Navigating the Labyrinth of Shifting Biographies

In the spring of 2022, I interviewed Salim, a young Moroccan I met a few months previously, on a terrace in Madrid. Salim arrived in Spain three years ago without any family reference or legal guardian, which made him fall under the administrative category of ‘unaccompanied minor’ (UAM) due to his threefold condition of minority, foreign status and lack of parental guardianship. When I asked him why he agreed to tell me his story, he replied: ‘Because I knew you could understand me, you had spoken to me in Arabic, you know the “risky”, you know what Morocco is like, you were in Melilla, I know that you can understand everything I tell you, that you can imagine, that you won't judge me.’ What counted for him, therefore, was ultimately my circulation between the places he himself had crossed, my knowledge of migratory vocabulary, actors, places and practices – in short, a form of ‘transnational knowledge’ that allowed for a common universe of reference.

At the beginning of our interview, he told me he was 18 years old. During the interview, he put out his cigarette with a sudden gesture and interrupted himself: ‘Well, I'll tell you the truth. I haven't told anyone here. The truth is that I'm 16, but I didn't want to stay too long in a child protection centre … It's tough there, you know … When I arrived in Spain, I said I was 15, but in reality, I was 13. But now, in my mind and heart, I'm 18. It's become my real age, forever. I don't even think about it any more.’

Salim transformed some of his biographical data in order to adapt to the administrative environments in which he would have to evolve. These changes of the presentation of self (Goffman 1959) were so strongly internalised by Salim that they ended up ‘melting’ into his personal history. What kind of story could I have collected if I hadn't met him outside of the institutions he attends in his daily life and if I hadn't been able to reassure him of my familiarity with the places and thus the contradictory administrative universes he had travelled through? Probably the institutional version of his story, with poor scientific value, and no basis to understand the biographical tactics that young people on the move are compelled to invent. But even so, his will to re-establish his ‘biographical truth’ is the result of a sudden decision on his part over which the researcher has little or no control. And where is a hypothetical ‘truth’ to be found, now that his new age has now become, in his eyes and according to the administration, his new and irreversible truth? Salim's tactic shows how age is above all a social artefact, arbitrary, unstable and fabricated: it is less a biological reality than an administrative recognition and registration. In the face of those young people travelling without official documentation, the instability and fragility of Western age identification systems are exposed. Moreover, the struggles to determine age and to legitimate the access to or exclusion from social categories such as ‘children’ or ‘minors’ are far from new. From the colonial empires where racialised juvenile bodies were subjected to public surveillance and medical and social expertise (Stoler 2002; Saada 2012) to the aftermath of the Second World War when resettlement was conditioned by age determination of young refugees (Burgard 2021), from French adolescents lying about their age and crossing the Spanish border in secret to fight against Franco's forces (Sill 2011) to ‘indigenous’ adolescents leaving their families in Algeria to reach the French metropole alone before the war of independence (Gardet and Mokrane 2010), the embarrassment of adults and nation states in the face of the ‘unchildlike children’ (Zahra 2009: 53) is a historical constant. These struggles are part of a long genealogy of juvenile tactics for navigating childhood and adulthood and negotiating age norms and, simultaneously, of administrative suspicion about the age claimed and the extension of techniques to reduce age-related uncertainty.

In France, I met up with Madi, whom I had followed on his journey from Morocco to Spain and then to France for months. ‘So how are you doing?’, ‘How was Spain?’, ‘How's your work going?’, ‘What about Otmane, have you got any news?’, ‘How's your injury?’ We caught up quickly as he had to attend a school support course. After exchanging memories and giving each other news, we took a photo together, and he left on his bike. The next day, I received a message: ‘Please don't use my photo if you are going to use everything I told you about my life.’ It turned out that at this time, Madi was going through a minority assessment procedure at the Aide Sociale à l'Enfance (ASE). The story he gave to the institution is slightly different from the journey I know: he smoothed, polished and transformed certain elements. The complex and opaque bureaucratic machinery of child protection and migration control in France has made him unsure of what to say and when to keep silent, and he got lost in the labyrinth of his biographical transformations. Distressed by the contradictory advice he received from friends and associations, he feared being excluded from the status of ‘UAM’ and developed a narrative that would not be prejudicial to him. I met him a week later and tried then to conduct an in-depth interview with him. He told me contradictory things that did not match with the events I had witnessed in Marrakesh. I realised that he did not remember what he had told me back in the past, and I could see in his eyes and his anxious and sudden gestures that he was under high stress levels because of my questions. I then decided to interrupt the interview and return to a more banal and ‘harmless’ discussion to soothe him. If in Morocco he was willing to share his story with me, it turned out that since he has had to face European administrative obstacles, he experiences my questions as microaggressions to the energy he has put into recreating a biographical coherence in line with his history and the institutional expectations he is now facing.

