Book Launch: Buildings of Refuge and the Postcoloniality of Asylum Infrastructure

Paolo Novak's book offers a fresh perspective on the European migration crisis, chronicling its everyday realities in a central Italian province. Through vivid ethnographic accounts, it reveals how the forces and relations animating this crisis are reproduced and transformed in the rooms of ordinary buildings converted into shelters for asylum seekers.

Drawing on postcolonial and feminist approaches, he explores the intersection of global and local histories, migrant stories and bordering processes, providing a timely lens for understanding migration today.

This is an invaluable contribution to debates on EU borders, including their logistical management, their coloniality and the autonomous force of migration that subverts them.

Speaker

• Paolo Novak is Senior Lecturer in Development Studies and Co-Director of the Centre for Migration and Diaspora Studies at SOAS University of London

Discussants

• Ben Rogaly, Emeritus Professor of Human Geography, University of Sussex
• Paru Raman, SOAS University of London

Chair 

• Hassan Ould Moctar, Lecturer in Anthropology of Migration, Department of Anthropology and Sociology