Creating a topological home through radically hopeful undoings

This commentary on Paolo Boccagni's Undoing Nothing centers on two themes. First, I explore the book’s key idea through the lens of agency and temporality. Drawing on the concept of radical hope, I identify asylum seekers’ mundane practices of undoing nothing as a form of “thin political agency”, which challenges linear conceptions of time. The second theme concerns spatiality. While the book employs a traditional scalar approach, I propose that a more relational reading would provide deeper insight into the homemaking processes of asylum seekers. The analysis reveals how by being here, people in waiting weave translocal, transcultural and transnational ties and negotiate personhood across what I term “topological home”, which supports their processes of political becoming in the “political ordinary”. This interpretation aligns with Boccagni's portrayal of migration as a pursuit of adult masculinity. Finally, I discuss homemaking as a fundamental human condition through the concept of “constitutive homelessness”.