I'm in a pizzeria in Italy with Kal, a 17-year-old unaccompanied migrant. I've invited him to talk to me about his future. He starts rapping, and my interview topic guide is momentarily abandoned. Kal's narrative has gathered its own direction and momentum. Like most of my research participants, and consistent with past research (Bertrand 2000; Phoenix 2019), after answering some questions, Kal began to narrate the challenges and dreams of his life in—and on—his own terms.
The previous day I interviewed a young man from Albania who expressed a similar sense of injustice. But speaking with his head in his hands, Lodi had framed himself as at the center of a tragic plot. He was cursing the God that was now blessing Kal. While his narrative expressed similar themes—poor living conditions, discrimination, bureaucratic indifference—I registered a different narrative genre. Identifying these genres gave me additional information about Kal and Lodi's well-being needs, suggesting that Lodi required immediate support whereas Kal was more resilient.
I had invited Kal to take part in a semi-structured interview on the future plans (known in bureaucratic terms as “life projects”—Allsopp and Chase 2017) of unaccompanied minors in Europe. I sought to build on research that establishes a link between young migrants’ well-being and their ability to establish a sense of “ontological security” (Chase 2013a; Chase and Allsopp 2021)—that is, an ability to plot a future in relation to their past and present lives. Previous research shows that not knowing the outcome of one's asylum claim or being uncertain of what will happen to them once they “become adults” at the age of 18 can be a source of stress to unaccompanied migrant and refugee minors (Chase et al. 2024), leaving them to experience a sense of “limbo” and powerlessness (Gonzales 2011). As I have argued elsewhere, some young people are also defiant, using “tactics of time and status” to seek to move forward with individual or collective life projects in the face of a perceived hostile regime (Allsopp et al. 2015). This article develops this narratological approach to well-being research through the novel use of literary theory. It is the first article to consider the role of narrative genre in how young migrants and refugees express their life projects and experiences of confronting the challenges and opportunities of migration and asylum regimes. I show that it was not just what young people told me about their pasts, presents and futures, but how they recounted it to me that gave important clues about their well-being needs. This has important implications for contexts where they are invited to discuss their life projects with social workers and other social policy actors as well as how they interact with researchers. I argue that giving young people more freedom to express themselves in a range of forms as opposed to formal interviews is at once empowering for them and a source of more information for the interlocutor. How we listen and respond also shapes young people's ability to express themselves and provide an authentic portrait of their future plans and well-being needs.
In this article, I draw on semi-structured biographical interviews with 58 unaccompanied young migrant and refugee men aged 16 to 26 years old in Europe alongside ethnographic fieldnotes featuring more than 100 additional children and young people. I identify and discuss five genres that featured in participants’ narratives: (1) tragedy, (2) comedy, (3) epic, (4) confession, and (5) fantasy (see table 1). Through a discussion of each genre, I demonstrate that alongside fostering a greater understanding of well-being needs and life projects on the part of the interlocutor, storytelling—with its inherently forward-looking thrust—can be a crucial tool for migrants to challenge and survive the violence wrought by unjust border control systems. Storytelling opens important spaces for “existential mobility,” an “imagined or felt movement” which many young migrants living in situations of discrimination, stasis, or precarity are often denied (Hage 2009). My definition of each narrative genre is summarized in table 1.
Classification of Interviews by Narrative Genre
| Narrative genre | Definition employed in research | No. of cases in semi-structured interviews (total no. = 58) (Please note some semi-structured interviews were coded by more than one genre) |
|---|---|---|
| Tragedy | The downfall of a central character. The tragic effect usually depends on our awareness of admirable qualities—manifest or potential—in the protagonist, which are wasted in disaster. The protagonist may have a fatal flaw which leads to an irreversible error or they may be defeated by forces outside their control, such as time or (the) God(s). | 34 |
| Comedy | A story that takes the audience from darkness to light. May also serve chiefly to amuse its audience by identifying a contradiction or by appealing to a sense of superiority over the characters depicted. May include satire, mockery, and farce. | 17 |
| Epic | The protagonist is a hero (of sorts), pursuing something more than self-interest and, at least sometimes, seeing their efforts crowned by success. They may perform superhuman exploits in battle or in marvelous voyages. | 15 |
| Confession | The protagonist reveals their personal problems or private distress with unusual frankness and candor. May include treatment of subjects that are stigmatized in society. May seek to evoke pity or redemption. | 15 |
| Fantasy | The protagonist has an individual or collective hope or dream based on an idealized real or imagined context that motivates them to act out a series of events to try to achieve it. Parallels with utopia (see body of article). | 32 |
These definitions are my own. They are informed by my position as a white British female academic educated primarily in Western cultural and narrative traditions and as the holder of an MA in European languages and literature. My approach to tragedy, comedy, and epic were influenced by Western classical definitions beginning with Aristotle's Poetics ([c. 335 BCE] 1996), the work of Greek and Roman poets including Homer, Ovid, and Horace and those inspired by them, including Dante and Shakespeare. Within the comedy genre, I include the classical definition denoting a journey from darkness to light alongside more modern definitions that incorporate satire, the absurd, and the production of laughter through exposing contradiction. I draw on the work of nineteenth-century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard who explains that while both the tragic and the comic are based on contradiction, “the tragic is the suffering contradiction” while the comical is “painless contradiction”–or where one feels justified in ignoring the pain ([1846] 2019): 431, my italics).
