Abstract
This article explores the representation of unaccompanied minor asylum seekers as a distinct form of work, undertaken at the frontline of the Norwegian asylum system. Inspired by institutional ethnography, we examine the nature of this work from the standpoint of representatives in Norway and through regulatory texts defining their role and responsibilities. In the analysis, we show how the textual definitions and delineations of representation do not always overlap neatly with either what representatives do or what they feel they should be doing. Conceptualising the work of representatives as a type of frontline work, we identify a tension between a need to be active, doing work to activate rights, and an institutional message encouraging the representatives to act passively. This illustrates the difficulties of doing representational work, with potential consequences for the minors whose rights and well-being are at stake.
Introduction
In 2023, more than 41,000 unaccompanied minor asylum seekers 1 sought asylum without their parents or other caretakers in European countries (Eurostat, 2024). Because these minors are considered a particularly vulnerable group, in need of representation, systems of guardianship have been established across Europe (FRA, 2022). Within these systems, guardians play a vital role, providing minors with various means of support and safeguarding them from possible neglect by their host country (Goeman et al., 2011). Guardians have a concrete responsibility towards – and direct interaction with – the minors, while also being situated within the asylum system, a politicised and judicially regulated institution. Hence, they are situated at the intersection of two logics that do not necessarily correspond: “state immigration policies […] and a humanitarian attention for children's rights” (De Graeve, 2015: 79). This draws attention to the potential difficulty of being a guardian and of doing guardianship in practice. To date, there is little research on guardianship as something enacted; existing research focuses mainly on guardianship at a policy and institutional level (see Hedlund and Salmonsson, 2018), with little attention devoted to the guardians themselves or their role and practices (see, however, De De Graeve and Bex, 2017; Peris Cancio, 2025). This article contributes to the research literature by studying guardianship as it emerges through people's institutionally embedded practices to safeguard the rights and wellbeing of unaccompanied minor asylum seekers in Norway.
In Norway, guardianship constitutes a two-fold system, with unaccompanied minors being appointed a ‘representative’ (representant) during the asylum-seeking phase and a ‘guardian’ (verge) after permanent settlement. In this article, we focus on representatives. Representatives have both a legal and a practical role during a phase characterised by uncertainty, temporariness, and distress for unaccompanied minors (Berg and Tronstad, 2015).
Inspired by institutional ethnography (IE) (cf. Smith, 2005), we start our inquiry from the standpoint of the representatives in Norway and their descriptions of what they do. Approaching the representatives’ doings as a type of work, we ask: What are the formal expectations of representational work, and what characterises this work in practice? Overall, our aim is to examine and articulate the nature of representation as a distinct form of work within a certain institutional complex. Concretely, we conceptualise representation as a type of frontline work, characterised by direct interaction between the representative and the minor, and by the representative's subordinate position within the asylum system.
Representation embedded in the reception of minors in Norway
The representative arrangement is part of the Norwegian state's reception of unaccompanied minor asylum seekers and, thus, of the asylum system. The reception of minors encompasses a complex system of various bodies, such as immigration administration, children's social services, and general welfare providers, including healthcare and education. Everyday emotional and practical support is provided by staff at reception centres. Representatives operate within this reception system. They act as a legal replacement for the minor's absent parents, undertaking responsibilities associated with parents’ legal duties, and hold a monitoring function towards the different state or municipal bodies or actors within the reception system (Sivilrettsforvaltningen, n.d.-a).
The representative arrangement in Norway was established in 2013 to strengthen the legal protection of minors (Sande et al., 2017). Asylum seekers who are recognised as unaccompanied and under the age of 18 are entitled to be appointed a representative. These will represent the minor for as long as the minor's asylum case is being processed by the asylum administration. If the minor receives a restricted permit requiring departure at 18, or their claim is rejected, the representative continues in their role for as long as the minor legally resides in Norway.
The representative arrangement is governed by the Norwegian Civil Affairs Authority and administered by local county governors, where the County Governor of Oslo and Viken has extensive responsibility for recruitment, training, and guidance (Sivilrettsforvaltningen, n.d.-a). The representatives report to their respective county governors. Representatives are trained laypeople; they are volunteers, not employed professionals and do not have any formal organisational affiliation in their capacity as representatives. They receive compensation based on a fixed rate for each representation assignment 2 and not a regular salary.
