| Summary: | Abstract In this research, I focus on unaccompanied youths’ lived experiences and how they make visible social justice and barriers to it. I look at social justice through theorisations of recognition, parity of participation and love. 13 unaccompanied youths participated in producing the data for this feminist ethnographic study. These youths arrived in Finland between 2014–2016, were under the age of 18 on arrival and sought asylum without their primary caregivers. In 2018, the participants and I conducted fieldwork for 10 months. At that time the participants were 15–19 years old, lived in Northern Finland and had received residency permits. All the youths had lived, or were still living, in institutions and attended school. This research draws attention to two major areas of the social life of these youths: their homes and their schools. The participants’ accounts highlighted a lack of love in institutional homes and a disparity of participation in school settings. In institutional homes, different practices restricted the opportunities for unaccompanied youths to maintain existing loving relationships and to create new ones. In school settings, the disparity in participation was striking, as the youths frequently studied in segregated learning areas. The findings show that participants frequently defied these barriers to social justice. They were able to create loving relationships and asked to be treated as equals. However, individuals who resist these kinds of constraints cannot make the practices more equal by themselves. This research highlights that all practices in unaccompanied youths’ lives must be critically examined to determine whether they produce barriers to social justice. Tiivistelmä Tässä tutkimuksessa tarkastelen yksintulleiden nuorten elettyjä kokemuksia ja sitä, miten nämä kokemukset tekevät näkyväksi sosiaalista oikeudenmukaisuutta ja erityisesti sen esteitä. Käsittelen sosiaalista oikeudenmukaisuutta kolmen eri teoreettisen käsitteen kautta: myönteinen tunnustaminen, yhdenvertainen ...
|
|---|