Enacting biorelational citizenship in X-ray rooms and offices: on age assessments of migrants in Germany

Abstract

ABSTRACTIn Germany, people categorised as ‘unaccompanied minor refugees’ have special rights, entitlements and possibilities. It is, for example, legally complicated to deport them. Since age is such a crucial marker of difference, the age statement of individual migrants is often scrutinised in their registration process through administrative, pedagogic and forensic practices. This ethnographic analysis of forensic age estimations in Hamburg, Germany, shows that one cannot simply read age from a young migrant’s bones. Rather, an individual’s age is enacted in a practice whereby age is not only dependent on a body, but also on the specific bureaucratic and scientific traditions, technologies and standards involved in assessing it. Thus, citizenship practices based on age not only draw on ‘the body’, but also – and more crucially – on varied scientific and bureaucratic practices. I propose the concept of ‘biorelational citizenship’ to grasp these shifting relationalities of the body in citizenship practices.