My definition of the confessional genre draws on Enlightenment literature including Rousseau, Proust, and Pascal. The genre of fantasy refers not to science fiction but rather to a combination of romance and utopia. I avoided the term “utopia” since, while I recognize the value of it in articulating a life project that is as yet undefined, hopeful, and unfurling (Jackson 2013), it also evokes a sense of impossibility, which undermines the potential realization of the young people's plans. I also coded for farce and romance and chose not to pursue these because they fitted in broader categories (comedy, and a mix of tragedy and epic respectively).
Background
At the time of my research, 2015 to 2016, Europe was facing unprecedented mixed migration flows and the topic of unaccompanied minors was—as it remains—politically volatile. In 2014, some 23,000 unaccompanied children sought asylum in one of the 28 EU Member States, a significant increase from previous years which averaged 11,000 to 12,000 applications (Eurostat 2021). In 2015, the number rose to 90,000 (Eurostat 2021). By 2016, EU Member States introduced new deterrence (Moreno Lax et al. 2021) and the number of applications began to fall. Many more unaccompanied children arrived in Europe during this time without claiming asylum.
The arrivals were mostly young men aged between 15 and 17 years, originating from countries including Afghanistan, Eritrea, Syria, Albania, and countries in North and Sub-Saharan Africa. Past research has shown that the main objectives—or “life projects” (Allsopp and Chase 2017; Kanics et al. 2011)—for migration among this population are to find safety, to get an education, to reunite with family, and to support their families through work (Kanics et al. 2011; Chase and Allsopp 2021). Although the elaboration of a personal “life project plan” with a social care professional to assess their hopes and well-being needs should provide the basis for the formal support given to all unaccompanied minors across EU Member States, I found that these were often not applied or that participants fell outside of any formal reception system.
The narratological conception of well-being as a sense of ontological security directly speaks to Ghassan Hage's notion of “existential mobility” as a real or imagined movement (2009). In this context, my research encounters can be seen as potentially transformative “ethical encounters” that had the potential to be descriptive and/or iterative (Jackson 2013: 221). Indeed, the question of story-telling often entered into a playful dynamic with that of story-making. Story- making, refers to the psychic act of plotting, plots being not simply organizing structures, but intentional structures that are goal-oriented and forward moving (Brooks 1992). Story-making is equivalent here to planning—something that leads to the taking of action in the real world. Story-telling, meanwhile may or may not involve action in the real world but rather involves the sharing of stories with others or even with oneself.
While I was conscious of my impact on how stories were told, including limiting expression, as I explore below, in holding space for young people to narrate their life projects on their own terms, certain individuals who felt held in conditions of stasis by the state could also exercise agency. Whether that meant framing themselves in that moment as a star-crossed lover or a defiant hero, as Michael Jackson notes, storytelling “allow[s] us to feel that we actively participate in a world that for a moment seemed to discount, demean and disempower us” (2013: 96).
Literature Review
A wide-ranging literature exists on the importance of narrative genre and form in thinking about social justice, including on questions of empathy, understanding, and intercultural exchange. Joseph Campbell's work on the universalism of certain narrative genres—particularly “the hero's journey” (2008)–has been interrogated by studies that have explored the (im)possibilities of translating certain genres or forms, such as the Pashtun oral spoken poetry tradition of Landays, or tappas (Schuster and Shinwari 2020). Moreover, it is important to note that genres also only become so if they are recognizable in a certain culture. As Liza Schuster and Riaz Muhammed Khan Shinwari poignantly ask with reference to Gayatri Spivak (1988): can the Subaltern speak when her words are collected, extracted, selected, and interpreted by others (1988: 96)? Agnes Woolley (2017) has shown how legal determinism shapes and limits our engagement with the question of storytelling in migration studies. Arnab Dutta Roy (2021), meanwhile, has observed with reference to South Asian literature that certain narrative genres may be more suited to fostering cross-cultural empathy. Finally, it is important to recognize that in our globalized world, points of reference of narrative genre are many and intersecting and stories adapt to their audiences (Chase et al. 2024). I spoke with Afghan participants of our common appreciation for Bollywood films, for example, and Titanic was repeatedly raised by young people when discussing dangerous boat crossings.