The overarching principle informing representatives’ responsibilities is the safeguarding of unaccompanied minors’ rights and interests. In general, asylum-seeking children's rights and interests are defined via an international legislative apparatus following, among other things, the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and the UN Refugee Convention. During their asylum-seeking phase, minors have the right to be heard in matters concerning themselves. In the asylum interview, for example, the representative upholds this right by observing whether state actors comply with established protocol on how asylum interviews should be conducted. Asylum-seeking children are entitled to adequate healthcare and acceptable living conditions, and care arrangements supporting their physical and psycho-social health. Representatives should ensure that minors receive these entitlements.
To become a representative, one needs to be deemed eligible with the emphasis placed on having a general understanding of Norwegian society and public administration, including knowledge about children's rights and areas of immigration, having experience with refugees, and strong language skills (Statsforvalteren i Østfold, Buskerud, Oslo og Akershus, 2024). The training of representatives is not formally defined in the Immigration Act apart from the requirement that such training must be provided; yet there are requirements for a minimal standard of training encompassing comprehension of the role, the intent of the representative, and their knowledge regarding relevant legislation, regulations, and proceedings (Sande et al., 2017: 793).
Scholarship on guardianship across Europe
There is no common international definition of guardianship for unaccompanied minors. There are also significant variations in the implementation and conceptualisation of guardianship across different countries (FRA, 2022; Hedlund and Salmonsson, 2018). Guardianship systems may synthesise or make distinctions between “elements from the general legal provisions for child protection, the general guardianship system established in civil codes and the legal provision of asylum and migration” (FRA, 2022: 28). The differing institutional arrangements across Europe have been a key topic in the research literature, explored largely from within a legal tradition at a policy and legislative level (cf. De Graeve, 2015; Hedlund and Salmonsson, 2018). Reviewing this literature, Hedlund and Salmonsson (2018) identify two overall topics: firstly, diverging policies, including policy gaps and failure to realise the rights of minors, and, secondly, the guardianship role and difficulties of balancing its different objectives. More recent contributions showcase the limitations of guardianship systems across countries (Rinaldi, 2020) and contradictory systems where state employees act as guardians (Cochliou and Spaneas, 2019). Research has also examined new institutional models of guardianship (Long, 2021; Weatherburn and Mellon, 2019) and the role of guardians in maintaining the best interests of minors (Arnold et al., 2014).
This research literature has been invaluable in highlighting the significance of the institutional set-up of guardianship arrangements. Nevertheless, there is a need, as also suggested by Hedlund and Salmonsson (2018: 504), for more research with a tight empirical focus on guardianship. Little attention has been devoted to guardianship as something enacted in practice (see however Hedlund, 2019) and few studies have explored this practice from the perspective of those enacting guardianship or representation, with notable exceptions being De Graeve and Bex (2017) and Peris Cancio (2019, 2025). Positioning our efforts in this article in continuity with this work, we emphasise that guardianship – and, in the Norwegian case, representation – is a type of work that still remains to be studied in any depth.
Furthermore, Peris Cancio's work (2019) is of interest to us for its attempt to theorise the role of guardians as a type of “street-level bureaucracy agents”, who are central to the implementation of the reception of minors. This theorisation has the merit of enabling an analysis of the scope of discretion held by guardians in the execution of their tasks and responsibilities (Peris Cancio, 2019). However, the term ‘bureaucrat’ or ‘bureaucratic agents’ does not seem particularly fitting when seeking to comprehend the role of representatives within the Norwegian system. Nevertheless, the theorisation of guardianship as an example of street-level bureaucracy draws attention to frontline work in the public sector (cf. Bjerregaard and Klitmoller, 2010; Durose, 2007). We suggest that representatives may be precisely understood as someone working on the frontline in the reception of asylum-seekers in Norway. In what follows, we specify how we approach the work of representation.