Solicited by a plurality of adults in search of narratives, young people on the move are caught in an injunction to ‘open up’ and ‘tell’ themselves. The suspicion that hangs over their minority and the narrative credibility of their journey (Bricaud 2006; Sigona 2014; Kumin 2014) can provoke a tendency among young interviewees to modify their stories, to evade or invent elements, which weakens the validity of the data collected. Inaudible because they are confined to the closed worlds of migration control and child protection, unspeakable because they are full of violence and distressing memories, the words of young people on the move have become a legal and political issue in determining the legitimacy of their access to protection. At the heart of the institutional biographical injunction (Duvoux 2009) to ‘recount’ themselves and to transform an intimate narrative into a civil one (Astier 1995), a test of narrative credibility (Kobelinsky 2007) is played out for young people, giving rise to a social sanction and selection that operates a logic of sorting out ‘legitimate’ and ‘illegitimate’ young people (Perrot 2019; Paté 2023). It is therefore a matter of the young person mastering their narrative, transforming it and making it, sometimes artificially, ‘coherent’ in order to correspond to the tacit expectations of adults (Carayon et al. 2018). This is precisely what happened to Madi, and what made him suddenly regret confiding in a researcher for fear of possible institutional sanctions.

Facing Solitude, Building Trust: Insights from Youth Crossing Borders in Morocco

Bashir, a teenager of Guinean origin, vigorously cuts his chocolate pancake; it's all over his mouth, and he bursts out laughing as he wipes it with a tissue. He leans over my phone: ‘Is it recording, are you sure? No, check it, check it, what if it's not recording?’ Once reassured, he takes a deep breath : ‘Let's go!’ His undisguised enjoyment, his excitement at granting me an interview, draws my attention, whereas the surveying of young people involved in transnational migration journeys generally comes up against silences, mistrust and ellipses (Kohli 2006).

To my question of why he agreed to grant me such a ‘formal’ interview, he replies, amused: ‘Because you already know almost everything! I'm so happy to help you with your thesis, so happy really, you can ask me anything you want, you're going to do the best thesis!’ Bashir's enthusiasm highlights the complicity that unites us and the confidence he has in my understanding of his experiences, built over several months of repeated meetings. He feels valued in his role as an interviewee and is enthusiastic about the idea of participating in my research, partly because he sees it as a way of thanking me for the support I have given him in moments of loneliness. Additionally, since he left Guinea, he has had very few opportunities to tell his story – the ‘real one’ as he says: ‘I know I can tell you my real story, I know you are on my side.’ To Becker's (1967) famous question about social scientists’ commitment, ‘whose side are we on?’, Bashir gave his own answer.

We are joined by Kyle, an adolescent from Cameroon, whom I met a year earlier in the north of Morocco and who now also lives in Rabat.

When I met you, phewwww [amused]. It wasn't a good time for me, it was too hard. I agreed to meet you because it was Aimé who told me I could trust you, and Aimé is like a big brother to me, if he says something I believe it. I explained everything to you, how it was going for me. Afterwards when I left, it was strange, I felt a bit lighter, I don't know how to say, I had no one to tell all that to […] the others I was staying with, who were trying to cross [the Straits of Gibraltar], all that we live, how we suffer and everything, they already know it, they live it too, I'm not going to tell them again! And after telling you, I don't know how to say it, I felt a bit lighter.

Kyle's testimony shows that he was pleased, and even relieved, to be able to confide in someone. It also highlights the isolation that often characterises the experiences of young people attempting to cross borders in Morocco, and the strength and importance of individuals who act as guarantors of trust.

Beyond Biographical Violence

What is the difference between Bashir and Kyle, who are enthusiastic and confident in their desire to confide in researchers and tell their stories, and Salim and Madi, whose more chaotic accounts are marked by the fear of revealing themselves and by the confusion between their ‘official’ and ‘intimate’ biographies? One of the possible explanations is that Bashir and Kyle are still far from aid institutions, whereas Salim and Madi are already entrenched in institutional work and its biographical issues. I suggest that young people on the move gradually learn institutional norms and their biographical injunctions as they are socialised into humanitarian and social intervention, and that the situation of investigation is radically affected by this. Those who have been exposed to the organisations of international cooperation in Morocco are already familiar with institutional work, the expectations of adults and the ‘vulnerability criteria’ that are central for the ‘UAM’ status. Once they arrive in Europe, they are confronted with the European administrative regimes of migration control and child protection, which radically alter their narratives. Therefore, there are two factors guiding and shaping the juvenile narratives: the stages of their migration pathway (within or outside Europe) and, more importantly, the degree of socialisation to institutional intervention. These factors have decisive implications for social science surveys and must be considered by researchers operating in so-called ‘sensitive’ fields.

