, in a way, as long as they keep waiting for a decision on their cases. Nonetheless, by virtue of their presence, and of the gendered and generational imaginaries they elicit, sneakers keep “telling” about the possibility to literally run into the future, as young and athletic men who take care of their outfits and bodies would aspire to do. To that extent, their effective use matters less than their symbolic power – and, for a researcher, their heuristic one. Based on the parallel lives of these ordinary objects in extraordinary circumstances, my lecture shows the potential of material culture as an opening into marginalized and silenced stories of migration and displacement. It also unpacks the tension between use and taste/desire, at a subjective level, as much as between ideals of existential mobility and realities of protracted stasis, at an inter-subjective one.