HDEV Seminar Series featuring Dr. Michele Statz

In the U.S., unaccompanied Fujianese youth manage multiple transitions of legality, labor, and age alongside their immigration cause lawyers who negotiate personal motivation and professional constraints. In and beyond the legal realm, the figure of the “vulnerable Chinese child” powerfully legitimates legal claims and attorneys’ efforts. At the same time, the transnational ambitions and obligations of Chinese youth implicitly unsettle this figure. The maneuvers of these youth not only belie attorneys’ reliance on racialized discourses of childhood and the Chinese family, but they also reveal more broad uncertainties around legal frameworks, institutional practices, health and labor rights—and cause lawyering itself. 

Dr. Michele Statz is a legal anthropologist and Assistant Professor in the Dept. of Biobehavioral Health and Population Sciences at the U. of Minnesota Medical School, Duluth.