Paolo Boccagni

PAOLO BOCCAGNI is Full professor of Sociology, Dpt. of Sociology and Social Research, University of Trento [paolo.boccagni@unitn.it | Academia | Scholar |  homing.soc.unitn.it ]. 

He has recently been the PI of ERC StG HOMInG (2016-22) and of other nationally funded projects in migration, refugee and housing studies. He lectures in Sociology for social work and Intercultural relations (BA in Social Work), Qualitative research methods (MA in Global and Local Studies), Ethnography and social research (PhD in Sociology). Over the last twenty years he has done multi-method and comparative research on migration, integration and transnational family life, as well as on the lived experience of home, with a particular focus on mobile and forcibly displaced people. He has mainly published in migration, home, diversity and social welfare studies, mostly in a qualitative and ethnographic perspective. 

He has (co)authored about 120 publications, including 50 articles in international peer-reviewed journals, 15 book chapters, 10 special issues and edited collections and one entry (“Multi-sited ethnography”) in the Sage Research Methods Foundation series (2019). Recent books include Migration and the Search for Home (2017), Thinking Home on the Move (co-authored, 2020), Migration and Domestic Space: Ethnographies of Home in the Making (co-edited, 2023), the Handbook on Home and Migration (edited, 2023), Vite ferme: Storie di migranti in attesa (“Still lives: stories of migrants in waiting” 2024) and Undoing nothing: Waiting for asylum, struggling for relevance (forthcoming, 2025). The journals in which he has published include Sociology, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Global Networks, Housing Studies, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Environment and Planning-D, Mobilities, Social Politics, International Migration Review, Population, Space and Place, Qualitative Research and the International Journal of Social Research Methods. 

Much of my research and writing, so far, has been in seven broad areas, with blurred boundaries between each of them and the others. I mostly work with a qualitative approach, starting from the lived experience of everyday life. Much of my past research boils down to keywords like migration, displacement, transnationalism, diversity, home. Most recently, I have been trying to enter new empirical and theoretical fields – from death, youth, memory and future studies, to some more substantive engagement with metaphor and social phenomenology. As of now, though, the bulk of what I’ve been able to do involves migrant/refugee, social welfare/care, diversity and home/housing studies.

1. Migration and transnational living

This is my oldest, if admittedly broad, field of interest, since my PhD thesis onwards. Starting from that fieldwork experience, which resulted in a book in Italian (Tracce transnazionali, 2009) and is somehow wrapped-up in one book chapter (“Public, private or both”, chapter 10 in Diaspora and Transnationalism, 2010), I have addressed a variety of facets of migrant transnational engagement. These include parenting and family life (Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 2012), along with the consequences of large-scale emigration on intergenerational and gender relationships back “home” (The Latin Americanist, 2013); informal social support from a distance, across national borders (International Journal of Social Welfare, 2012); shared sociability and helping initiatives, some of them called collective remittances (International Migration, 2013); association-building (Journal of Civil Society, 2015), political activities, most notably external voting (International Migration, 2010; Journal of Latin American Studies, 2012); dreams, desires and prospects for return (Global Networks, 2011) during years of global crisis (Bulletin of Latin American Research, 2011). In a more top-down perspective I have also analyzed the diaspora-building and reaching effort of one particular emigration state (National Identities, 2014).

I have discussed transnationalism, in a more theoretical perspective, in a paper on the European Journal of Social Theory (2011), in a sociological overview on the Revue Européenne des Migrations Internationales (2012) and in a short entry for the Wiley Encyclopedia of Social Theory (“Transnationalism”, 2017). Furthermore, I have addressed the main forms of migrant-driven circulation of political resources in a piece on Mobilities (“Transnational politics as cultural circulation”, 2016, with P. Levitt and J.M. Lafleur). As a contribution of my own on the transnational side of return, moreover, I have co-edited Transnational return and social change (2019, with R. Anghel and M. Fauser, eds.), and authored an afterword. More recently, I have been back to transnationalism to systematize my thoughts on the cross-fertilization between transnational studies and home studies in a paper on “transnational migration and homemaking” (chapter 9 in the Elgar Handbook on transnationalism, 2022).

