On the fugitive and being their own cartographer : metaphors for illegalized youth transitions

Abstract

The proposed paper advances new metaphorical frameworks for understanding the experiences of young asylum seekers, whose lived experiences sit uneasily within dominant narratives of transitions to adulthood that assume citizenship. Reconnecting with the imaginative and critical intentions that animated the work of Furlong and Cartmel, Cuzzocrea and others, our chapter will emphasise the continued importance of metaphors as analytical devices that make visible otherwise obscured social conditions. Drawing on research conducted with young asylum seekers in Malta, our chapter introduces two metaphors to conceptualise and understand youth lived under conditions of legal precarity. First, youth is approached as fugitive: lives lived outside of the law and sometimes on the run, and also as an ephemeral state, imagined but out of reach. Second, young asylum seekers are conceptualised as wanting to be their own cartographers, to take control of their own journey, to create their own map and to live their lives whilst navigating risk and uncertainty within uncharted territory. Together, these metaphors problematise the notion of youth transition by revealing adulthood not as a universal developmental endpoint but as a status unevenly distributed and structurally withheld within the context of illegalised migration, where reaching legal adulthood often coincides not with increased autonomy or recognition, but with a transition into ‘illegality’. For the young people who participated in our study, and many like them, turning eighteen marks the withdrawal of institutional protections and the constant threat of deportation. Rather than signalling the consolidation of personhood and citizenship assumed in dominant youth transitions frameworks, legal adulthood here produces a paradoxical loss of recognition, rendering adulthood a fugitive state, a site of ongoing precarity rather than arrival.