For over a decade, a series of contributions have made clear how research agendas centred on the critical study of logistics provide a useful lens to interpret transformations in our contemporary world. Logistics, broadly conceived as the art and science of managing the mobility of people and things to achieve particular objectives, has become central to the orchestration of contemporary capitalism (Neilson 2012). This is because expanding trade and production networks, and the radical reorganization of supply chains across the globe associated with them, has propelled logistics from a discrete and specialized military art to a ubiquitous science of circulation (Cowen 2014). Logistics, in this sense, can be more specifically understood as a calculative rationality and a suite of spatial practices aimed at the production of circulatory regimes and at their securitization (Chua et al 2018). A critical gaze on logistics exposes the violent worlds of circulation and their association with war making (Cowen 2014), colonization (Chua et al 2018) and the slave trade (Harney and Moten 2013), with labour regimes and their lived realities and routines (Khalili 2020). Although originally centred on the analysis of the operative dimension of supply-chain capitalism, the strength and validity of this critical gaze has been validated by a variety of research projects concerned with processes as diverse as humanitarianism (Ziadah 2019), food regimes (Henderson and Ziadah 2022), advanced automation systems (Lin 2022), consumption (Shapiro 2023) and gendered circuits of violence (True and Hozić 2020).

‘We have 16 nationalities here’, enthused Mamadou after I introduced myself and told him that I was conducting field research for a project on asylum seekers’ accommodation. This was my first visit to the Hotel House, a 17-storey residential building in Porto Recanati, a small but seasonally bustling coastal municipality in the Macerata province. ‘We have Nigerians, Pakistanis, Afghans, Ghana, Romania, Togo …’, he said, naming 11 or so nationalities/countries, and then stumbling and starting again from Nigerians. My research is specifically concerned with asylum seekers, I interrupted. Do any of them live here? ‘Oh, we have them all’, he said, adamant:

I declined, wondering if he was offering me a discount or if it was a case of bad maths.

Mamadou seemed to know each person entering and exiting the building and was able to modulate his exchanges with them accordingly. In the brief time I spent with him, he received a small bundle of 50-euro notes from a West African man who started shouting at him in a language I could not identify, and to whom he responded calmly. He raised instead his voice and gesticulated while giving stern instructions in French to a group of three Senegalese nationals crossing the lobby on the way out of the building.

The Centri d’Accoglienza Straordinaria (Extraordinary Reception Centres for asylum seekers, CAS) managed by the provincial chapter of the Italian Red Cross, the protagonists of this chapter, were the most difficult ones for me to locate due to their remoteness and isolation. Although over time this proved to be extremely convenient for repeated informal visits, they were the only CAS that I first visited through a gatekeeper. This was Cristina, a sinologist by training, who worked as a mediatore culturale (cultural mediator) for the Red Cross, teaching Italian classes and performing administrative tasks across this subcontractor's facilities. In July 2017, she accompanied me to their San Lorenzo CAS (mentioned in Chapter 1), a place she knew well as she used to go there as a youngster to participate in the summer camps organized by her local church. She was proud to have returned there in a humanitarian capacity.

‘We have 27 people here’, Cristina told me during our visit there, ‘but there will be 33 soon, as we won the new Bando [Public Tender organized by the Prefettura]. Thirty-three is too many. Ideally, we should have 25. This is a good number to manage’. When I asked how decreasing San Lorenzo's occupancy by eight asylum seekers would improve their management, or indeed ameliorate the experiences of those residing there, she couldn't offer clear explanations. She did explain, however, how all new arrivals were sent there, before being transferred to the other CAS managed by her organization, depending on availability of places and good behaviour. She also recounted how, when the facility first opened, residents of this hamlet organized a meeting with the bishop, pleading for him not to authorize the opening of a CAS in the diocese-owned building.

