I am grateful to Tom Scott-Smith for his insightful commentary about Undoing Nothing. I have especially appreciated the way in which Scott-Smith sums up my argument about relevance, making it probably more effective than in the book itself. If relevance has to do with an attempt at “foregrounding” on multiple scales, however, there is still another scale that the book aims to pursue: the claim for relevance of the lives of the asylum seekers I met, and of thousands who share their sense of suspension and meaninglessness, in mutual isolation. This, I contend, has also analytical significance—unpacking these lives in waiting affords better understanding of social reality in several respects—rather than “only” being relevant for humanitarianism or political engagement. It is up to the readers, of course, to decide whether this scale of relevance has been achieved.

Relevance, Scott-Smith writes, evokes autonomy, a notion that is central to Fragments of Home. And autonomy is typically approached as a process rather than a destination. I can only agree with this remark—at an analytical level. However, to the eyes of young undocumented migrants who ended up living on welfare, under top-down rules that go along with constant infantilization and uncertainty about the future, the simple idea of autonomy is hardly a question of degrees. Rather, people cling even more to a binary view of the world and of themselves, as simplistic and undesirable as this may be: all or nothing; that is, no autonomy, opposed to an ideal and elusively full one. Reckoning with the grey zone of autonomy as a process, and recalibrating one’s expectations and projects accordingly, is part and parcel of the struggle of refugeehood. It is also an aspect on which professional and empowering social support could make a difference, as opposed to the semicarceral approach of shelter humanitarianism.

More critically, my interlocutor warns, the book risks “leaving some readers struggling for air” or “drowning in complexity.” Luckily enough, he is not one of them, as his final assessment of the contribution of the book to a “political sociology of asylum” demonstrates. However, the point he raises is a serious one. There is more to it than a matter of legibility–something I did my best to work on, through constant interaction between theory (or larger debate) and daily narratives or practices in the center, in an open access publication format. Admittedly, this book does not advance a “generalisable theory or systematic set of analytical categories”—although, in my ambition, the questions it raises speak to a large audience across migration, housing, and youth studies. Likewise, it is meant as a grassroots way of knowledge production from everyday life, rather than from an abstract, overarching question. However, it is not meant to surrender to complexity, ambivalence, or “focus unsettledness.” In some practical respects, the message is straightforward: while a degree of ambivalence is inherent in the trajectories of young men who survived migration to Europe, only to end up stuck in asylum, it is made more severe by decreasing welfare provisions, institutional hostility and societal invisibilization. This is, in a nutshell, what has occurred to the governance of asylum in Italy since 2018, as a part of a larger backlash that followed the ephemeral compassion for the 2015 “crisis.” That such an institutional configuration is by no means unavoidable—it is rather an outcome of political pressures that can be actively contrasted—is also the message of the book. And that a shelter is a critical research site, with a view to turning it into more than a “fragment of home” or to “undoing” the nothingness therein, is a key point for both Tom Scott-Smith and myself, as this critical dialogue has shown.