Paper short abstract:

In this paper, I discuss how caregivers render the refugee shelter a safe place that should protect its young residents from external pressure and provide them with a space for being young. I carve out tensions between their vision of a safe place and young residents’ engagement in place-making.

Paper long abstract:

Based on ethnographic fieldwork in a shelter for underaged refugees in East-Germany, this paper engages with the refugee shelter as a place in the making. Focusing on caregivers’ attempts to create a protected space for refugees, I engage with the ways in which adolescence and behavior caregivers associate with puberty disrupt this undertaking. The shelter as a safe place should protect its young residents from external pressure and provide them with a space for being young. Through a careful analysis of everyday care practices, I trace how caregivers strive for creating a comfortable and secure atmosphere, in which residents enjoy time being young and catch up on things caregivers assume they have missed. I argue that this dedicated efforts for a safe place can indeed become a resource for the residents, who, to a certain extent, are given small spaces of experimentation to invest in their own forms of place-making. However, being young entails making gut decisions, transgressing rules and order, and thus also unconventional forms of doing place. Therefore, adolescence brings about new conflicts between adolescent residents and adult caregivers. Looking at place-making through the lens of puberty enables new insights into contested place-making in situations of displacement, normative expectations that are being articulated through place, and how young people invent their own forms of transgressing place.