‘Sensitive’ fields can be defined as fields that deal with ‘illegal or informal practices, individuals who are subject to strong stigmatisation and situations marked by violence, danger and/or suffering’ (Bouillon et al. 2005: 13–14). These characteristics ‘imply abandoning an excessively canonical survey protocol, as the ethnographer must put his methods to the test in order to invent new ways of doing things, with a constant concern for rigour’ (ibid.: 14–15). The difficulty of accessing migration fields, in a context of increasing politicisation of migration issues, is notably linked to specific spatiotemporal and statutory configurations (social, residential and legal-administrative precariousness, hypermobility and informal networks) that contribute to weakening the survey relationship. Child and youth care facilities are also ‘closed-door’ environments, isolated from public life, with strict access restrictions justified by the legal minority status of those in care.

Furthermore, investigative relations in ‘sensitive’ fields tend to have to accommodate the recurrent interference of third parties. One of the major challenges of surveying young people in mobility is thus ‘the lengthy and time-consuming process of negotiating access to young people categorised as underage through gatekeepers’ (Chase et al. 2019: 459). These gatekeepers (Broadhead et al. 1976) are the adults who, evolving around the young people, control, allow or block the researcher's access according to their own definitions of the young person's ‘best interest‘ (Hanson et al. 2012). The research is thus often marked by the impossibility of engaging in direct contact without the mediation of an adult through whom the conditions of the survey must be negotiated. Indeed, ‘gaining the trust of children means managing to create a relationship with them “despite” the other adults who would like to organise the interaction, and “despite” the researcher's adult status’ (Danic et al. 2006 105).

Ethics in research with young people on the move is receiving more and more specific attention, offering reflective scholarly work (Hopkins 2008; Vervliet et al. 2015; Kaukko et al. 2017; Chase et al. 2019; Senovilla-Hernández 2021; Lønning et al. 2022 ; Shahrokh 2023). When faced with the young people's refusal or reluctance to collaborate, researchers try to elaborate new ways of meeting them, for instance by proposing co-creation workshops or legal information sessions to defend a retributive stance and participatory methodologies. But meeting young people through institutions and administrations makes it difficult to evacuate the researchers’ proximity to social and administrative agents, with whom they may share certain social properties, such as class, race, age or gender – always with the risk of collecting an institutionally oriented account. Moreover, sometimes some of these investigative strategies, when carried out inside institutions and when they seek to explore the migratory pathways of the adolescents, ultimately aim to ‘crack the varnish’, to break down the resistance of young people, whose silence is nevertheless a protection of the territory of the self (Paté 2023: 220). Of course, intra-institutional approaches are often the only possible way in and enable passionate and important research about a wide range of subjects, especially about their current experiences and future aspirations. But I would like to go further and stress their limitations when they seek to explore these young people's pasts and the depth of their juvenile migratory journeys. Biographical transformations are intertwined like threads in a tapestry: one lie implies another to preserve the overall coherence, and revealing one implies revealing others, threatening to undermine the fragile biographical architecture that can fissure and within which young people can get lost when they are subjected to contradictory injunctions or invasive and repeated solicitations. Indeed, I support the idea that the obsession with the pasts of these adolescents, whether from researchers, journalists or social workers, even varnished with goodwill and active listening, can be analysed as a biographical violence against the energy deployed by young people to create meaning and coherence between an often painful intimate history and a civil narrative whose destabilisation could entail irreversible institutional sanctions. The repeated solicitations reactivate anxieties and plunge the adolescents into a permanent state of qui vive. Researchers have to avoid reproducing those forms of biographical violence, either by collecting the stories in spaces and times where this speech is possible or, when the intra-institutional approach is the only entry possible or when the adolescent is caught in a narrative vice, by giving up access to this past, dislocated by a specific and excluding administrative regime, in order to invest other research themes by detaching themselves from obsession with biographical stories and migratory journeys. This is all the more necessary as this obsession with the pasts of young people contributes to reifying their identity on the basis of their migratory stigma and to reproducing institutional classifications and relegations (Payet 2020), while many research topics about youth experiences remain blind spots in the social sciences.