Representational work as institutionally embedded doing
In our efforts to unearth the nature of representational work, we suggest thinking through the notion of frontline work. For this, we take inspiration from institutional ethnography (IE) (e.g., Smith, 2005), a critical theory and methodological framework that alerts us to work as a practical activity embedded in a specific institutional context. Representation for unaccompanied minors is situated within an “institutional complex”, where people's activities are organised and coordinated in particular ways (cf. Nilsen, 2017; Smith, 2005). These activities are often, implicitly or explicitly, “coordinated with and through texts” (Smith and Griffith, 2022: 50). In our case, where the Norwegian asylum system – and, concretely, its reception of minors – is the institutional complex of concern, the institutional relates to myriads of institutions, texts, pieces of legislation, and discourses delivered through the National Police Immigration Service (PU) and the Norwegian Immigration Directorate of Immigration (UDI), immigration policies at both national and international level, and international conventions, all of which affect how the system functions (Liodden, 2024: 94). Representatives work within this institutional complex, at what may be understood as the frontline, in direct contact with the minors whom they are assigned to support.
Frontline work is said to have two main characteristics: direct contact with service recipients or customers, and the workers’ subordinate position within the employment relationship (Bélanger and Edwards, 2013: 435; Johnson and Bagatell, 2020: 645). Representatives are at once subordinate and somewhat sidelined within the asylum system, not being part of its administration but nonetheless an aspect of the reception system for unaccompanied minors. The triangular relationship between employer, employee, and service-recipient (or customer) characteristic of frontline work (Bélanger and Edwards, 2013) may therefore be somewhat different in their case, potentially exacerbating the experience of being in a “betwixt-and-between position” (Bjerregaard and Klitmoller, 2010: 421). This alerts us to the significance of addressing the structure of the relations at play (cf. Bélanger and Edwards, 2013; Johnson and Bagatell, 2020) and to “the institutional message about how people at the front line are to understand and conduct themselves within the particular context” (Grace et al., 2014: 282).
An expanded conceptualisation of work is important for our exploration of representation. We understand work as all activities that people do intentionally that require time and effort, as well as their participation in institutional processes (Smith, 2005: 229). This definition serves as a methodological tool to capture the different activities that representatives undertake. It allows us to address people's efforts as relational. Moreover, we pay attention to activities that are oriented towards other people and their needs and, thus, to activities that elicit care and emotion. Care and emotion have been theorised by scholars in order to highlight work that is often invisible and unrecognised (see for instance Hochschild, 1979). On the concept of care work, Glenn (2000: 86) writes that “care as practiced encompasses an ethic (caring about) and an activity (caring for)”. ‘Caring about’ activates our thoughts and feelings, such as feelings of responsibility for others, while ‘caring for’ concerns the diverse activities we undertake when seeking to provide for the needs and wellbeing of others (Glenn, 2000: 86).
By including these dimensions into our conceptualisation of work at the frontline, we are equipped to unpack what representation for minors means within the specific context in which we explore it. Next, we describe our methods and empirical material.
Methods and empirical material
Representatives constitute the standpoint (Smith, 2005) from which we study representation. The experiences and descriptions of what they do provided by the representatives have served as an empirical entry point for the further exploration of what representational work for unaccompanied minors entails and becomes in practice within a given institutional complex.
The empirical material consists of 13 qualitative interviews with 11 former and current representatives as well as selected regulatory texts. Two texts in particular became central for us after being brought to our attention by the representatives we interviewed: a manual for representatives and guardians (Veileder for representanter og verger) and an information sheet that legal representatives are asked to give to minors during their first encounter (Norsk informasjonsskriv for enslige mindreårige asylsøkere) (Sivilrettsforvaltningen, n.d.-b). We have also analysed texts providing formal descriptions of what representation entails, engaging with legislation, Chapter 11A of the Norwegian Immigration Act (Utlendingsloven, 2008) and the outline of the legal representative arrangement available through the Norwegian Civil Affairs Authority (Representantordningen for enslige mindreårige asylsøkere) (Sivilrettsforvaltningen, n.d.-a).
