What Undoing Nothing does: dilemmas and developments in researching racialized waithood in place

Research on forced immobility, as part and parcel of forced migration, can make a difference conceptually, societally and biographically. With this goal in mind, Undoing Nothing illustrates, respectively, the transcontextual significance of notions such as ambivalence, nothing and relevance; the emergence of forced irrelevance as a mode of sovereign power, and an instance of the analytical and political struggles between what is (to be) foregrounded and backgrounded; the value of experiential narratives of home and good life to illuminate migrants’ constructions of the future. Overall, this Symposium points to key commonalities across lived experiences of racialized and gendered waiting, as daily battlegrounds in which people strive to make sense of apparently empty timespaces, and to protect their dignity therein. It also confirms the promise of comparative research into young people’s endeavors to transition toward greater autonomy and self-respect, including through the erratic and risky pathways of migration.