CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2022
| Author | Kyvelou-Kokkaliari, Lydia Kanelli |
|---|---|
| Title | Will Boys Be Boys? Inclusionary Narratives in the Institutionalization of Unaccompanied Minors' Exclusion |
| Summary | This thesis explores how important social markers surrounding the figure of unaccompanied minor (e.g. ‘integration’, ‘deservingness’) are negotiated between unaccompanied refugee youth and the researcher-coordinator in an Athenian residential facility. Starting from the premise that the educational space created in the facility’s classroom constitutes the heteroclite simultaneity of being at once a project of future-making and control, I investigate the ambiguous potential of a child-centered education in shaping and providing these minors with experiences of and in the Greek society. This continuous ambivalence between their existential presence(s) and the legal, political and social contestation of its legitimacy produces the tensions whereby the paradoxical dynamics outcast them while promising to include them in the society. Under that light, viewing them as right-bearers within and through their displacement and separation, I look into what it means and how to tend to a refugee child taking into consideration their particular vulnerabilities. Through our interactions, I explore the role of an ethics of care in how I navigate my desire for standardization (e.g. curricular, attendance) and the interpersonal teaching and care relationships mandated by the pedagogical approach and the feminist research practice. In doing so, I examine, delineate, draw upon and evaluate my role(s) as a visual arts’ coordinator and social researcher whence I resist, reproduce and re-appropriate the dominant discourses on migration control and my personal biases pertaining to the presumed rights and needs of an education system for unaccompanied minors. By examining how refugee’s children right to education is honored and/or obstructed, I substantiate the barriers they face, and the common informal solutions taken upon, well-intentioned but not durable, NGOs and volunteers for their alleviation since the ‘humanitarian crisis’ framework. These barriers and discrepancies subsequently produce the particular kind of social segreggation unaccompanied minors undergo in Athens (Greece). The findings suggest that the discrepancies between their institutionalized inclusion and their exclusion in practice perpetuate their precarious living conditions as minors which serves to discourage them and expel them by adulthood. |
| Supervisor | Jones Gailani, Nadia |
| Department | Gender Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2022/kyvelou_lydia.pdf |
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