The qualitative interviews were conducted during two rounds of data collection by the first author in 2020 and 2023. The first round was part of a larger project conducted by NTNU Social Research, in which the first author participated (Berg et al., 2021). The second round was part of the collection of data for the first author's PhD project. During the first round of interviews, some participants were recruited through the interest organisation for guardians in Norway, Vergeforeningen, while others were recruited through a snowballing method. In the second round, participants from the first project were contacted again and two participants were interviewed for a second time. Three new participants were recruited with the help of the previous two.
For the first project, semi-structured interviews were conducted, addressing general topics focusing on representatives’ reflections upon the arrangement in its entirety and how they experience it (Berg et al., 2021). In the second project, the intention was to move closer to what representatives do. These interviews were also semi-structured, with questions aimed at encouraging participants to reflect upon their everyday activities when doing representation. Interviews in both rounds were conducted digitally or via telephone and lasted between one and two hours. In both projects, participants signed a letter of informed consent. The interviews were transcribed verbatim and, for the purposes of this paper, the quoted extracts have been translated from Norwegian into English. Both rounds of data collection were approved by the Norwegian Agency for Shared Services in Education Research (SIKT).
The interviewees started their work as representatives between 2010 and 2021. Some did so in addition to their ordinary jobs, while others had retired from the labour market. The participants had different levels of experience regarding representational work; some had only recently become representatives and were responsible for a handful of minors, while others had been in the role for a long time and had represented around 50 minors. Attempts to map the population of representatives have shown that more than half are over 60 years of age, one in ten have a minority background, there are more women than men, and they have varying educational backgrounds, with pedagogy, social sciences, and law being the most common (Berg et al., 2021: 63). In our empirical material, most participants were women, of mature age, and only one had a minority background. Their educational backgrounds corresponded with previous findings. To safeguard the anonymity of our participants, we do not use any identity markers, such as gender, when referring to the participants. Secondly, we have excluded personal details from the interviews when necessary.
While making the representatives’ standpoint our empirical starting point, we are acutely aware of the relations of dependency and potential dominance between the minor and the representative. We also acknowledge that the minors might have different experiences and may give other descriptions of the work performed by the representatives. In our concrete analysis, we have paid attention to the representatives’ descriptions of their relations to the minors, while being careful not to present their descriptions as definitive or all-embracing.
In terms of our own positionality, none of us have any direct experience with the asylum system or the work of representation, which we have only studied as researchers. This has required us to pay close attention to the everyday experiences described by the representatives and to ask probing questions to ensure that our understanding of what we were being told was correct. This allowed a levelling of the power relations between the research participants and the first author, who performed the interviews. However, we acknowledge that our enquiries into what people do, drawing attention to dissonances between their own practice and the state's expectations, risk reinforcing the potential power relations between researcher and research participant.
Inspired by IE, we analysed the interview material in several stages. Firstly, we approached the representatives’ doings (i.e., work), taking into consideration not only practical tasks but also emotional aspects. Secondly, we categorised these doings into two main themes: what they do in accordance with formal regulations and what they do to safeguard unaccompanied minors’ rights. These main themes were categorised into sub-themes. Thirdly, we explored texts to which representatives implicitly or explicitly related. This way of working allowed us to explore how representation unfolds as a particular type of work within an institutional complex. The following analysis is structured into two sections: the first exploring the formal expectations of representational work and the second exploring this work as it is practised.
Representation ‘on paper’
The tasks of representatives are delineated in legislation and formal descriptions, mainly through Chapter 11A of the Immigration Act and, in some cases, the Guardianship Act. In these legal texts, representation emerges as an administrative and practical role, with representatives being responsible for the safeguarding of minors’ interests and rights. Examples of overall responsibility and specific tasks are outlined by the Norwegian Civil Affairs Authority in its online information for representatives, emphasising that the duties of representatives entail: [S]afeguarding a minor's interests in the asylum case and in other ongoing cases, being present during all conversations that the minor has with Norwegian immigration authorities, having contact with the minor's lawyer, engaging in dialogue with those in charge of the minor's daily care, ensuring that the minor receives proper care, adequate healthcare and schooling, making sure that the best interests of the child are assessed, that the child is heard and is able to participate in decision-making according to their age and maturity, taking part in identity investigations (such as consenting to a medical age test), and overseeing other aspects that fall under a legal parent's responsibility.
