In the aftermath of the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ in 2015, unaccompanied minors have been depicted as potential threats and challenges to receiving countries in the Swedish public debate. Through narratives of unaccompanied youngsters from 2011 to 2012, this article will illustrate that these youngsters were already struggling with the ambiguous refugee figures of the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ prior to the events of 2015. By studying their narratives, I analyse how deservingness comes into play in how they constitute themselves as subjects. In their narratives, they describe themselves as responsible, hard-working youngsters in relation to education and future working life. Moreover, their narratives also illustrate how descriptions of diligence and agency are used in order to oppose the discourse figures of unaccompanied minors as threats or victims. I conclude by suggesting that these narratives can be seen as manifestations of conditional belonging centred on deservingness, which the youngsters negotiate also after they have been granted protection.

In the aftermath of the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ in 2015, unaccompanied minors have been depicted as potential threats and challenges to receiving countries in the Swedish public debate. Through narratives of unaccompanied youngsters from 2011 to 2012, this article will illustrate that these youngsters were already struggling with the ambiguous refugee figures of the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ prior to the events of 2015. By studying their narratives, I analyse how deservingness comes into play in how they constitute themselves as subjects. In their narratives, they describe themselves as responsible, hard-working youngsters in relation to education and future working life. Moreover, their narratives also illustrate how descriptions of diligence and agency are used in order to oppose the discourse figures of unaccompanied minors as threats or victims. I conclude by suggesting that these narratives can be seen as manifestations of conditional belonging centred on deservingness, which the youngsters negotiate also after they have been granted protection.

Abstract

The aim of this three-year research project is to investigate displacements, i.e. changes in the right to housing and food according to the Swedish Social Service Act between 1982-2018, and its implications for the broader issue of social rights in the welfare state. This is done through the notion of advanced legal practices, which refer to incidents where the dominant current law is contested in legal interpretation and application and this involves a transformation of the legal content. Focus of the project is the right to basic social assistance, which comprises emergency aid, including food and housing, for vulnerable EU migrants and undocumented persons. Special focus is children’s situation.

Advanced legal practices emerge at different levels and in various juridical spaces, for example when a decision-maker or judge disregards certain conditions or allows jurisdictions to interact in new ways. An example is a resent ruling by the Supreme Administrative Court’s HFD 2017 ref 33, which, through a re- interpretation of the linkage between the Social Service Act and Law on the reception of asylum seekers, destabilized the basic responsibility of the municipalities to provide emergency aid for everyone residing on their territory. Regardless of the underlying

motives, advanced legal practitioners have consequences for individuals as well as for social rights in general. It is therefore important to understand why and how such practices emerge. The study concentrates on two basic social rights (food and housing) and two groups whose legal status in Sweden is ambiguous. Empirical material are 200 administrative court judgments, individual and group interviews, and local guidelines in three Swedish municipalities of different size with experience of EU-migration and refugee reception – Malmö, Norrköping and Älmhult. Our knowledge acquisition is a dialectic process through continuous collaboration with professionals. An exploration of the law enforcement over time in three municipalities, guided by approaches within legal geography, spatial and temporal dimensions of law are demonstrated.

This paper offers some behind-the-scenes insights drawn from the collective fieldwork experiences of the contributors to this Special Issue. These include reflections on: how decisions about modes of accessing research participants fundamentally shape the research process and outcomes; the pitfalls of only focusing on young people’s migratory experiences while ignoring the multiple other dimensions to their lives; how we can best capture and represent young people’s often paradoxical vulnerability and agency; the relative merits of methodological innovations increasingly integrated into work with marginalised and hard to reach communities; and, finally, our own positionality when conducting research with migrant young people and the importance of taking account of how our own subjective, political, philosophical and ethical standpoints influence our interactions throughout our research endeavours. These contributions seek to promote greater reflexivity and transparency among academics conducting ethnographically driven research with young people in the context of forced migration.

This article investigates children’s participation and sense of belonging from the perspective of unaccompanied children, based on two qualitative research projects with unaccompanied children in Sweden and Finland. The results show that the unaccompanied children’s own understanding of their participation and belonging in different positions was fluid; for instance, the borders between childhood and adulthood, and striving for independence or wanting to be cared for by adults were flexible, allowing the children’s movement within and between the categories.