Transnational Biographies of Education: Young Unaccompanied Asylum Seekers and their Navigation through Shifting Social Realities in Switzerland and Turkey

Project Number: CH6

Country: Switzerland

Institutions/Departments: Institute of Social Anthropology, University of Bern & University of Teacher Education, Bern

URL: https://www.transeduscapes.com/

Publication/Material: ten published articles / chapters (https://www.transeduscapes.com/publications), two workshops, three blogposts (for both, http://p3.snf.ch/Project-156476#)

Project leader and contact person: Prof. Dr. Sabine Strasser (sabine.strasser@anthro.unibe.ch); Prof. Dr. Kathrin Oester (kathrin.oester@phbern.ch)

Duration: 02/2015 – 01/2019

Short Description:

This project investigates the educational pathways of unaccompanied youth, asylum seekers (UMA) between the ages of 14 and 21. Starting from the premise that the international mobility and precarity of young people is bound to grow along with the increasing force of globalisation, this project explores which strategies unaccompanied refugee youth in two different national settings (Switzerland, Turkey) deploy to enhance their educational possibilities. By focusing on Switzerland and Turkey, both with high numbers of unaccompanied minors but very different institutional frameworks and responses, the project aims to gain insight into how young people navigate their ways through landscapes of extreme uncertainty and change. Based on two in-depth ethnographic studies, one in Switzerland, the other in Turkey, the goal of this project is to come to a better understanding of how different legal, political and educational frameworks restrict or enhance young people’s educational opportunities. Comparing the lived experiences of young migrants in the two countries affords a perspective on how different degrees of control and uncertainty, of agency and ambition impact on young people’s educational biographies.

Using methods such as visual and narrative storytelling and extensive periods of participant observation in formal and informal educational spaces, the projects sheds light on the ambiguous interplay between agency and constraint that marks young unaccompanied asylum seekers’ transnational biographies of education. As such this project offers an important contribution to the emerging body of research on transnationalism, youth and education from a perspective that regards children as active agents in migratory processes.

Implementation: 02/2015 – 01/2019

Target Group(s), age & context: unaccompanied refugees, age 14-21 years, schools, state care facilities, youth centres, NGOs, charitable organisations and diasporic networks

Approach/Method: Comparative ethnographic fieldwork, visual and narrative storytelling

Type: Research project

Funding: Swiss National Science Foundation

The European Commission support for the production of this publication does not constitute an endorsement of the contents which reflects the views only of the authors, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.