Undoing nothing, making relevance, and embracing ambivalence: home and place-making in migration contexts

This paper is part of the review symposium of Paolo Boccagni’s Undoing Nothing: Waiting for Asylum, Struggling for Relevance (Oakland: University of California Press, 2025). I center my comment on the contribution of the three main concepts in the book: nothing, relevance and ambivalence, in relation to debates around integration, belonging, placemaking and temporality. I also consider how the focus on asylum seekers’ practices of placemaking in a context of racialization sheds light on the structural conditions of violence in host societies and how this book offers new perspectives to understand and respond to them.