Join the Centre for the Study of Democracy for a talk with Dr Paolo Novak (SOAS).
Across Europe, hotels, apartments, rural houses, barracks, containers, and barges have become part of the infrastructure of asylum reception. Rather than treating these facilities as settings in which asylum policy is implemented, this paper approaches them as material condensations through which the multiple and multi-scalar forces that produce asylum become visible.
Drawing on research in the Italian province of Macerata, the paper places asylum in four analytical moves. First, it reorients the study of asylum towards an appreciation of the uneven configurations through which legal protection becomes materially organised in particular buildings, re-focusing our gaze on the compositional dimensions of asylum. Second, it locates these facilities within wider geographies of bordering, logistics, and political economy. Third, it situates asylum accommodation within the region's longer histories of agrarian transformation and uneven development. Finally, it re-places asylum infrastructure in the everyday practices of dwelling through which landlords, property owners, and asylum seekers continuously shape and remake these spaces.
The paper argues that asylum infrastructure cannot be understood solely through the opposition between migration and border controls. Rather, accommodation facilities reveal the intersection of territorial histories, property relations, governance regimes, and everyday forms of inhabitation through which protection is unevenly configured and lived. Such unevenness also has implication for how we understand the politics of asylum.
About the speaker
Paolo Novak is a Reader in Migration and Border Studies, and Co-Director of the Centre for Migration and Diaspora Studies (CMDS), at SOAS London. His work draws on feminist and postcolonial spatial theory to analyse the contested geographies, scales, and formations produced through the intersections of borders, migration, and development, and their broader political implications. He is the author of Buildings of Refuge (BUP 2025) and Co-Editor of Embedding Externalization - How Bordering Practices Transform Places (Routledge 2027).
Location
Westminster Forum, 5th floor, 32–38 Wells Street, London, W1T 3UW
The event will take place in person. If you have any questions, please email the seminar convener, Dr Matthew Fluck at [email protected].
About the centre
The Centre for the Study of Democracy (CSD), established in 1989, is based in the School of Social Sciences at the University of Westminster. At the Centre, academics working in politics and international relations undertake socially engaged, methodologically diverse and often interdisciplinary research that aims to address a range of critical political challenges in relation to democracy worldwide.
CSD has a longstanding international reputation for research excellence through a programme of publications, events and collaborations with academics, practitioners, policymakers, and activists. Research in Politics and International Studies at CSD was ranked 4th highest in the UK for impact in the Research Excellence Framework 2021. The Centre has established numerous collaborations with scholars and universities around the world and has hosted encounters with public intellectuals including Luc Boltanski, Judith Butler, Stuart Hall, Bruno Latour, Richard Rorty, Quentin Skinner, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Charles Taylor, James Tully, and Michael Walzer. The CR Parekh lecture, instituted by Lord Bhikhu Parekh, has included lectures by His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Arundhati Roy, and Ashis Nandy.
CSD recognises that responding to contemporary social and political challenges requires engagement beyond the academy, so actively welcomes dialogue and collaboration with researchers, practitioners, policymakers, and activists around the world. The Centre is directed by Professor Nitasha Kaul.
