This book illuminates a distinctive modern form of purgatory, offering both a perceptive critique of state responses to the so-called refugee crisis and nuanced psychological portraits of a demographic rarely afforded narrative depth and grace.

In response to Prof. Boccagni's presentation, discussant Dr. Maja Hertoghs will present her own recently published book Working the Dutch Asylum Apparatus. An Ethnography of Suspicious Compassion and State Power. This book examines how the Netherlands engages with the arrival of certain (often illegalised) travellers and the asylum procedure, a tense liminal space and time that ensures decisions of inclusion and exclusion. Based on an extensive ethnography, this book reveals the ways in which suspicious compassion in Dutch asylum pervades an objective decision-making practice.

The event will be chaired by Lieke Wissink and is supported by the Amsterdam Research Centre for Migration (ARC-M).

About the speakers

Paolo Boccagni is Professor of Sociology at the University of Trento. He has extensively researched migration, home, displacement and everyday life. His recent ethnographic work focuses on migrant transnational ties and the lived experience of asylum seekers in Italy.

Maja Hertoghs is Assistant Professor teaching anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. She has worked extensively in critical border and migration studies.

Lieke Wissink is a Senior Researcher at the Department of Social Work, University of Applied Sciences Inholland, and currently affiliated to the Department of Anthropology, UvA.  She ethnographically traces everyday social and material encounters that shape relations of power and inequality in European welfare states.