3
(Sivilrettsforvaltningen, n.d.-a)
The regulatory texts also include specifications of what representatives should not do. For instance, the Immigration Act states that “the representative shall ensure that the minor's care needs are met in a satisfactory way, but the representative is not responsible for the minor's maintenance and daily care” (Utlendingsloven, 2008). This is elaborated on by the Norwegian Civil Affairs Authority in its online information for representatives, which states: “it is not your task as a representative to facilitate adequate living conditions, activities, or transporting the minor” (Sivilrettsforvaltningen, n.d.-a). It is clear from this that representatives are not expected to provide for the needs and wellbeing of the unaccompanied minor asylum seekers – and, consequently, representation should not consist of care work.
Care in a more general sense, as a type of feeling or expression of support, is described as potentially inappropriate to the role of representing minors. The manual for representatives and guardians states that: “It may feel natural to give the child a hug, hold the child's hand or put an arm around the child's shoulder during the interview. The representative should reflect upon the use of this type of body contact” (Fylkesmannen i Oslo og Akershus, 2018: 18). The instruction to reflect seems to imply that representatives should be wary of showing support and expressing care through physical contact. A further indication that care falls outside the scope of being a representative is the manual's advice to representatives, reading: “If you find that the minor is increasingly seeking you out or seeking care from you, it is important to explain to the minor what your role is and what others should do” (Fylkesmannen i Oslo og Akershus, 2018: 31). A similar message is conveyed in the information sheet addressed to unaccompanied minor asylum seekers, which representatives are asked to hand out to the minors during their first encounter. In this information sheet, there is a clear delineation of the representative's role: “What is the representative not expected to do? (…) Be your new mum or dad” (Sivilrettsforvaltningen, n.d.-b). While the representative serves as a legal replacement for the minor's absent parents, they are not supposed to assume other parental responsibilities, such as caring for or caring about the minor.
In our interviews, the representatives provided descriptions of their own role, referring implicitly or explicitly to the different regulatory texts formally defining their role. For example, one representative said: “According to the law, you’re supposed to take care of rights and finances.” In this quote, the role of a representative is delimited to legal and economic responsibilities. Others highlighted more specific tasks when asked to describe their role: “As their representative, it was important for me to visit them regularly in reception centres. This involved ensuring that they had food, clothing, and education to the extent possible, as well as monitoring their health.” This description resonates with that of the regulatory texts, where the duties of the representative include maintaining a dialogue with those in charge of the minor's daily care and ensuring that the minor receives proper care and adequate healthcare (Sivilrettsforvaltningen, n.d.-a). Some representatives described their role as providing a link and being a facilitator between the minor and the state, and saw it as their responsibility to ensure that the state does what it is supposed to do concerning the minor. Their descriptions echoed the formal definition of the representative as responsible for the safeguarding of minors’ rights, illustrating alignment between the representatives’ perceptions and the institutional requirements and expectations. However, doing the above is not necessarily a straightforward exercise. In the next section, we analyse what occurs during practical representational work.
Doing ‘representation’
Several of the representatives experienced that the formal instructions were not descriptive of what unfolds in practice during everyday representational work. Some had encountered unforeseen events that required ad hoc solutions there and then, while others struggled with not being able to act as a fellow human being in situations where a minor was clearly in distress. The representatives talked about having to translate narrowly defined legal requirements of what representation entails and make individual assessments of what to do in a given situation. One representative commented: “The law says very little. It just states what needs to be done, but it doesn’t say anything about how to do it.” The move from representation as defined in text to representation as a practical activity was not straightforward.
