Urban Ethnography Reading Group #4

For this week’s ethnographic reading group, we read Undoing Nothing: Waiting for Asylum, Struggling for Relevance by Paolo Boccagni. This marks our first book in the book list of an ethnography conducted within Europe.  

Here are some key discussion points from our reading group.  

1. Researching the “Silent” Margins   

As our own research deals with urban poverty, we found strong parallels between Boccagni’s asylum seekers and the participants in our project, as they both are experiencing marginality and limited autonomy. During the discussion, we focused specifically on the methodology of researching silence. Undoing Nothing serves as an excellent example of how to document boredom and silence, not as an absence of data, but as a central, lived experience of loss of autonomy and what Boccagni refers to as relevance – a concept that to Simona resonated with De Martino’s presence and presentification techniques as the relative forms of sense-making. This provided fresh inspiration for our own ethnographic fieldwork.  

2. Approaches to analysis and writing   

Having previously focused on US-based ethnographies, we noticed a difference in tone. While American ethnographies often lean toward a narrative, storytelling style designed for a general audience, Boccagni’s work seems more academic-oriented. Furthermore, with our relational approach to ethnography in mind, our curiosity focused on how the dynamics happening in the centre followed and unfolded outside of it and in the broader context of the city. We then expanded on how specificities of a city might influence the entanglement of the centre in a city.  

3. Regional Nuances   

For Shiori and Marga it was particularly interesting to learn about the dynamics of life in an asylum seeker centre in a first-arrival country like Italy in the Mediterranean migratory route. This fostered a fruitful conversation with the perspectives of Simona, Filippo, and Alejandro, who have more familiarity with the Italian context and sparked questions on how the local political, social, and cultural contexts can influence different experiences of marginality.  

For the next meeting, we will be reading a few papers on comparative ethnography. 

Boccagni, P. (2025). Undoing nothing: waiting for asylum, struggling for relevance. University of California Press.