My approach to reflexivity adds to a wider literature on the value of decolonial feminist methods (Mohanty 1984) as well as more recent discussions of conviviality in research (Berg and Nowicka 2019). Recent years have seen growing recognition of the need to acknowledge biases in the analysis stage of research and how this interacts with an ethics of co-production at other stages, such as research design and fieldwork (Berg and Nowicka 2019). As Ann Phoenix (2019) has argued, there may be value in the researcher pursuing analysis self-reflectively outside of a democratizing framework involving participants at other research stages. This approach can help shed light on and perhaps help to dismantle power imbalances that the researcher may see from her positionality but may be less explicit to the participants (Phoenix 2019: 53–54). While, in keeping with this approach, my choice and definition of narrative genres is subjective, the article may be reflective of a broader interpretive approach based on the Western canon that may exist among researchers and practitioners of a similar background. This is something which is rarely made explicit but shapes knowledge production and consumption about migrants and refugees.
Methodology
Between 2015 and 2016, I spent 18 months in two cities in Italy and England respectively where I conducted semi-structured biographical narrative interviews with 58 unaccompanied young men aged 16 to 26, focused on well-being and futures. I diversified my sample by including individuals with different pathways through, and experiences of, the English and Italian asylum reception and welfare systems (including those not receiving any statutory support). This included semi-autonomous living arrangements, child and adult reception centers, informal settlements, and homelessness. I focused on young men because of their predominance in mixed migration movements to Europe and as part of a broader interest in masculinity and migration (see Allsopp 2017). I also spent time as a participant observer based in three support centers (two in Italy, one in England), keeping ethnographic field notes of my encounters with additional young people.
Because of the importance of the asylum interview to access refugee protection, asylum seekers often approach researchers with caution; likewise, researchers may be skeptical about the stories narrated by refugees. Their narratives may be shaped by a rehearsed legalistic account of past persecution aimed to appease a bureaucrat embroiled in a “culture of disbelief” (Wooley 2017). They may also feature “fragments” (Besteman 2014) or collective traumas inflicted on communities (Malkki 1995). Alternatively, participants may be fearful and/or loathe to speak. I sought to overcome these limitations by employing a longitudinal approach based on the potential of conviviality as at once “a concept to help us make sense of everyday encounters and practices that transgress categorical differences and establish a shared, common humanity” and as a “potential methodology” (Berg and Nowicka 2019: 2). In each setting, I was also involved in collaborative arts-based activities that gave participants various media through which to tell stories. Research was conducted in English, Italian, and French with assistance from Arabic, Amharic, and Tigrinya interpreters. Participants were selected through referrals from gatekeepers and support centers and snowball sampling. I received university ethical clearance. Participants had the option to sign a consent form but most chose to give oral consent, which I recorded after reading the consent form to them. Interviews were recorded via Dictaphone. Data were anonymized to protect participants with insecure immigration status and those fleeing persecution. Where individuals wanted to have an opportunity to tell their story publicly, I sought to facilitate this by referring them to local organizations and to the peer-led publication Griot, named after the narrative genre popular in West Africa and sponsored by Save The Children. I also co-created a range of artistic outputs related to the research.1
This article's source material includes narrative analysis of interview transcripts coupled with ethnographic fieldnotes from my volunteering and participation in arts workshops. My analysis is informed by social constructionism (Burr 2015), which sees the collection of data—especially as this relates to storytelling—as an inherently interrelational, co-construction of knowledge, at the center of which are two (or more) persons in a meeting of minds through the act of speaking and listening. In keeping with convivial approaches to research, this work should “not be viewed as a grand narrative, but as partial, situated and contingent on social positioning” (Berg and Nowicka 2019: 2).
I adopted a flexible text-based narrative approach which focused on young people's understandings of visual or other materials. Following Anna Bagnoli (2009) and others, I analyzed images and texts in terms of the stories that were told, giving weight to both the internal (content) and external (contextual) aspects of the narratives (Banks 2008). In doing so, I pursued what Sarah Drew and Marilys Guillemin (2014) call the “Interpretative Engagement Framework” which involves a three-stage process of: (1) participant engagement; (2) researcher-driven engagement; and (3) re-contextualizing. The final stage involved feeding back findings to a sample of 20 participants through meetings and phone calls. I recognize that this stage, while valuable to foster a spirit of inclusion, was determined by my interest in how I perceived the presence of Western narrative genres. Although most participants were curious and familiar with the Western genres I employed and my interpretation of them, I appreciate that this stage of research may have been experienced as oppressive to some participants or as an attempt to reduce their narratives to fit a Western mold. To mitigate this, I stressed my background and positionality and the rationale of my approach and also explained that this was part of a wider program of research that included more participatory analysis. I offered them all a copy of their transcriptions—which most gladly received—and gave them the option to share their own subjective perceptions of narrative genre that fed into my subsequent research.
When I got back in touch with Kal to discuss my reflections on the importance of genre in storytelling, he initiated a discussion of Nigerian novelist, Chinua Achebe. “Oh yes,” he said, “the story's in the telling . . . ” I am grateful to Kal for this discussion, and it is from here that this article derives its title.
This article analyzes the narratives I was told by my interlocutors and I treat them as such—as expressing deep and complex emotional realities. The definitions of the narrative genres that I explore are given in table 1, along with the number of interviews in which they featured. My identification of each narrative genre was based on its consistent use over a period between two minutes and the whole interview to tell a story—often a story within a story, for narratives frequently combined different genres. Elsewhere in the article I draw on ethnographic observations to describe contexts where the I observed each genre.