The move from text to practice was difficult when it involved intervening in the practices and intentions of other institutional actors, or representing minors in a way that came into conflict with institutional and/or procedural requirements. One representative recounted an episode in which they had abstained from signing a letter of informed consent for a minor to undergo a medical age test. The representative commented in our interview that “[not taking the test] was in the best interests of the child […] I believed it was illegal in a way, that there was no legal basis for taking the test because there was no doubt that he was the age he stated”. It was the representative's responsibility to make the specific assessment of what would be in the child's best interests, a principle that generally informs the legal rights of asylum-seeking children. However, not undergoing a medical test may be viewed as a failure of the minor in cooperating with the process of identity clarification (cf. UDI, 2024), something the representative was very aware of. Signing the consent letter would have been a way of complying with state expectations; it is outlined in the Immigration Act that representatives should consent to the medical age test when a minor has done so themselves. Nevertheless, this representative chose to prioritise what they saw as the child's best interests over institutional demands.
The representatives talked more generally about their sense that there was an expectation that they should be passive actors. As one representative noted:
The expectation to be passive was felt most strongly when representatives did not live up to institutional expectations, instead doing what they considered necessary to fulfil the requirements of their role. One representative recounted an episode in which the police officer in charge reacted with anger when the representative actively intervened in the proceedings: “It wasn’t so long ago that I was in a situation where the shift manager was called to PU, and he got really angry with me […]. Because they wanted to put a boy in Trandum [an internment camp], and I thought there was no reason to do that.” Similar situations were recounted by others who reflected upon how unpleasant it could be to go up against representatives of powerful state institutions. Some had even lost their authorisation due to their interventions, indicating that opposition to the system can have consequences for the individual representative.
Interfering with actors who have decisive power over the future of unaccompanied minors was not something the representatives did easily: “You’re terrified every time you do it, but you kind of have to.” Emphasising that intervening is something they must do at times, the representatives pinpointed the potentially conflicting demands involved in their practical representation of minors. One reason for such interventions was a lack of confidence in the infallibility of the system: “Mistakes happen all the time during interviews, and the margins are so small that suddenly a negative decision is made instead of a positive one.” In a system making life-altering decisions for minors, the representative deemed it essential to remain alert and be ready to intervene. This also affirmed their commitment to the minors, who are, after all, the ones they are meant to represent: “I don’t represent the state, I represent the children,” one declared. Yet, it was their clear understanding that proactive and interventional representation was not desired behaviour within the system.
The institutional expectation to remain passive was described as particularly difficult in situations where they witnessed minors in severe distress, creating dilemmas about how to respond. One representative recounted attending an asylum interview during which a minor was visibly affected and distressed. The representative thought it would not be in line with the formal guidelines to offer support in that situation, and therefore opted to sit still: “I sit right next to him and in a way, almost, at least mentally, hold him, the little skinny boy.” This quote suggests that the instruction to reflect before engaging in physical contact has tangible effects on the representatives’ practices. Moreover, it signals the effort involved in not acting upon their sense of what the minor needs, such as a hug or someone holding their hand.
The explicit descriptions in the regulatory texts of what not to do was something the representatives commented upon in our interviews: “In meetings and courses organised by the County Governor, there's a lot of talk about what we shouldn’t do. ‘Don’t give them presents’, ‘don’t take them home’,” one representative recounted. Although the representatives agreed that their mandate should be regulated, they argued that, at times, doing a good job required transcending the formal definitions. As one representative stated, “I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve given hugs to many of the people I’ve been a representative for. But, of course, on their terms, not on my terms.” For others, activities extending beyond their mandate involved escorting the minor to the asylum interview, despite this being defined as not part of their duties. Others took minors to cafes after the asylum interview or home for dinner. These acts stemmed from a belief that the formal determination of representation left the minors to handle things too much on their own, without sufficient support. The representatives expressed a desire to provide some level of social and emotional support for the minors.
Meanwhile, the representatives also emphasised the need for boundaries. They talked of their doubts about where to draw the line; for example, whether to invite the minors into their personal lives or not. On that point, one representative said: I’ve been very conflicted about not inviting [them home], at least those who live in the same municipality as me. […] I’ve felt so sorry for some of those children, so much so that I wanted them to move in with me.