On 30 August 2017 I woke up to discover that five identical videos had reached my WhatsApp number. They were sent by asylum seekers I had met over the previous two months of field research. The video depicted a man, a Nigerian national I later learnt, standing on the edge of the roof of Hotel Le Grazie, the largest Centro d’Accoglienza Straordinaria (Extraordinary Reception Centre for asylum seekers; CAS) in the Macerata province. The man was staring at the horizon. After a few moments, he turned his back to the man-made three-storey chasm, opened his arms wide, and let himself go, his body producing a loud THUMP as it hit the ground after a half-somersault.

Border deaths have become an unacceptable component of our everyday life. Whether these are the result of violent and militarized policing, of self-harm practices engendered by experiences of confinement and deportability, or of processes of organized abandonment, it is intolerably clear that contemporary border regimes create the conditions for deaths to occur.1 I should not have been so stunned, enraged or indeed surprised, then, that in a place like Hotel Le Grazie an attempted suicide could take place. As a building of (forced) refuge for migrants, the hotel is an integral component of the European Union (EU) border interactive machine, the manifestation of the humanitarian hand that cares, to use Agier's (2011) famous expression, that is inextricably interwoven with the securitized hand that strikes, that is, the sovereign fist that reacts to and lands on EU-bound migrants during the violent patrolling of their routes across the Sahel or the Balkans, during Search and Rescue military operations across the Mediterranean, or through the various agreements that attempt to contain migrants at the outer periphery of Europe.

How to chronicle the border crisis? From my privileged vantage point, that of a white male mobile academic securely employed in a global university, the most striking feature of this crisis is its worldly nature. What is immediately evident to my eyes is that exploitation, coloniality, death and violence are constitutive elements of a transcontinental migration containment machine which, in its current conjuncture, is heterogeneously but simultaneously realized in Macerata, the English Channel, the Darién Gap, Cox Bazaar, the central Mediterranean, Beitbridge and elsewhere. In fact, from the privileged vantage point of development studies, the transdisciplinary field that informs my academic gaze, these are constitutive elements of an always already global historical project of differentiation and hierarchization of territories and populations that marginalizes, dispossesses and subordinates the (im/mobile) majority world. From my privileged vantage point, exploitation, coloniality, death and violence constitute an analytical starting point rather than something in need of confirmation. This is precisely where the problem of chronicling the crisis begins.

If a chronicle is understood to be a report, and specifically a report that is given in a chronological order,1 what sort of chronological order should I use to talk about the European Union (EU) border and its crisis in Macerata? One that privileges the historical and conjunctural resonances and synchronicity that subsume this province within global space-times?

Buildings of Refuge is a situated account of the so-called ‘European migration crisis’. It studies the tumultuous period that witnessed both the arrival in Europe of millions of what were categorized as first-time asylum seekers, and a proliferation of responses to this phenomenon by governmental authorities. Taking as its object of analysis and investigation 65 reception centres for asylum seekers in the small central Italian province of Macerata, this book records and interprets the reverberations, refractions and deflections engendered by these arrivals and responses.

As convincingly made clear by critical scholars, the ‘crisis’ witnessed in this period is not to be understood as one of migration, but rather one created by said proliferation of responses. Blocking legal routes of entry into Europe and thus irregularizing almost all forms of European Union (EU) bound migration; multiplying and diffusing points of violent border enforcement within and outside Europe; creating chokepoints at European internal borders and thus engendering informal settlements; introducing legal and administrative innovations that dilute the right to seek asylum; curtailing the entitlements associated with the latter; and other such transformations; are all implicated in fracturing and making more turbulent what otherwise could have been safer and more linear migration routes (see de Vries et al 2016; Ambrosini et al 2019). This is a border crisis, not a migration one (Kasparek 2016), and as such it will be considered throughout this book.