2. Social protection & welfare – top-down and grassroots, local and transnational

Based on my fieldwork in diverse social environments, and on much extra-academic stuff, I have long tried to work on social welfare for, and within, marginalized populations, especially with a migrant or refugee background. Together with E. Barberis, I have written the first international systematic article on the field of social work with migrants in Italy (British Journal of Social Work, 2014), as well as a handbook on “social work with immigrant people” (Il lavoro sociale con le persone immigrate, now on its second edition, 2024[2017]). Starting from this background, in interaction with migration studies, I have contributed to reflecting on the meanings and implications of “superdiversity” for social work practice, theory and research (Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2015). Moreover, in the framework of the IMISCOE Research group IMASP, I have worked with E. Righard on the theoretical foundations of social work with immigrants (Journal of Immigrant and Refugee Studies, 2015)  as well as on transnational social work (Transnational Social Review, 2015, including C. Bolzman). More recently I have also started working on social work with displaced, refugee and highly mobile people (European Journal of Social Work, 2020, with E. Righard).

Prior to that, I explored the multiple consequences of migration for the social protection of migrants and of their stayer counterparts, looking at the particular case of Ecuador (chapter 8 in Migration and Social Protection, 2011), and then trying to sketch out a larger framework for the comparative study of social protection from below (Global Social Policy, 2017).

3. Care work and domestic work

For several years, the practice of care and domestic work among immigrant women has been one of my research topics across multiple fields across migration, family, gender and local welfare studies. In one piece, for instance, I explored the views of wellbeing of live-in female care workers in relation to their elderly clients, their left-behind kin and, only in the last place, themselves (Social Politics, 2016). Other articles on related topics, borrowing from different sources, involve the transnational practices of female care workers, as a matter of distant communication, “ordinary” remittances, and “reverse” ones (International Sociology, 2015); the ways in which their live-in work in Italy is simultaneously “stigmatized, segregated, essential”; the multiple forms of transnational social welfare, from above and below, in which their lives are entangled (Critical Social Policy, 2014); the complex interplay between their tasks as homemakers, the forms of domesticity they unequally reproduce, and their own ways of not being at home (Housing Studies, 2018). The latter piece has all to do with housing, home and homemaking – another of my key research concerns.  

4. Home, house, homemaking & homing after migration and displacement  

I started to write about migrant houses, almost by reaction to their outstanding and uncanny emergence across research sites, with a paper that unpacked the meanings, dreams and dilemmas they embody (“What’s in a migrant house?”, Housing, Theory and Society, 2014). Following this, I sketched an outline of the home-and-migration field which turned into a book, Migration and the search for home (2017), and was also inspired by a piece on the thresholds of domesticity, commonality and publicness in immigrant homemaking (Journal of Housing and the Built Environment, 2017, with A.M. Brighenti). Further on, the ERC grant HOMInG has enabled large-scale, collaborative research on several facets of the home-migration interplay. Among the dozens of publications stemming from HOMInG’s fieldwork, I’m especially satisfied of those about immigrants’ food production and consumption as a way into homemaking (Sociology, 2020, with A. Miranda-Nieto); on the conceptual positioning of home, as an analytical category for comparative research in sociology (Current Sociology, 2020, with M. Kusenbach); on the potential of a homemaking perspective to advance migration studies between the apparent stalemate of assimilation vs transnationalism (International Migration, 2021, with P. Hondagneu-Sotelo); on the role and use of objects and material cultures, as affordances for local and transnational homemaking (Journal of Intercultural Studies, 2022, with L.E. Pérez-Murcia); on the promise of reframing return migration through a “multiscalar understanding of home” (Global Networks, 2022, with L.E. Pérez-Murcia); on the lived experience of “domestic religion”, and how the domestic space is renegotiated accordingly, in immigrant households (Ethnicities, 2022, with B. Bertolani); on migrant ways of “feeling at home” and the variables that account for it over time and across countries (Population, Space and Place, 2021, with C. Vargas-Silva); on the structural and biographical factors associated with migrants’ likelihood to call a certain place “home” (Comparative Migration Studies, 2021, with B. Armanni and C. Santinello); on a HOMInG-driven reconceptualization of the very notion of homing, as a “category for research on space appropriation and “home-oriented” mobilities (Mobilities, 2022).  