Towards Extra-Institutional Ethnography ‘on the Move’: Being at Their Side, Being on Their Side

After spending several months following adolescents’ journeys from Morocco to Spain and France, journeys that they managed to carry out despite sophisticated migration control and the (im)mobility effects of the health crisis (Gazzotti 2023), I thus advocate for research ‘on the move’ as one of the ways to establish an early relationship of trust and follow adolescents intimately in their pathways to and through Europe. This approach is reminiscent of Marcus's (1995, 1998, 2008) multisited ethnography that aims to embrace a social phenomenon from a multiplicity of spaces, following connections and associations among these dislocated sites. It implies a conceptualisation of mobility that is perceived not only as a method or a factor to be studied, but as a constitutive element of the field itself. This mobility should be anchored in an ethnography as close as possible to the adolescents’ daily lives, allowing a more empathetic and contextually grounded understanding of young people's experiences (Cantwell and Luby 1994; Lewis Aptekar 1994). By systematically meeting the adolescents outside institutions (on the street and/or through links and pledges of trust) and accompanying them actively throughout their journeys, the researcher avoids having to ‘convince’ them of their trustworthiness by being at their side and, as Bashir highlights, by being on their side – which implies engaging both physically and emotionally in the field, sharing the emotions of fear and joy, celebrating the victories and supporting in the trials and, most importantly, suspending judgements derived from the hegemonic norms of childhood and transnational (im)mobility. The careful and respectful positioning of the researcher, whose trust and reliability are never taken for granted and could be revoked at any moment by the adolescents, is then an ethical and ethnographic responsibility in a universe of constraint, hostility and criminalisation of mobility.

To that extent, the use of social networks enables researchers to establish and maintain long-term relationships of trust with adolescents, thanks to repeated contact and virtual ‘small talk’ despite geographical distance. These exchanges open up a level of intimacy with the young people, allowing for a certain degree of reciprocity within the multiple and ever-present asymmetries of the investigative relationship. This allows the researchers to capture everyday practices of meaning-making and to meet the adolescents where they are after they have travelled or crossed a frontier. It also allows them to be situated outside of the pressing but short-lived requests of humanitarians, institutional agents and journalists and to avoid reproducing the symbolic violence of institutional interviews (Mekdjian 2016: 156). The fieldwork situation extends beyond the moment of the interview, expanding in space and time. And the interview itself can take many biographical forms to avoid registers that break away from ‘ordinary communication’ (Althabe 1990). It can take the form of traditional in-depth interviews and life stories (Bertaux 1997) when the context and the trust bond allow it, but also conversational interviews, remote interviews, phone and video calls or even voice notes… These alternative biographical methods provide young people with greater control over the interaction and take account of the variability of contexts and constraints they experience, but constitute above all, in the end, a myriad of ‘small stories’ (Georgakopoulou 2006) that are particularly valuable for investigating ‘youth in vulnerable situations’ (Lavaud 2017).

Most importantly, this transnational long-term relation allows the researchers to truly accompany the adolescents and to conduct observations at different administrative or geographical stages of their journeys. Researchers can thus witness in situ the ‘biographical transformations’ that occur progressively, by documenting the repetitions, ellipses and modifications that are made as the adolescents interact with institutional agents and penetrate heterogeneous administrative universes.

However, these methodologies should not result in romanticising fieldwork that is saturated with violence and characterised by extreme asymmetries of privilege and vulnerability, and the biographical violence researchers may contribute to produce and reproduce is never definitively resolved, as Madi's concern pointed out. It is also noteworthy that researchers themselves are not exempt from institutional control. The social sciences now operate in a context where research is subject to institutionalised ethical regulations and bureaucratic requirements, which Johanna Siméant-Germanos (2022) refers to as the ‘bureaucratisation of scientific virtue’. It should be noted that these rules – established to protect the respondents in the first place – can be difficult, if not impossible, to guarantee when working with these adolescents categorised as ‘UAMs’. How can we work within the legal framework of age and minority when chronological, civil and biological age frontiers are blurred and porous? Sometimes, the adolescents do not even know their exact date of birth. As Slow, a Guinean adolescent crossing from Morocco, arrived in the Canary Islands and was bombarded with questions about his civil status and his age, he called me on WhatsApp: ‘I don't know what to tell them, I don't know, it has never been important before’, he explained anxiously. Besides, many of them are often not in contact with their parents or legal guardians. Obtaining parental authorisation or signed informed consent forms can be, by definition, especially challenging for young ‘UAMs’. And how can the researcher obtain signed consent when signing a document is also perceived as a breach of trust and can reignite the symbolic violence of the survey relationship, especially with those who may have low literacy skills? In Rabat in March 2022, some young people who had previously received donated food and clothing packages turned against the volunteers when asked to sign against the withdrawal of the baskets. ‘They want us to sign, what does that mean? The European Union gives them money, they make it look like they're giving it to us because they show our signatures, but look at our bags, they don't give anything. The signature is proof that they're lying to us.’ Additionally, administrative norms that constrain researchers may clash with the scientific imperatives of the study: how can the researcher plan the coming months in detail or request mission orders from attached institutions when the specificity of the multisited approach is to be able to follow the unpredictability of juvenile trajectories? The researcher must therefore continually negotiate these ethical, legal and administrative constraints and move between heterogeneous and sometimes competing scientific and legal imperatives.