The example above illustrates the kinds of situations that representatives may face when wanting to do the ‘right’ thing, such as being supportive of someone they consider to be a vulnerable child or adolescent, but being rejected with reference to procedural guidelines. The representatives expressed discontent with what they saw as a requirement to not be compassionate – and not have feelings – in their encounters with the minors: “They [the state] don’t want representatives who actually have feelings. […] In reality, you can’t remain completely cold and indifferent to what you’re experiencing,” as one put it. For some, such formal requirements failed to encompass what representation is all about: “It's not just a technical thing where one ought to make sure that formalities and laws are fulfilled,” one noted. Another stressed the impossibility of not feeling anything while representing minors, proclaiming that “[w]e aren’t just cardboard cutouts.” This draws attention to the emotional toll experienced by representatives, while also indicative of the kind of effort required to do the work of representation.
Representation as work on the frontline
The role as a representative for unaccompanied minors in Norway is shaped by texts defining and delineating what representation is and what it should (and should not) be, and the specific practices and considerations of representatives. As shown in the analysis above, the textual definitions and delineations do not always overlap neatly with either what representatives do or what they feel they should be doing. In this section, we discuss what this insight may tell us about representational work on the frontline of the Norwegian asylum system.
One key feature of representation is to safeguard the rights of minors. On this point, the textual definitions of representation and the opinions of the representatives align. From the representatives’ accounts, safeguarding rights requires work, practical doing. The representatives activate rights, ensuring that rights on paper are also rights in practice for the minors. This work of activation is undertaken in specific situations and during specific asylum processes, illustrating the frontline character of representational work: the representatives are present and responsible in “the key moment in which regulations are converted into concrete decisions to take specific measures in individual cases” (Peris Cancio, 2019: 473). Like frontline work more generally, there is an inherently situational and also relational character to the work of representation; representatives interact directly with those who are to benefit from their work.
The representatives are present during acute situations, such as the asylum interview, where minors are emotionally and psychologically challenged by the need to recount painful experiences. Such situations bring with them a sense of responsibility on the part of the representatives towards the minor and their wellbeing. Similar to other frontline work, not least in the public sector (cf. Johnson and Bagatell, 2020), representational work seems to be guided by principles of moral care and a sense of responsibility. This sense of responsibility felt by representatives may be understood as part of what it means to be ‘caring about’ (Glenn, 2000), implying thoughts and feelings about how to address the needs of the minors. In their elaboration on frontline service work, Bélanger and Edwards (2013) note briefly that emotional labour is more salient among frontline workers, highlighting the significance of direct interaction with those who benefit from one's efforts. In the case of the representatives in this study, they seem instead to be performing what Hochschild (1979) has theorised as emotion work, inhibiting their emotional responses and not letting it show that they care. The Norwegian state clearly defines care as being outside the scope of representation. However, it is not an easy task to know where care starts and ends. In their efforts to remain within the procedural requirements of representation, the representatives perform not only emotion work but also a type of boundary work, in the sense of excluding some areas, i.e., personal lives and homes, and some activities, such as hugging a minor or meeting daily care needs, from their representational practices (cf. Roussy et al., 2019). The boundaries in question are those between the formally defined responsibilities and the representatives’ own interpretations of what is required of them in practice, as an adult with responsibility for a minor.
The representatives’ emotion work and boundary work may be read as an indication of the efforts they undertake to align with institutionalised standards and institutional messages. Moreover, it may be understood as a disciplining of themselves. Johnson and Bagatell (2020: 646) refer to workers’ self-governance, emphasising that it is mediated through the textual complexes organising frontline work. The representatives’ practical doing is played out within an institutional complex that places constraints upon them, limiting their decision-making in the specific situations in which they find themselves. These constraints sometimes take the form of specific instructions on what to do and not do; at other times the regulatory texts may have their effect through an indirect governing of the representatives’ decision-making, leaving them less likely to prioritise the minor's needs over protocol.
