Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review"Forever 17 is outstanding, original, impeccably researched, and eminently engaging. With deep ethnographic engagement, humanity, and lucid prose, Bialas brings razor-sharp intellect to demystify the seemingly neutral category of age, debunking the taken-for-granted naturalness of social categories and revealing their complexity, ambiguity, and malleability. This brilliant contribution has enormous theoretical significance and will have a lasting impact on policy debates about the asylum system and beyond. I highly recommend it, especially to anyone open to having their assumptions challenged."
-- Cecilia Menjívar, University of California, Los Angeles
"This ethnography of young asylum seekers in Germany shows how a process that might seem obvious—defining a person’s age and its meaning—is a wobbly social construction erected by architects with competing visions. Bialas is a perceptive observer of the conflicts, mutual adjustments, and unintended consequences."
-- David Scott FitzGerald, coauthor of The Refugee System: A Sociological Approach
“This brilliant and incisive ethnographic study unpacks how to determine eligibility fairly under conditions of great demand. Bialas profoundly understands a crunch point at which global demand for opportunity confronts local desires to limit access, and explores all the ambiguities, ambivalences, and indeterminacy that follow. This is a must-read in terms of both the ‘bureaucratic incorporation’ of immigrants and the liminal lives so generated.” -- John Mollenkopf, CUNY Graduate Center
