Refugees without Age

Because minors and adults have different rights, German government agencies need to know a person’s exact age. In the case of young refugees, this is often a challenge: few own identity documents and many do not even know their date of birth. How do government agencies deal with such uncertainty? And how do refugees themselves experience the enormous significance of their age in Germany? In my research, I examine age from multiple perspectives and show that this ostensibly straightforward biological category is also a complex social construct.