Discussion
I now discuss how my analysis of each narrative genre informed my interpretation of the well- being and life projects of the young people I interviewed. I also discuss the challenges I faced in adopting a convivial method and the potential for developing this approach going forward.
Tragedy
The most common genre I observed in participants’ narratives was tragedy. A catastrophic—often gendered—event commonly inspired their initial flight from their previous home. They included the outbreak of violence and loss of home; forced recruitment by the army or a militia (e.g., in Eritrea or Afghanistan); and/or the sudden loss of a family member. Several young men migrated, for example, after the death of their father; in an intergenerational shift, it was now their responsibility to ensure the family's safety and livelihood by sending remittances.
The tragic catalyst could be individual (e.g., Kino, 17, persecuted in Gambia because of his sexuality) or collective (e.g., Khalid, 18, who framed his flight from Egypt as part of a wider response to ISIS activities on the African continent). The ways young people sometimes shifted between individual and collective narratives is at odds with an asylum system that requires them to evidence a “subjective” (meaning individual—although the meaning of this term is disputed in refugee law, see, e.g., Carr 2005) well-founded fear of persecution. Some participants identified this tension, pointing out, for example, that friends who had similar backgrounds had received asylum, whereas they had been found to be unreliable and refused.
Other tragic narratives were intimate. Ariost, a 17-year-old Albanian in Italy, painted multiple sunsets in an art workshop I co-led at his reception center, depicting a couple cuddling. This repeated motif, he explained, marked the loss of his girlfriend who he had “stupidly” left behind—it was an image of his loneliness and desire to reunite.
While loss was often associated with the past, it was also associated with lost opportunities for the future. Several participants were struggling to secure legal status. In a pencil sketch he titled “The Illusion of Italy,” Ahmed, 16, from Egypt, drew two people speaking on the phone with a boat between them. He wrote:
It's me and my cousin. He's in Italy, and I'm in Egypt, and we're talking on the phone. I'm asking him, “So how's Italy?” And he says, “Oh, it's great, yeah. There's work, money; there's all you could ever want! You have to come to Italy!” And then I come to Italy, and it's not like that . . .
The image and caption reflect Ahmed's frustrated desire to secure a future for himself in Italy due to bureaucratic delays that affected his legal status and, consequently, his ability to secure money or work. He felt betrayed by his cousin for raising his hopes, and yet, because of shame, he also felt unable to explain his situation to his family back home who were “already waiting for the first Western Union.” Referring to his situation as at once tragic and ironic, he said he felt that he was living a “double life.”
Often, God was framed as the arbiter of fortune. Hishan, 18, also from Egypt, explained that over the course of the week that he had spent crowded on a boat with 200 other refugees coming to Italy, several people died. The corpse of a 13-year-old boy was thrown overboard to make more space. “God curse that boat that brought me here to Italy,” he exclaimed as he recounted this event. “God strike it down that it brought me here!”
Three research participants explained that because of tragedies they had endured, they had given up religion, while several others had instead leaned into it. The importance of religion for coping among refugees and survivors of violence is well documented (Pertek 2022; Raghallaigh 2011).
In his story, Bilal, 22 from Afghanistan, distinguished carefully between individual bureaucrats (whom he often experienced as “kind”) and the “corrupt politicians” and the “international order” which he saw as responsible for the tragedy in his life. Bilal arrived in England aged 16 after a year of traveling, having fled the Taliban at the age of 15. Once settled, he fell in love with Karima, a fellow minor in care, and they dated for three years. Bilal's promising future was curtailed when he turned 18. He was refused asylum, detained, and deported to Kabul. He experienced this as unjust since he felt he had contributed much to UK society and had always been “truthful.” The event shook his understanding of everything; it was “like a dream.” This surreal quality appeared across several of the young people's narratives.
Without family and fearing for his life, Bilal left Afghanistan post-deportation for Dubai, returning only briefly to Afghanistan, whence he set off back to Europe—specifically to the UK city where he had previously lived. It was here that I interviewed Bilal. He had “cheated time,” successfully returning through irregular means two years later to the place he now considered home. His second journey to Europe included multiple deportations from Iran back to Afghanistan, and grueling periods of labor in Turkey and Bulgaria to pay his way.
Asked what his primary motivation for remigration was, Bilal gave an answer that stood out from the fear and economic insecurity that past research has shown fuel the remigration of many deported Afghan youth (Schuster and Majidi 2015): love. The fantasy of being reunited with Karima had made it possible, he said, to endure the hardships of multiple displacements and remigration.
The story had clearly exerted a power in itself as a coping strategy, however, the conclusion of Bilal's perilous second odyssey—or nostos (a term for homecoming in ancient Greek literature)—was, in his words, “a devastation.” Despite the admirable quality of his love, Bilal was thwarted by time. Karima had a new boyfriend and was pregnant with their second child.
