The crisis of everyday self-other misalignments between unaccompanied minors and adult professionals: A dialogical self study

Young people who travel across national borders as unaccompanied minors have become central figures in modern narrations about the ‘migration crisis’. At the macrosocial level, legal and policy frameworks often designed to protect unaccompanied minors have at times explicitly, or inadvertently, create everyday ‘crises’ at the microsocial level as part of asylum and welfare provision for children. In this paper, we use sociocultural approaches and dialogical theorising to examine how everyday ‘crisis’ are created at the psychological level, through misalignments in the self-other relationship between unaccompanied minors and professional adults. To do so, we add to these theoretical ideas the concepts of misrecognition and dialogical approaches to trust, to examine the forms of sense-making in both parties. We illustrate our theoretical points by drawing on data from the Children caring on the Move (CCoM) project. A dialogical analysis was undertaken on 112 semi-structured interviews with adults from several sectors (e.g. social worker, law, NGOs, healthcare, education, accommodation services, policy) and participatory approaches involving 75 interviews with 38 unaccompanied young people, including care object interviews and day-in-the-life interviews. The self-other misalignments discussed are ‘I-as-agentic-self’ as misaligned with ‘They-as-savvy-users-of-the-system’, and ‘I-as-detective/truth-seeker’ as misaligned with ‘They-are-testing-you’. We argue that both young people and adults can get caught in a dialogical loop of misrecognition, leading to the development of mistrust.