ABSTRACT
Since the onset of Europe’s so-called refugee crisis in 2015, thousands of children have traveled from the Middle East and North Africa to and through Greece unaccompanied. Advocates and policymakers often speak for and about these children using and advancing familiar tropes of abandoned youth, “out of place,” too immature to understand their circumstances and, for various reasons, unable to express themselves. Yet, unaccompanied migrant children do communicate their individual experiences and thoughts, concerns and hopes, directly to larger audiences. The public-facing personal narratives they share are in the styles, modes, and forms typically used by young people including social media posts.
Drawing on over 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork among unaccompanied migrant children living in Athenian shelters, here I consider the social media posts of two young people, one who chronicled her journey to Greece, and another who grew over 1,200 followers by documenting his everyday life in Athens. I show how the narratives they communicated challenged the simplified, essentialized accounts of their movements to Europe and their lives in the shelter system. I argue that these narratives articulate an anticolonial critique of neohellenic idea(l)s at the heart of public discourse about undocumented child migration to Greece.
