Paper short abstract:

Drawing on a four-year ethnography of everyday life in an asylum reception centre, this paper explores the prospects and tensions of future-making, from an apparently frozen present, for young male West African migrants in Italy.

Paper long abstract:

Young male asylum seekers from West Africa, such as my fieldwork interlocutors in a reception centre in Italy, have their own imaginaries and attitudes about the future. Their very histories of migration have also to do with the perceived impossibility to accomplish a meaningful future in Africa, including one’s transition to adulthood and to normatively predominant ways of masculinity. However, these biographical aims are likely procrastinated further ahead, once people find themselves in the protracted uncertainty of refugee reception in Europe. Does the promise of “more future” still hold, and in what respects? How do migration and its aftermath shape young Africans’ ability to nourish (which) future imaginaries, and move towards them? Future, within an asylum centre, is a slippery and elusive topic. The imaginaries associated with it are generally unfocused, beyond the short-term need for legal, work and housing autonomy. However, the residents’ endeavours to envision what might come afterwards share two moral orientations, while struggling to temporalize them: a medium-term desire to make a family life of one’s own, “like anybody else”, and a longer-term commitment to get back “home” (i.e. the country of origin), thereby eventually healing the implicit moral wound of migration. From a present of biographical and socio-legal suspension, asylum seekers are hardly in a position to predict their future. Yet, they are not short of views, aspirations and dreams about it. How future-making emerges from their present emplacement, and in what directions, is then the key question of my ethnographic exploration.