In quite a few papers from the same project, moreover, I have specifically addressed transnational housing and the analytical potential of so-called remittance houses. This includes an overview piece to situate the topic in the migration-and-development literature (“So many houses, as many homes?”, in the Routledge Handbook of Migration and Development, 2020); a position paper to argue for “the theoretical potential of remittance houses”) (Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 2021, with M. Bivand-Erdal); a comparative study of remittance houses in different locations in Ecuador (Migration Studies, 2021, with L.E. Pérez-Murcia); a multi-sited ethnography of the lived experience of migrant housing in the countries of origin, as part of larger family and migration biographies (“Whose homes?”, 2023, with G. Echeverria, in Migration and domestic space); a pilot study of the role of real estate agencies in “selling a house, staging a dream” (Migration & Development, 2022, with L.E. Pérez-Murcia); most recently, a quantitative study about the difference between transnational house “owners” and “dreamers” (“Dreaming of a remittance house”, International Migration Review, 2023, with C. Vargas-Silva).

Some HOMInG publications, moreover, are like housing and family stories from fieldwork in migration contexts as diverse as India (“Two houses, one family, and the battlefield of home”, Geoforum, 2021, with B. Bertolani) and Ecuador (“You’re always in transit, but the house stays”, Housing, Theory and Society, 2022, with S. Yapo). In one particular case, I’ve worked on one “home biography” as a part of an edited volume of life stories of home and migration (Finding home in Europe, 2023 ed. by Pérez-Murcia & Bonfanti). At a more theoretical level, revisiting the findings of HOMInG has fed into two books: a curated series of interviews on Thinking home on the move (2020, with L.E. Pérez-Murcia & M. Belloni), and my new Handbook on home and migration (2023; see, in particular, the OA Introduction [“Home and migration – Setting the terms of belonging and place-making on the move”] and the Conclusion [“On the futures of home and migration”].     

Last, I have started exploring the metaphorical power of home in humanities and arts (“Haunting homes and emerging dilemmas of being in the world”, Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 2023). I’ve also returned to the tension between house and home, and to its analytical promise for migration studies, in a paper on “Housing and home” (2024, with E. Fravega, chapter 18 in the Elgar Research Handbook on the Sociology of Migration).

5. Diversity and homemaking in the public 

I have long had some critical fascination with “the difference diversity makes”, as a concept in itself and for the variety of “jobs” it does (chapter 1 in Governing through diversity, 2012). This has been paralleled, over time, with an attempt to extend the analytical reach of home, and its relevance as a terrain of claims-making, beyond the domestic domain – well in the middle of the public (urban) space (“Homemaking in the public”, with J.W. Duyvendak, Sociology Compass, 2021). Following this insight, I’ve worked on the role of houses of worship as critical sites of homemaking for immigrant religious minorities (Religion, 2021, with B. Bertolani & S. Bonfanti); and on the ambiguous ways in which majority/minority neighbourhoods may be felt, and claimed, as “homes away from home” (Anthropological Journal of European Cultures, 2021, with A. Massa). Based on my research, and on the burgeoning field of diversity in urban and housing study, I have also reflected on the interplay between superdiversity and homemaking, both as analytical lenses and fields of urban experience, in a paper on “Homemaking in superdiverse public space” (chapter 17 in the Oxford Handbook on Superdiversity, 2022).