At the time of our interview, Bilal was seeking to lodge a fresh asylum claim and reliant on volunteers to survive. “For now, there's no one else except God,” he said “I'm not sure what will happen this time because if this time they send me back I will go crazy; I will go mad. I'm only 22; I look like 40.”
Several features of Bilal's tale evoke canonical tragic tropes—the evocation of madness, the running out of time, and the duplicity and frailty of love. Stories such as his challenge simplistic ideas of “unaccompanied” young refugees by drawing attention to their oft-ignored emotional and relational lives.
It is important to recognize in relation to the tragic genre that the act of engaging in storytelling itself may be affected by one's capacities at a given moment as well as by states of depression or anxiety (Chase 2013b). This was the case for a group of 18-year-olds I visited who had been refused asylum in England and were living in a shared house. Having fought repeatedly against “the system” and lost, thwarted by the politics of aging and time they had resigned themselves to situations of immobility. They slept all day and hardly ate. One said he had “lost the will to carry on.” The curtains were continually closed, and one young Afghan told me that when he looked at the clock, he did not know if it was day or night. The nemesis responsible for their wasted talents was identified as both an individual (a negligent social worker) and the international border regime as a whole. Except for one young Iranian who was relatively new and keen to talk about his plans to visit London, flights of existential mobility whereby they could allow themselves to “dream big” in terms of their life projects were unthinkable. One of them did not wish to speak but instead asked for a hug. As Ravi Kohli (2006) has demonstrated, when it comes to the well-being of unaccompanied asylum-seeking children and youth, silence can sometimes tell us more than words.
Comedy
I understood the use of comic narratives (used in 17 out of 58 interviews) as an attempt to process trauma, stay positive, or to reach out to other people, including myself as researcher. It was, as Marie Luise Knott (2014) describes it in relation to Hannah Arendt's processing of the Eichmann trial, “serious laughter.” The comic genre is most often seen as an attempt to connect somehow, laughter being a great social leveler (Jackson 2002). Comedy, in this sense, catches the researcher and “the researched” on what Jackson calls “the cusp of identification” (2002: 181). Comedy can force participation physiologically through laughter, just as tragedy can provoke the physiological reaction of tears.
The range of topics approached comedically was vast: the Afghan who lost his eye during a military exercise after finding employment with the British army (“I mean, how unlucky is that! He fled the Taliban only to . . . ”); girl troubles (“yeah, at the gym you'll always see refugees as we have to be hotter to compensate for being refugees!”); the difficulties of British queuing (“this lady was like ‘get back in the queue’—like I killed someone!”). Sometimes the comedy was narrated via the body as slapstick. Several participants gesticulated passionately and laughed, for example, as they demonstrated how they had climbed into a truck or clasped the bottom of a lorry, mimicking their physical and mental discomfort during parts of their journey.
The butt of jokes varied, but they often channeled feelings of anger and despair. Figures of power who were dethroned through comic narratives included the unsuspecting lorry driver who took for granted his power to cross borders and ended up with a smuggling fine; and the social worker with the power to decide young people's age reduced to an old witch herself having been thwarted by the process of aging. Other subjects of humor were border guards and volunteers. Refugees would often wind up the Italian volunteers with jokes about the Mafia, for example, reversing the hegemonic media narrative at the time that they were the corrupting social influence.
Dil, 24 from Afghanistan, mocked not just individuals but the whole idea of the supremacy of the West and the rule-of-law with a series of jokes about Western versus Eastern civilization. In one, Neil Armstrong is surprised upon arriving on the moon to see a group of Afghans huddled around a fire beneath a tattered flag. “What the hell?” questions Armstrong, astounded that despite the United States’ financial investment, folks from a “poor country” have managed to get there first. “Well, what did you expect?” responds one of the Afghan moon refugees, “of course we got here first, we took the illegal route!” The joke celebrates the refugee journey as a success for the underdog. Dil explained to me that he likes sharing such jokes to “mess with people” and also “boost morale.” In keeping with Kierkegaard's sense of “contradiction,” discussed above, as well as the tradition embodied in works such as Dante's Divine Comedy, comedy is experienced and offered to others as at once a provocation and a light to keep people moving forward during “dark times.”
Epic
The epic differs from the tragic and the comic in the Western canon in that the protagonist is neither a victim nor a survivor but a hero of sorts, pursuing something more than self-interest and, at least sometimes, seeing their efforts crowned by success—think, for example, of Homer's Odyssey or Virgil's Aeneid. The epic accommodates the collective dimension of many young migrants’ life projects, linked as they are to family or communal aspirations and livelihood strategies (Chase and Allsopp 2021).
In their exchanges with me, young people rarely used the epic, although I observed it more second-hand in discussions among young people. It was employed in 15 out of the 58 interviews, mainly by those who appeared more confident or defiant.
Participants seemed to enjoy performing epic tales. Sometimes they embellished events. There were sharks in the Mediterranean, for example, or crocodiles. At other times, the epic took the form of lists of countries traveled and sites seen: Bihari, 17 from Eritrea, ran out of fingers as he recounted the many countries he has passed; meanwhile, another Eritrean recounted how on his epic voyage he had watched the stars in perfect blackness at sea for weeks, surviving to see the Eiffel Tower and the Colosseum!—“Had I seen such things?” he inquired.
