13th ESA Conference (2017), Athens. Title: Contested Childhoods: Independent Juvenile Migrants’ Social Navigation Strategies through Worlds in Crisis. (original) (raw)

My presentation discusses chronological Age as an additional field of Biopolitics exercise in the European migratory context. Based on research with independently migrating teenagers-and young adults in Greece, it highlights some of those juveniles' generational strategies to localize and create passages through the real, symbolic and material constraints imposed on them by spatial seclusion, economic and civic deprivation and exposure to racism during their efforts to reach an imagined 'genuine Europe'. While examining the subjects' sociopolitical situatedness with relation to further intersecting aspects such as ethnicity, nationality, sex and gender the presentation moreover traces eventual racialization, gendering and generationing rationalities that underlie public discourses around migrant Bogusness. It is finally argued that due to the existence of an additional, generational 'bio-filter' in matters of migration governance, in the case of young migrants, the natural process of reaching chronological adultness constitutes after all an instance to be feared of instead of being celebrated, once that it forms another threshold of exclusion from settlement options.