I met Innocent during one of my first visits to Hotel Le Grazie, in June 2017. I had gone there to try and meet Janice, the head of Centri d’Accoglienza Straordinaria (Extraordinary Reception Centres for asylum seekers, or CAS) operations of Gruppo Umana Solidarietà (GUS), the subcontractor managing the hotel (see Chapter 2). As she usually avoided my repeated phone calls or had her assistant reply to them saying that she was away, I would often show up at her office chancing an encounter. Sometimes I did meet her, but she would rush into her car or another room telling me ‘we are extremely busy, if you want to talk to me come back in winter’. I did, but also the following January I was denied audience. Bar a courteous encounter during a pilot visit to Macerata in 2016, she actively, and progressively with more force, attempted to hamper my research efforts. In 2018, she banned me from all her CAS, even if there was no legal basis for doing so, as I confirmed with a Prefettura official. I nevertheless continued visiting Le Grazie throughout the years, reassured by the fact that those trips would never be wasted, always filled with new encounters.

In one of these visits, I introduced myself to Innocent, another Nigerian national and a man from Ghana, who were seated in one of the parking lot's few shaded areas, with a large rooster enclosed in a cage behind them. I told them that I had come to meet Janice but that she wasn't there and made my by then well-rehearsed ethics-compliant introductory spiel about research objectives, confidentiality and safeguarding, which was met with puzzled gazes.

Buildings of Refuge and the Postcoloniality of Asylum Infrastructure challenges the narrative of ‘migration crisis’ in Europe, offering instead an analysis of how European Union (EU) enforcement policies have created a ‘border crisis’ that manifests in the everyday life of local spaces. Situated in the Macerata province in Italy, Paolo Novak’s deeply situated ethnography of 65 Centri d’Accoglienza Straordinaria (Extraordinary Reception Centres for asylum seekers, or CAS) examines the situated manifestations of the EU border interactive machine. Through detailed observations of buildings – ‘the protagonists of the book’ – the encounters within them (including owners of the buildings, employees of organizations running the reception centres for asylum seekers, and people living in these spaces), and the history of these spaces, Novak makes an original and necessary contribution to understanding the infrastructures of bordering through a situated account of local places. This does not just mean turning from the global to the local, as Novak argues, ‘placing the study of borders, migration and their infrastructure does not (simply) mean shifting the analytical focus from global, regional or national scales to local ones’. Rather, the detailed descriptions of these spaces and the various layers of interactions between them and the people that live there seek to situate the fluid geographies engendered by the EU border machine, ‘recognising that each place is the product of diverse trajectories and relations, each uniquely and unevenly expressing the immense movement of the world’.

Introduction

In introducing my contribution to this edited collection, I feel I need to outline my background and what has brought me to where I am now. I have always been interested in the details of how research is carried out, especially in settings that may not allow for conventional research approaches and methods. As such, I have always engaged deeply with questions of power, hierarchy, and ownership as well as the location and generation of knowledge. Research for me became a process of active doing and making in collaboration with participants with the aim to foster social justice and pursue activist work. It is this philosophical outlook on research that has led to my substantive research relating to the lived experience of disabled, chronically ill, and/ or neurodivergent staff and students in higher education, predominantly in the UK. It is also this philosophical outlook that has led me to focus on objectwork in the context of analysis.

The methodological and theoretical framing for my work is Embodied Inquiry (Leigh and Brown, 2021), an approach to research that foregrounds the role of the body and seeks to transcend the body– mind dualism. As such, Embodied Inquiry may focus on any or all of the following four typologies (pp 22–6):

• 1. the lived experience

• 2. the researcher's body in the field

• 3. the body as communicator

• 4. the body in interaction

The exploration of these research foci draws on phenomenology and hermeneutics, thereby recognising knowledge as produced and relational, contextual, and multimodal (pp 39– 40). Embodied Inquiry is based on the principle that human language is insufficient and inexact, that human understanding is embodied and that therefore human communication relies on metaphors (pp 28– 31). Consequently, analysis within Embodied Inquiry requires engagement with data that goes beyond conventional coding and theme finding in order to account for embodiment within analysis. For researchers to be able to make sense of data and generate knowledge as active agents Embodied Inquiry asks that they attend to their bodies.