Bearing in mind that the genre people use often fits with the purpose of telling and story as told, even though people are generally not aware that this is what they are doing, it is of note that Afghan participants seemed to have a particular penchant for recounting epic stories. This observation has inspired me to look more into culturally situated storytelling traditions in my current work. As well as cultural background (Abbasi and Monsutti 2017), this may have been shaped, in part, by the fact that Afghans in my sample were more likely to have secure immigration status and/or employment and thus spoke from a place of relative pride and security.
For other participants, such as Kal, the use of the epic was shaped more by character and by the level of trust between us. For Kal, recounting his story as an epic allowed him to celebrate the cultural capital and capabilities that had helped him to overcome adversity. Although he had hardly received a hero's welcome in Italy and was homeless when we met, for him there was glory in the fact of even having survived the hellish voyage across the sea.
Like a classical “hero,” Kal had used trickery to defy his future fate as a street seller after being cast out of his family home. In the rap presented at the start of this article, he frames himself as akin to the Greek hero Prometheus who used his cunning to steal fire from the gods to illuminate humanity with greater wisdom. For Kal, this greater wisdom equated to a postcolonial world without borders in which opportunities were more equal. Several of the respondents’ life projects appeared equally political. Linked to collective aspirations for social justice and radical political change, they commonly expressed these in tropes that I identified with epic and fantasy genres.
Confession
Following religious and cultural traditions, confession is a chance to come clean about one's sins or, in Western enlightenment literary terms, to reveal private distress. For this group, the interview was a rare opportunity to come clean about certain facets of one's identity about which one was required to be silent so as to conform with—and to progress along—a certain narrative arc necessary to access certain rights and entitlements in the welfare and asylum system.
Many respondents were exhausted by constantly having to perform the role of the “deserving” migrant and underplay their capabilities, something that was often necessary to qualify for welfare assistance such as free meals or shelter (Sheldrick 2024). Some felt that they had to hide character traits they liked and which were commonly linked to ideas of strong masculinity. This included physical strength, sexuality, fashion, and practical work skills (Allsopp 2017; Griffiths 2012; Sheldrick 2024).
Several young people experienced survivor's guilt. Most had seen someone die or be injured traveling to Europe, including loved ones. Without having the spaces to disclose these experiences safely and without fear of reprisals (implication in criminal investigations, for example), participants reported having nightmares or trouble sleeping.
The research encounter offered participants a degree of protection to talk with unusual candor. Often lies had been told as a means of helping others or because they had “no choice.” They were usually easily explicable and yet they caused moral anguish. The following incidents featured in multiple confessional narratives: lying to parents about leaving; using deception to obtain the means to travel; the act of crossing borders irregularly; the use of violence (often in self-defense, but sometimes in anger, shame, or frustration); leaving other people behind; and the act of stealing (e.g., food) in order to survive. Elsewhere I have argued that not being forced to lie as a means of accessing basic entitlements should be a fundamental right (Allsopp 2022a; Allsopp 2022b).
The question of the interview as a confession is bound up with questions of power and trust in research ethics (Carey 2018). The power agenda of “the confessional discourse,” as Yiannis Gabriel has argued (2004: 27), “is not merely the humiliation or purification of the subject, but the definition of a domain of experience as a domain of surveillance and control.” At times, when the confessional genre featured, the interview encounter felt disciplinary. For some, I represented the Europe that they had “cheated.” It follows that I offered a form of salvation by, for example, explaining I understood their situation and stood in solidarity. As Melanie Griffiths (2012) has explored, male refugees are often acutely aware of the ways they are portrayed “as vile liars and truth distorters” in popular narratives.
Joseph's “confession” demonstrates the complex interaction of lying, truth, and guilt and how these manifested differently over space and time in shifting narratives. Joseph, from Gambia, was registered as aged 19 at the time of our interview and was staying in an adult hostel. He had been in Italy for over a year and obtained a two-year humanitarian document.
As he told me about himself and his aspirations, at several points, Joseph shifted positions between that of a persecuted adult refugee—the “official narrative” that he had given to the institution—and that of a child labor migrant. He seemed at first to be uncomfortable with, and then to enjoy, playing with the truth. “Why does it matter?” he asked. I also suspected that he was testing me. Was I a reliable source to whom he could entrust his stories?
After about an hour, Joseph told me that everything he had told me so far was false: he was in fact 17 and had migrated for economic reasons and “the fun of it.” He went on to explain that he had changed his age several times in the Italian asylum bureaucracy to obtain access to better accommodation and material resources and avoid destitution. Finally, he “chose to be an adult,” as it gave him the freedom to work at night to pay off his debt of voyage—something that he was not allowed to do as a child.
“Frankly,” Joseph concluded, “in Europe, if you want to be honest to get the document, you won't get it . . . I was on this journey. I lied a lot. I lied lied lied lied lied lied lied until I reached here. I had to lie to survive.”
