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Paper short abstract:

The main purpose of this paper is to understand the practices of clandestine crossing of the Mediterranean Sea of Moroccan youth on the move to Europe. The paper is a photograph about the Melilla living with the reflections of a drawing workshop held with six young harraga.

Paper long abstract:

Young Moroccans, [self] referred to as harraga, are moving to Europe due to their own circumstances and using their own resources. According to the extensive academic literature on the matter, they are a new migratory actor (Gimeno & Rodríguez, 2015; Jiménez Álvarez, 2011; Suárez Navaz, 2004). The Autonomous City of Melilla, a colonial enclave located on the southern border of Europe, has become the shelter for a large number of these harraga, located in a grey area of age between the minority and the majority, which forces them, in many times, to the self-management of their own movement as a resistance, clandestinely crossing the Mediterranean Sea.

The main purpose of this paper is to understand the practices of clandestine crossing of the Mediterranean Sea of Moroccan youth in autonomous movement to Europe. With that purpose, a drawing workshop was held in the streets of this border city with six young harraga. This drawing workshop emerged after extensive fieldwork. The predominance of research techniques that seek a testimonial account exclude from their participation street children, without access to formal education or even illiterate and with drug use that made oral discourse difficult.

This paper does not intend to teach what the clandestine crossing of the Mediterranean Sea and the flight from Melilla mean. It is a photograph about the ways of feeling and thinking of some young men who are on the margins of the margins.

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Paper short abstract:

On May 16 and 17, 2021, some 8,000 people, most of them minors, crossed the border fence between Morocco and Spain in Ceuta, encouraged by rumors that the Moroccan government had opened the border. Children who alone or encouraged by their families flee from the hogra and look for karama.

Paper long abstract:

The immigration of underage boys and girls from Morocco who come alone and are in a situation of helplessness has been a sustained phenomenon in Catalonia in recent decades. During this time, progress has been made both in the actions and in the knowledge of this group and their needs once they arrive at their destination. The typologies and profiles of the boys and girls who come to our towns have been described, the different responses that have been given to them by the administrations and the effects of each of them have been analysed. The works, beyond intervention perspectives, on the living conditions in origin and transit are less numerous, although significant. In our research, we propose a transnational perspective with the unitary treatment of the situations in origin, transit and destination, although considering the contextual and cultural differences. Being young in Morocco first and in Catalonia later means managing a wide range of complex identities and, more than a transition, it is about navigating through social and personal circumstances that place young people in the same social situation: they are inhabiting the physical and symbolic border throughout the migratory process (Sánchez-García et alters, 2021).

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Paper short abstract:

This contribution proposes to question the tension between performativity of childhood and performativity of adulthood in order to grasp the articulation between geographical (im)mobility, social action and progression towards adulthood for young people on the move from Morocco to Spain and France.

Paper long abstract:

"I braided my hair to age for the forest". Young people in transnational mobility, throughout their migratory journey, develop strategies for presenting themselves in a younger or older way, depending on their understanding of the institutional and community injunctions to which they are subject. Forced to negotiate and circulate between sometimes contradictory and competing age norms, young people gradually learn, along the way, about the issues of protection and/or vulnerability linked to minority and majority, in a continuous tension between 'performing childhood' and 'mimicking aldulthood' (Perrot, 2015; Paté, 2018). How does one become an adult in the course of a migratory journey? How do protection pathways influence the "becoming an adult" of young people engaged in a transnational process ? How do these young people move between age norms and renegotiate the boundaries of chronological and social age? How do institutional injunctions related to age translate, on the edge between 'state thought' (Sayad, 1999) and 'humanitarian reason' (Fassin, 2010), strategies for governing youth (Roux & Mazouz, 2015)? Based on a multi-situated field survey conducted in Morocco, Spain and France from 2020 to 2022 during the Covid-19 crisis as part of an ongoing doctoral research on youth who migrate alone, this contribution proposes to question the tension between over-autonomisation and infantilisation, between the performativity of childhood and the performativity of adulthood in order to grasp the articulation between geographical (im)mobility, social action and progression towards adulthood for young people on the move from Morocco to Spain and France.

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Paper short abstract:

Trapped between i) paternalistic concepts of childhood and restrictive asylum law, and ii) children’s right discourse, I will discuss asylum seeking children as non-citizen child. From an intersectional childhood sociology perspective refugee childrens' multiple/political identities are analysed.

Paper long abstract:

For children in forced migration their relationship with the nation state is far from natural or automatic, and an issue of ongoing political debate and discourse. In this presentation I analyse the relationship between children’s rights and asylum law in view of refugee children’s childhood in Europe, from the perspective of childhood sociology. Specifically, the paper examines the political identity (Laclau Moufe, 1985) which is attributed to the figure of the asylum-seeking-child in the struggle between children’s rights discourse and asylum discourse. It will discuss impacts on child protection standards and children’s participation, and children’s exclusion from citizen rights, respectively. It depicts the struggle to determine the political identity of the refugee child as significant for constructivist understanding of childhood concepts. The paper examines processes of invisibilisation (Hormel 2017) of refugee childhoods and discrimination against groups of refugee children. Processes are highlighted of double victimization (Pupavac 2008) of migrant youth in forced migration, in terms of their status as legal subjects, their age, and against the background of paternalistic understandings of family in national migration and asylum legislation (Bhabha 2006) . However, adopting an intersectional perspective children’s experience in refugee mass accommodation is discussed in terms of social actorship, relational agency and refusal. Based on empirical data from an ethnographic research project with young refugee children and their parents in Germany, the paper aims to contribute to a better understanding of migrant youth, and intersecting concepts of childhood, forced migration and citizenship from a sociology of childhood perspective.