Buildings of Refuge and the Postcoloniality of Asylum Infrastructure Published in Journal of Borderlands Studies (Ahead of Print, 2026)

this is a generous review of my book! Thank you @Jasmin Lilian Diab

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

@soasdevelopment.bsky.social
@brisunipress.bsky.social

(and next time we will try to find a non-cartesian map to pinpoint our activities, promise)

...and we will kick off at 1pm
43 Gordon Square

@migrationscholars.bsky.social

It's already started in Australia !!

@migrationscholars.bsky.social

On the way to the airport - A Theatre Performance by Ice&Fire A specially curated script for CMDS and its "Return - a conversation" series of events - followed by Q&A

Join us: 14 November 7pm SOAS BGLT

A performance by Ice&Fire, specially scripted for CMDS and its conversation on "Return -an idea, practice, and contested horizon"

Register at: www.eventbrite.com/e/on-the-way...

@soasdevelopment.bsky.social @migrationscholars.bsky.social @soasanthro.bsky.social

"the border separates things and people precisely because they are already intertwined rather than preventing them from becoming intertwined"
This is a very good way of phrasing it

muse.jhu.edu/article/971352

Senate statement on Gaza, Palestine - SOAS
www.soas.ac.uk/about/news/s....

HAPPENING TODAY at 5pm! Join us at SOAS (SWLT) or via Zoom as @terminalias.bsky.social offers fresh perspectives on the European migration crisis!

@soasuni.bsky.social
@naomihossain.bsky.social @carlosoya.bsky.social @eadi.bsky.social @devcomms.bsky.social @laurahammond.bsky.social

I had the honor of participating remotely in this powerful, extraordinarily timely and visionary event organized by Paolo and his colleagues, and look forward to continuing dialogue & collaboration!

Camilo, I learned so much from your lucid, important and powerful presentation. Thank you so much!
Hopefully more to come

This discussion is part of the Global Teach In/out events organised by Migration_Scholars_Global_Network

📍Birkbeck Cinema 43 Gordon Square London
📆11 November 1pm

Join us!

and join the network
www.instagram.com/migration_sc...
www.facebook.com/profile.php?...
@migrationscholars.bsky.social

📌Return - a two-day workshop exploring the concept and practices of return

📅 Day 1: 17 October 2025, 5:30 pm, DLT, SOAS
📅 Day 2: 18 October 2025, 1:00–5:00 pm, SOAS Bar

info and registration
➡️www.soas.ac.uk/about/event/return-works...

The asylum accommodation “ problem” is about how the state organises inequality.

Hotels, barracks, flats – all are political battlegrounds where the wider inequalities in our society are exposed.

www.soas.ac.uk/about/blogs/...

Opinion | Don’t call it ‘Alligator Alcatraz.’ Call it a concentration camp. This facility’s purpose fits the classic model, and its existence points to serious dangers ahead for the country.

"The Nazis... imagined their targets would self-deport. Once the myth of self-deportation collapsed, they turned to more punitive measures. On Tuesday, Noem similarly noted the Everglades camp was meant to frighten immigrants into self-deporting. 'If you don’t,' she said, 'you may end up here.'"

In difesa del Leoncavallo - Effimera Il Leoncavallo è sotto sfratto. Dopo oltre trent’anni, uno degli spazi sociali più importanti d’Italia rischia di scomparire per sempre. Ti ricordi quanti ricordi abbiamo […]

Milano, hai bisogno del Leoncavallo

effimera.org/in-difesa-de...

That's precisely what border management does. Securing borders doesn't mean being 'anti-immigration.' It means anti-specific-forms-of-. It's about distinguishing between desirable and undesirable types of circulation

Buildings of Refuge and the Postcoloniality of Asylum Infrastructure YouTube video by Bristol University Press

Aggressive publishers-driven marketing
youtu.be/230--PLGo8o?...

We know that the border crisis isn’t about migration—it’s about the re-production of racialised exploitation, dispossession and hierarchy. The book investigates how this process is granularly produced and constructed in place, and why this is important. #worldmaking #placemaking

Ch 6 "The postcoloniality of asylum infrastructure," concludes that chronicling the border crisis demands embracing empirical unevenness, ontological instability, and conceptual ambiguity. It calls for a postcolonial gaze that provincializes, destabilizes, and places concepts.

Ch 5, "Placing autonomy" revisits the autonomy of migration debate from the standpoint of place, showing how the thrown-togetherness of migrants/non-migrants unevenly constructs asylum infrastructure. #AutonomyOfMigration #Migrants #Embodiment #Borders

Ch 4, "Destabilising coloniality" interrogates coloniality literature from the standpoint of place and illustrates the multiple "afterlives" haunting asylum seekers' reception facilities. The coloniality of asylum is a content-form #deco #PostcolonialStudies #Asylum #Place

Ch 3, "Provincializing logistics" interrogates critical logistics literature from the standpoint of place, and explains why logistical operations are lively, uneven, and unstable #Logistics #EUBorders #Place

Ch2 "The place of asylum infrastructure" formalizes the book's "standpoint of place" articulating Marxist and decolonial geographies via #GillianHart #MiltonSantos and #DoreenMassey. It proposes an ontologically unstable approach to studying borders and their crisis.

#SpacePlace

Ch 1 "Buildings as protagonists" argues that buildings aren't passive backdrops but places that "communicate" complex social and political relations. They serve as crucial analytical standpoints for mapping the border and its crisis. #Architecture #SocialGeography

Introduction: the book's main aim is to offer an understanding of the EU border machine centred on the deeply situated cartographies that explain its emergence, entrenchment and transformations, in and across “places”, and to foreground the unevenness of these processes

read the introduction @SOAS research repository soas-repository.worktribe.com/output/436575

buy the ebook for £18 @googlebooks or through @BrisUniPress if you subscribe to their newsletter

ask your library to buy the expensive hardback @SOASLibrary

wait for the paperback, out next year

This terrain isn’t about countermapping or transcendence—it's about contesting the worldmaking nature of borders from within -through embodied, situated, and relational struggles by migrants and non-migrants alike. This is the worldmaking force of placemaking practices.

the standpoint of place dis-entangles the place-transforming nature of worldmaking processes and the worldmaking nature of placemaking practices.

it delineates the terrain where border politics unfolds

The book conceptualises the EU border machine through a double dialectic—what it calls the "standpoint of place". Throughout its chapters, border crossing and border reinforcement processes are articulated with processes of production and construction of place. #borderstudies

Buildings of Refuge and the Postcoloniality of Asylum Infrastructure Buildings of Refuge and the Postcoloniality of Asylum Infrastructure; This book examines the buildings used as reception centres for asylum seekers in central Italy to reveal how they reflect the Euro...

0ut today!

Buildings of Refuge and the Postcoloniality of Asylum Infrastructure is a carto-ethnography of the EU border machine told through the buildings that house it.

@SOASDevelopment @soasdevtrac @SOAS_CMDS

bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/buildings-of...

a thread🧵