Joseph's story troubled me, and I was selective in the truths I took from our interview (Carey 2018). I had felt, transferred to me, some of the burden of holding his confession. After discussions with colleagues, I concluded that ethically it was not my place to intervene and report his age to the adult center. But the question remained: what are your ethical obligations as a researcher when your participant gives you multiple narratives or tells you a story that may place them at risk according to the statutory protection script?
It was clear that for Joseph, as for others, having someone to listen was something valuable. When I saw him days after our initial interview, he seemed to be a different person, cheerful and “feeling lighter,” he said.
Fantasy
Most participants’ migration projects were informed by risk and insecurity in their home countries, but also by a dream of Europe, like Ahmed's, which enticed them to move as part of a range of push-and-pull factors. Fantasy was evoked in 32 of the 58 interviews, and it was also commonly a subject of young people's artworks where it usually featured alongside symbols of hope or disappointment.
Coming to Europe was, for many, the realization of an individual and collective fantasy. Joseph explained the power of this in the following terms:
Must, must go. Must go. It's crazy. The dream is too much . . . Even if you talk about the sea, the water is BOILING; they will cross it. They would rather die.
This power of individual and collective narratives to prompt some individuals to pursue what Jackson terms “the wherewithal of life” (2013) through acts of migration, despite often being aware of the immense risks, is something that policy makers often fail to understand. Rakim, an Eritrean elder, articulated the power of the fantasy and its important temporal character to me one day as we were volunteering in a transit camp in Italy. “They [the migrant youth] go [to Europe], even before they arrive,” he explained, “mentally they are already there . . . And some will make it,” he insisted.
He would know. Aged 52, Rakim had been chasing his European dream for decades. And he was right: some participants had achieved their goals. Among them was Atum, aged 26, from Afghanistan, who was running a successful business, having married and brought his family to Italy. The story of unaccompanied young migrant and refugee men, as Rakim's persistent optimism reminded me, was not all star-crossed lovers and ill-fated voyages. With a combination of hard work and luck, fantasies could—and did repeatedly—come true.
Appeals to fantasy in interviews often appeared shaped by participants’ dispositions and whether they were optimistic or pessimistic about the future. Many were motivated by a series of short- and long-term material goals which they saw as fundamental to realizing future “possible selves” (Yowell 2002). These included car ownership—sometimes bought on credit—or saving to buy a house.
One reason for the importance placed on material goods was to show oneself as successful to those back home—via, for example, posting pictures of a new haircut or a watch on social media. Facebook—and its role in propagating migrant fantasies—was like a “scab,” joked a group of Eritreans in Italy: “you keep scratching it, and it itches more; and the scab gets bigger!” They found relief in being able to joke about their common predicament.
Past research has also shown that, as well as being shaped by collective and family migration strategies, young people's migration aims adapt and evolve once they leave. They may also experience a new sense of “personhood” or “individualization” (Olszewska 2015). Those young people in the research who were still in touch with people back home or in refugee camps or urban settings, sought to straddle their individual hopes and family obligations, sometimes with acute dissonance: the duty to study and earn more money from a profession long term had to be juggled against the competing desire to send money home quickly; the desire to date in Europe often co-existed with a recognition that they would one day be expected to marry a woman from “back there.” They juggled, in other words, multiple stories or recounted the same story differently to keep dreams alive for particular audiences.
The dream of family reunification was commonly articulated alongside the hope of a grand return home. This trip back was a rite of passage that several participants with papers had realized and of which they spoke proudly, also often in epic terms. Sibal, aged 22 from Bangladesh, by contrast, narrated his return home not as an epic but rather as a confession of maintaining an illusory ideal. Yes, he had security of status and a job in Italy; but he was still poorly paid, and this was something that his family could not understand. Once he had obtained papers in Italy, he had felt compelled to borrow money to buy presents for his family and fly to Bangladesh to visit them. He could not tell them, he explained, that he shared a room with six others and did not even have a lamp to read.
Finally, some participants who had given up on the hope of a future in Europe coped with adversity by dreaming of the trope—well established in migration studies—of a mythologized homeland (Malkki 1995) with better conditions. Khalid, a 19-year-old Egyptian who had been refused asylum, contrasted his “bullshit life” without papers in England with an idealized account of growing up in the Egyptian countryside. “I was young then,” he reminisced, “[t]hat life was a happy life.” Because he was seeking political asylum, however, it was not safe for Khalid to return.