The notion of self-governance draws attention to the structures of the relations at play. One characteristic of frontline work is the triangular relationship between worker, employer, and customer/service recipient. For representatives, this triangular relationship is between themselves, the contracting authority, and the minors. Additionally, they are part of the wider reception system for minors, where others, such as social workers, the police, and immigration authorities, also work. This reception system is, in turn, part of the Norwegian asylum system, which operates according to laws and political signals. Within this institutional complex, the representatives could be seen as acting in a betwixt-and-between position (cf. Bjerregaard and Klitmoller, 2010); they need to operationalise their own mandate and define their own role when meeting minors and when sitting next to and representing them during their encounters with other actors within the system. This raises a question regarding the representatives’ scope of discretion in the execution of their role (cf. Peris Cancio, 2019). As shown in the analysis, the representatives often feel a lack of confidence in their role, not knowing what to do or how to prioritise, but they have also experienced being overruled when asking for guidance or support on how to perform their role. This latter indicates a lack of discretion in the execution of the role of representative, and it also reveals the institutional message about how representatives are to understand and conduct themselves (cf. Grace et al., 2014); namely, in a passive manner.
Among our participants, there was a common understanding that the system did not appreciate them being too active in their representation of a minor, such as standing up for them and saying no on their behalf. Rather, as they perceived it, the expectation was to be passive and let the other institutional actors do what they intended to do when assessing the minor and their asylum claim. Failure to be passive (enough) could subject the representatives to negative reactions from other actors. Interfering on behalf of the minor could therefore feel intimidating. Meanwhile, our participants felt an obligation towards the minors to be active – and to activate their rights, doing what was needed to ensure that their rights were honoured. The notion of frontline work seems fitting to capture this tension, describing a type of work characterised by direct contact with service recipients while they themselves, as workers, occupy a subordinate position within the asylum system. The problem, as for other frontline workers (cf. Bélanger and Edwards, 2013; Johnson and Bagatell, 2020), is that resistance to the system becomes difficult from the representatives’ position. While resistance was a topic of concern for our research participants in the interviews, they emphasised that they were careful not to lose their own assignment and not to risk annoying those who had concrete decision-making power over the future of the minors, for whose well-being they, as representatives, saw themselves as responsible.
Conclusion
This article has explored the work of representation for unaccompanied minor asylum seekers in the context of the Norwegian asylum system. Throughout the article, we have shown how representational work unfolds within an institutional complex consisting of multiple institutional requirements, conditions, and actors, but also in relation to the needs and rights of minors as well as the representatives’ own emotional responses.
We argue that the work of representation may be conceptualised as frontline work. By harnessing this concept, we specify the situational, relational, and structural characteristics of representational work and identify a tension between the representatives’ felt obligation towards the minors and the institutional demands. Whereas the mandate to safeguard the rights of minors requires that representatives are active, doing work to activate rights, the institutional message is one of passivity, encouraging representatives to act passively. This makes the position of the representative a difficult one, as they are simultaneously responsible for the minors while being part of a system driven by other considerations than simply those of the individual rights and wellbeing of the unaccompanied minor asylum seekers (cf. De Graeve, 2015: 79).
The standpoint of representatives has provided valuable insights into the institutional circumstances within which representation unfolds, offering ways of understanding what representational work is when studied as practice. Importantly, the representatives’ work – and its institutional governing – have concrete consequences for unaccompanied minor asylum seekers. The realisation of minors’ rights is not inherently achieved by the asylum system in its own capacity; their rights need to be activated, necessitating efforts made by the representatives, efforts which at times may meet with resistance from the system. This highlights the precarious situation of these minors, whose current wellbeing and asylum case – and their future – is at stake.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Brita Bungum, Marit Ursin and Ann Christin Eklund Nilsen for reading and commenting on early drafts of the article. We are also grateful to the referees in CSP for very helpful comments. Finally, a warm thank you also to Elizabeth Sourbut for proof-reading the article.
Consent to participate
All participants in the two projects signed a letter of informed consent to participate in interviews.
Data availability statement
All data utilised in the studies stem from a relatively small group, increasing the likelihood of recognition. Moreover, the letter of informed consent has guaranteed participants that their data will remain available solely to the authors. As such, the full dataset is not disclosed, rather we only make use of excerpts in this paper to promote transparency.
Ethical consideration
Both rounds of data collection were approved by the Norwegian Agency for Shared Services in Education Research (SIKT).
Funding
The research has been funded by the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU).
Norges Teknisk-Naturvitenskapelige Universitet.
