Responding to misrecognition – A study with unaccompanied asylum-seeking minors

Riikka Korkiamäki and Robbie Gilligan

Children and Youth Services Review, 2020, vol. 119, issue C

Abstract: Theories of recognition have received increasing attention in studies of children, young people and social care. However, the concept of misrecognition, as the opposite of recognition, is less featured. This article studies the experiences of misrecognition using evidence from the lived experience of underaged unaccompanied asylum-seeking boys in Finland. Drawing from conceptualizations of (mis)recognition and qualitative data created with 18 unaccompanied asylum-seeking boys living in residential care, we firstly look at how the boys articulate their experience of being seen as ‘refugees’. Secondly, we study how they respond to the refugee label. The findings show that the refugee stigma is mainly experienced as misrecognition, which influences the ways the young asylum-seekers strive to construct agentic identities. Four ways of responding to this misrecognition are identified: adopting a diminished identity (resigning), standing up against misrecognition (resisting), acting to prove the prejudice they encounter wrong (conforming), and claiming ordinariness (performing). We argue that the misrecognition experiences of unaccompanied asylum seeking minors offer a valuable lens for deepening our understanding of young people’s responses to adverse conditions. Their varying responses to misrecognition provide important insights into how social work and the care system can be more attentive to the experiences of marginalized children and young people.

Keywords: Agency; Institutional care; Misrecognition; Recognition; unaccompanied asylum-seeking minors (UAM); Young people (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0190740920321101
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:cysrev:v:119:y:2020:i:c:s0190740920321101

DOI: 10.1016/j.childyouth.2020.105687

Access Statistics for this article

Children and Youth Services Review is currently edited by Duncan Lindsey

More articles in Children and Youth Services Review from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().