We have seen that maintaining fantasies—which may or may not come to pass—are important for both motivating oneself and for sustaining others on the journey forward, in other words, maintaining a sense of ontological security in the face of instability. As one colleague recently observed, “I've never seen so much hope as in my work with refugees.” The provenance of the fantasy genre in my research attests to this. It also recalls Jackson's suggestion that rather than geographical mobility, we might see existential mobility as a defining feature of the migrant experience in a way that sheds light on our common pursuit of well-being and being human (2013). This approach helps to emancipate us from rigid linear thinking and embrace the multiplicity and evolution that has been shown to be central aspects of young people's narratives (Chase et al. 2024). Social networks and friendships have been shown to be important in sustaining well-being and existential mobility in the face of adversity (Chase and Allsopp 2021), alongside its potential pressuring influences to conform to certain norms. We have seen that emotional responses including hope, homesickness, or anger, which shape genre, may be collective as well as subjective and have cultural and social roots in experiences of unfairness that are relational as well as individual and even span generations. In the context of unaccompanied youth migration, this question of intergenerational planning and family life projects has long been ignored.
Conclusion
This article has drawn on literary theory and analysis to argue that narrative genre is a valuable new lens to explore the well-being and life projects of unaccompanied young migrants and refugees. Some general trends emerge. Young people with more secure immigration status and who had spent more time in Europe were more likely to narrate their experience as an epic in which they had exerted agency, overcome obstacles, and achieved something. The newly arrived often shared fantasies, or else they expressed shock at having had certain dreams thwarted. Meanwhile, those who had spent a long time waiting with insecure legal status most commonly recounted their tale as a tragic one and/or fantasized about return. Since the stories told were invariably co-constructed in part with me, for those who were more despairing in particular, I may have been identified as a potential source of help in a way that influenced the expression of tragic or confessional narratives. At the same time, in keenly expressing their fantasies, participants may have willed that I support their realization. Further research is required on how narrative genre and form at once shape and are shaped by qualitative methodologies, including how certain genres may evoke more empathy (Roy 2021). For some social policy actors, such as social workers, the fact of being part of “the system” may dictate certain narrative genres by default, for example, encouraging refugees to present themselves as deserving (Sheldrick 2024). We can hypothesize that the tragic genre would consequently be more common in interactions with officials but this requires more research. More attention should also be given to what actually promotes open interactions with unaccompanied young children and young people so that they might more authentically explore their life projects and, in the process, present their well-being needs in contexts in which they feel they are being judged and to people with the power to help them in the short, medium, and long term, for example, with asylum interviews and appeals and interactions with social workers. My findings therefore reiterate the importance of storytelling to young people's well-being and the need in this context for a flexible and open approach to life project planning (Allsopp and Chase 2017). In addition to serving extrinsically to help elicit biographical information that could help locate them more effectively within welfare and protection systems as part of the formulation of a life project plan, freedom to express themselves across a range of genres has been shown in this article to have an intrinsic function, serving to help some young people establish a sense of control over their lives. It is critical that interventions recognize this dual function and the well-being implications that stem from the narrative aspect of life project planning. A failure to do this could pose an existential threat to the young people such interventions purport to help to whom they may be perceived as an attempt to immobilize their efforts to move forward. The stakes of this are high. Indeed, my past research has shown that when they fear their will to mobility is being disrespected or thwarted, young people are more likely to disengage with statutory and NGO-provided support and “go missing” in institutional terms (Allsopp et al. 2015; Chase and Allsopp 2021).
While I have sought to recognize its limitations, in the context of hostile and disciplinary asylum and welfare regimes in which access to certain entitlements is dependent on the performance of certain character traits, this research provided a rare space for some participants to critically reflect on and creatively re-imagine their futures and what they had learned in relation to their past experiences—to enact, in other words, a sense of “ontological security” (Chase 2013a; Giddens 1991) while also opening up possibilities for “existential mobility” (Jackson 2013: 221). In this article I have argued that the freedom to play with narrative genre is an important part of this. In keeping with the spirit of convivial research, I have sought to “disrupt the pathological thinking that characterizes both popular thinking and academic work” (Phoenix 2019: 54), which sees young migrants and refugees invariably as tragic victims.
This article contributes to a growing scholarship that explores the emancipatory potential of different cultural genres and how they express different migrant realities and aspirations (Roy 2021; Wooley 2017). My current work seeks to bring such insights from literary studies into the social sciences sphere, seeing research as a narrative endeavor for which textual and literary analysis can be of great use in terms of planning and interpreting our research encounters and in our treatment of research fieldnotes and transcripts. Moreover, I have embarked on a project of co-analysis, recognizing the positionality of participants in interpreting narratives drawing on Western and non-Western genres with which they are familiar.
Interrogating the value of “truth” as a defining feature of these narratives, the article has shown that similar events can be interpreted in multiple registers to evoke different meanings, including by the same individual. Moreover, I have observed that participants’ narratives changed over time in relation to past and future events. Indeed, participants were generally aware of and spoke to the constructed and circumstantial nature of their migration projects and well-being needs and how these changed over space and time. Seeing stories in this way—as situated exchanges in context, rather than as monolithic truths to be “extracted” from the field—has important implications for how we understand research evidence.
Acknowledgment
This research was funded by the ESRC through a studentship linked to the project “Becoming Adult” (Grant ES/L009226/1, PI Dr Elaine Chase, University College London). For more information, see www.becomingadult.net.
Notes
See Becoming Adult. Homepage. www.becomingadult.net (accessed 6 June 2024).
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