6. Home, dwelling, temporality and hospitality in asylum

From 2018 to 2022 I have done ethnography in an asylum centre for young men engaged in waiting, and hopefully in negotiating a better life, during the years-long process of assessment of their applications. This has led me to reflect on the reach, and inherent limitations, of the correspondence between a temporary refuge for forced migrants and a home, or a domestic space (At home in the centre?, part of a beautiful OA book on Making home[s] in displacement, 2020); on the life and housing stories of the young men I had the privilege to stay with, which resulted in a monograph in Italian – perhaps the first to explore the predicament of young refugees in the country in this perspective (Vite ferme, 2024); on the spatial, relational and emotional implications of fieldwork as a guest within “rooms with little view” for their temporary dwellers (2023); on the interplay between home and hospitality in an anthropological perspective (with N. Harney, Anthropological Theory, 2023); on “home in question” and the meanings of non-home in these life circumstances (with A. Miranda-Nieto, European Journal of Cultural Studies, 2022); on the battlefield of extending forward and backward the boundaries of home in domestic hospitality for refugees (with D. Giudici, Identities, 2022); on the tension between private and public, what is to be silenced and told, among asylum seekers in the reception system in Italy (with D. Giudici, Environment and Planning D, 2022); on the clash between multiple temporalities in the housing conditions and pathways of asylum seekers (La lotta per il tempo, with E. Fravega & D. Giudici, 2023); and more to come…

7. Ethnography and qualitative research methods

Since my PhD fieldwork on the “transnational tracks” left by Ecuadorian migrants and their local counterparts, I have tried to write upon, and revisit along the way, my own ways of doing fieldwork – and some insights and dilemmas this suggests. Over the years, I have written field-inspired pieces on the potential of collaboration between a researcher and their counterparts (Qualitative Sociology, 2011); on the need for an empirical definition of “transnational social fields”, and its implications for research on migrant transnationalism, as a chapter in one of the first methodological handbooks in migration (2012); on the ambition and added value of ethnography into the in-betweenness of transnational family life (International Jrl of Social Research Methodology, 2016); on the main steps of participant observation and the difference this makes in migration studies, in a volume on qualitative research in migration (2018, with M. Schrooten); on the key features of multi-sited ethnography, for the SAGE Research Methods series (2019). Most recently, I have led and co-edited (with S. Bonfanti) a Springer-Imiscoe OA volume (Migration and domestic space, 2023) that theorizes, illustrates and applies domestic ethnography across very diverse housing and dwelling environments. This is outlined as a methodological agenda in our co-authored introduction, “Stranger, guest, researcher: a case for domestic ethnography in migration studies”. In practice, fieldworkers can take up some guest role, with the promise and obligations this entails, all across the spectrum of migration and refugee studies.

Miscellanea (across and beyond the previous categories)

I’ve also done research and writing, over time, on a number of topics that do not fully overlap with the previous categories. One of them involves selective ethnic appropriation and boundary-making within an immigrant group, and between them and the majority society on a local scale (“I’m not like all these Ecuadorians”, Social Identities, 2014). Another one is the sociology of emotion, as a broad perspective into the transnational field of “emotions on the move” (with L. Baldassar, Emotion, Space and Society, 2015). Straddling between the realm of personal emotion and that of societal roles and responsibilities is sociological ambivalence, as a question of particular relevance for international migrants (International Journal of Comparative Sociology, with P. Kivisto, 2019). Yet another area of concern has to do with migrant aspirations and views of the future ahead of them (Comparative Migration Studies, 2017). I’ve also made some incursion into youth studies, regarding “International students and homemaking in transition” (Home Cultures, 2021, with S. Yapo). Another recent topic is forced migration to Italy as a question of “bordering”, also in relation to the covid pandemics (with C. Denaro, Journal of Borderlands Studies, 2022) and – most important in itself, and for my emerging research interests – to the ways of “challenging ungrievability for people missing at sea”. This is on the right to grieving, as well as to justice and memory, of migrants who lost their lives and disappeared upon sea crossing (with C. Denaro, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2023). During the pandemic, moreover, I have drawn on HOMInG’s expertise to approach the unprecedented “enforced domesticities” through the ways of displaying the domestic space while in lockdown (“Stayhome as a YouTube performance”, European Societies, 2022, with A. Brodesco and F. La Bruna).

