Undoing Nothing: From an Ethnography with Young Asylum Seekers to a Sociological Research Agenda

What does "doing nothing" mean for young people like asylum seekers in "waithood"? And what lies behind "nothing", aside from the obvious fact that "something" is happening nonetheless? In order to address these questions I draw on a four-year ethnography in an asylum centre in Northern Italy. I was a frequent guest in the temporary and segregated dwelling spaces of several young men from West Africa, waiting for their asylum claims to be assessed. "Nothing", to them, is more than a negative or residual label. Rather, it articulates distinct meanings and plays out different functions. For one thing, it expresses a lack of meaningful things to do, while public authorities divest them from any support other than basic livelihood, in a liminal space where only those with more capitals and good luck will find a meaningful way ahead. "Nothing" vents out frustration for the distance between what migrants have achieved and the new and dignified life they had been aspiring to; one that should afford autonomy, adulthood, success. Sometimes nothing is also used in a more assertive tone, to clear out from conversation, and ideally from one's thoughts, all haunting memories from the past - people left behind, violence encountered or witnessed, literal proximity to death. Nothing, therefore, has much to do with absence - another category of increasing, if elusive relevance. In sum, my ethnography elucidates the promise of a more systematic and critical analysis of what nothing does, regardless of what it is, as a category in use, especially among young people in protracted transition toward their next life stages. "Undoing nothing", through the lived experience of those dispossessed of meaningful life horizons, is a fruitful exercise for social scholars of youth, forced migration, and beyond.