Buildings of Refuge and the Postcoloniality of Asylum Infrastructure.

Main speaker: Dr Paolo Novak (SOAS)

Paolo is a Senior Lecturer in Development Studies at SOAS, University of London. His research explores the conceptual and contextual relationship between borders and migration, and the ways in which this relationship shapes and is shaped by broader development processes. He is Co-Director of the Centre for Migration and Diaspora Studies, Convenor of the MSc Migration, Mobility and Development, and leads the Migration and Development Research Cluster. His work brings together critical perspectives from political economy, postcolonial and feminist studies, and migration theory, with a focus on how migration both challenges and reconfigures the boundaries of development.

Discussant: Prof Camillo Boano (DPU/PoliTo)

Camillo is Professor of Urban Design and Critical Theory at the DPU and PoliTO, Italy. His research has centred on the complex encounters between critical theory, radical philosophy and urban processes. He authored Citta Nude. Iconografia dei campi profughi (2005, in Italian); The Ethics of a Potential Urbanism: Critical Encounters Between Giorgio Agamben and Architecture (2017), and coedited Urban Geopolitics. Rethinking Planning in Contested Cities (2018); and the forthcoming Displacement Urbanism (2025)

Chair: Dr Giovanna Astolfo (DPU)

Giovanna is Associate Professor at the DPU where she combines funded research, research-based teaching, and action learning from several contested and ungovernable urban geographies in Southeast Asia, South America, Southern and Eastern Europe and UK, with a focus on non-conventional urbanisms, continuous displacement and migration, spatial violence and housing justice. She is PI on the AHRC funded project Reframe.

Blurb:

This book offers a fresh perspective on the European migration crisis by tracing its everyday realities in a central Italian province. Through powerful ethnographic accounts, it shows how shelters for asylum seekers become sites where global forces, local histories, and migrant stories intersect.

A vital contribution to debates on EU borders, migration, and coloniality, the book sheds light on the autonomous force of migration that continues to unsettle Europe’s frontiers.

Join us for the launch and discussion of this important work.

This is a Hybrid Event