New anthropological perspectives on unaccompanied migrant youth in Europe and beyond I

This panel brings together new anthropological perspectives on migrant youth, and is conceived as a forum for new theoretical contributions from anthropologists working on and with unaccompanied children in Europe and beyond. How does the figure of the non-citizen child, crossing borders autonomously, challenge and redefine the anthropological conceptions of childhood - and more broadly, the notions of transnationalism, state power, human rights and humanitarianism(s)? In this panel the migrant child is addressed as a critical figure that impersonates the paradox of humanitarian reasoning (Fassin), which is also a legal and political paradox (Arendt; Bhabha), encapsulating the tension between structural oppression and agentive capacity of a human subject. Migrant children's life trajectories are critically defined by the tension between legality and illegality, mobility and immobility - an ontological condition that is co-produced by the system of nation-states, laws and governmental bodies, but cannot be reduced to their effects, living significant space for creativity and inventive strategies of resistance. By laying the focus on the theoretically productive role of autonomous children as subjects of ethnographic scrutiny, the aim of this panel is to come to a deeper understanding of the ways current anthropological knowledge makes sense of shifting terrains around the conceptions of childhood, adulthood, and migration.