Responding to misrecognition – A study with unaccompanied asylum-seeking minors

Theories of recognition have received increasing attention in studies of children, young people and social care. However, the concept of misrecognition, as the opposite of recognition, is less featured. This article studies the experiences of misrecognition using evidence from the lived experience of underaged unaccompanied asylum-seeking boys in Finland. Drawing from conceptualizations of (mis)recognition and qualitative data created with 18 unaccompanied asylum-seeking boys living in residential care, we firstly look at how the boys articulate their experience of being seen as ‘refugees’. Secondly, we study how they respond to the refugee label. The findings show that the refugee stigma is mainly experienced as misrecognition, which influences the ways the young asylum-seekers strive to construct agentic identities. Four ways of responding to this misrecognition are identified: adopting a diminished identity (resigning), standing up against misrecognition (resisting), acting to prove the prejudice they encounter wrong (conforming), and claiming ordinariness (performing). We argue that the misrecognition experiences of unaccompanied asylum seeking minors offer a valuable lens for deepening our understanding of young people's responses to adverse conditions. Their varying responses to misrecognition provide important insights into how social work and the care system can be more attentive to the experiences of marginalized children and young people.