Paper short abstract:

What is an "unaccompanied minor refugee" made to be when x-rays, bodies, forensic scientists, and standards are drawn together in the practice of forensic age estimation? This ethnographic paper delineates how technologies become crucial in the making of political subjectivities of young refugees.

Paper long abstract:

Recently bodies, (forensic) medicine and technologies gained importance in decision making processes on asylum seekers in Europe. Where does this belief in the truth derived from bodies and technologies come from? I examine ethnographically what kind of truth, objectivity and body is achieved in forensic age estimation practices carried out in young refugees in Germany: there X-rays of hands and teeth of them are taken to estimate their age. I investigate how this technologically assisted truth relates to the making of new political subjectivities and identities: while some refugees are assessed under age, others come of age in the x-ray room. The former are declared "unaccompanied minors", a status entailing a lot of rights and privileges like being secured from deportation, the latter cannot claim these rights as adult refugees and often move on to other cities and countries to try and claim childhood again.

I theoretically and methodologically draw on the ethnography of practices, science and technology studies and the anthropology of citizenship to investigate what child- and adulthood are made to be for refugees when laws, x-rays, individual bodies, forensic scientists and statistics and standards from different times and places are drawn together in forensic age estimation. I argue that the concrete study of practices is important because it attends to the multiple ways in which categories of in-/exclusion like 'age' are done - in this case, the statistically and technologically assisted enactment of "the normal child" is neither purely 'biological' nor 'social'.