RESEARCH ACHIEVEMENTS AND CONTRIBUTIONS

Since obtaining his PhD (2008), Boccagni has published extensively across social sciences, with a primary focus on sociology. As of April 2024, according to Google Scholar, his work has been cited over 6,300 times. His H-index is 45 and i10-index is 85. Over the same period, he has been invited as a speaker in about 50 scientific events in 18 different countries in Europe, America, the Middle-East, East Asia and Australia. He has also been an Invited professor at the University of Western Australia - UWA (2019) and an Invited fellow at the Netherlands Institute of Advanced Studies - NIAS (2021) and at the Institut Convergences Migrations (ICM) in Paris (2023). In 2022, his name was included in the Stanford University List (AD Scientific Index) of “World 2% top scientists” by last 5 years’ ratios on total ratios. Overall, Boccagni’s research has mainly impacted on the interdisciplinary study of migration, displacement, diversity, care and home. 

His scientific contribution could be summed up as follows: 

(1.) In migration studies he has contributed to a research agenda on migrant transnationalism as a diverse set of attitudes, ties and practices that vary in reach and intensity over time, given the external structures of opportunities, the demographics of migrants and their counterparts, and the resources accessible to them; 

(2.) In social welfare and care studies his work has shed light on the moralities and mutual obligations underpinning care, in proximity and over a distance, by taking into account care-related vulnerabilities, no less than forms of active care provision; 

(3.) In social work, his lecturing and research activities have contributed to approaching social work practice in diversity, including migration-related one, in ways that escape methodological “groupism”, while acknowledging intersectional vulnerabilities and oppressions in the conditions and careers of welfare clients; (4.) 

In housing and built environment studies, his research has invited an original understanding of the views of home, and of the associated practices and material cultures, underlying the dwelling experience across groups and cultural settings; 

(5.) Methodologically speaking, his fieldwork and writings have contributed to elucidate the limits of social action at-a-distance (relative to social action-in-proximity) and the mixed impact of the natural and built environment on people’s ways to make themselves at home, particularly for immigrant newcomers and members of minority groups.

RESEARCH SUPERVISION, EVALUATIONS, REVIEWS

Boccagni has so far supervised 40 Master students (Sociology, Social Research, Social Work), 2 PhD students (Sociology) and 15 post-doc researchers (Sociology, Anthropology, Development and Social Work). He is part of the Editorial Boards of academic journals such as Comparative Migration Studies and Mondi Migranti. Moreover, he has been invited to sit in Doctoral Juries in the following universities: Pisa, Torino, Barcelona Autónoma, País Vasco, EUI, Liège, Leuven, Amsterdam, Groningen, Milano Bicocca, Padova, Gottingen, Newcastle, Nottingham, Birmingham, Radboud and Ghent. He has also served as an external evaluator for PhD dissertations at the universities of Genova, Madrid Complutense and Helsinki. He has also been an independent assessor for recruitment and academic promotions at the universities of Genova, Urbino, Tel Aviv, Cyprus, Sussex, Plymouth and Lisbon.

He has also served as an expert in evaluating funding applications for a number of institutions, including Velux Fonden (2024); Luxembourg national research fund (FNR) (2023); European Commission-AMIF (2023); Norway Research Council (2022); MIUR-VQR (2021); NIAS (2020-); European Commission - MCSF (2018-); NordFosk (2019); National Science Centre, Poland (2017); DAAB (2016); Swiss National Research Fund (2014); Estonian Science Foundation (2012). Moreover, Boccagni is a member of the Scientific board of the following international research projects: ReRoot (Arrival Infrastructures as Sites of Integration for Recent Newcomers, funded by the European Commission, 2021-25); YMAP (Youth Mobilities, Aspirations & Pathways, Australian Research Council, 2017-22); HoMi (Home and (dis)continuity: Foster care for children with migrant backgrounds, Research Council of Norway, 2020-25); MIG-AGE (“Do migrants in Europe age well?”, Volkswagen Foundation, 2023-26); Contesting urban borderscapes in Latin America (Dutch Research Council, 2023-27). Since 2017 moreover, Boccagni has co-convened an International Summer School in Ethnography that has attracted to Trento dozens of PhD students and postdoctoral researchers from Europe and beyond. He has also promoted about 50 conferences, symposiums and seminars, mostly on themes of international migration, development studies, social policy, social work, housing and home. Moreover, he has served as an anonymous reviewer for about 40 academic journals across the spectrum of social sciences, with a main focus on migration, welfare, home and transnational studies.

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