Date of Submission

Spring 2024

Academic Program

Foreign Languages, Cultures, and Literatures; Politics

Project Advisor 1

Simon Gilhooley

Abstract/Artist's Statement

Amidst an increasingly restrictive immigration landscape, this research is focused on the practice of age assessments conducted on unaccompanied migrant minors in France. Despite the rise in international legislation safeguarding the rights of children, irrespective of citizenship status, France lacks a unified strategy for their protection. Instead, dozens of local government offices (called départements) carry out highly subjective age assessments to determine whether an unaccompanied migrant minor qualifies for protection. These offices enact a conflicting mandate in which the duty to protect all children is entangled with immigration enforcement practices. Against this backdrop, this research seeks to explore how the category of childhood is established, through following the threads of translation and biopolitical forces present in the age assessment procedure. It argues that the age assessment primarily operates in support of a moral economy where certain immigrant groups are deemed the state's ethical responsibility while others are disregarded. By highlighting the subjective nature and various levels of translation inherent in the assessment process, this project demonstrates that the evaluation of age is part of a broader biopolitical scheme to regulate and control translation contingencies, ultimately serving the objective of population management.

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Open Access

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

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