‘Will you take care of me?’ Bio-space, racial assemblages and the US Youth Refugee Resettlement welfare system

Routté’s paper presents an ethnographic case study of an unaccompanied refugee minor from Nigeria throughout his first year in the care of the United States Office of Refugee Resettlement. In tracing various interactions with ‘care’-based institutions and practitioners, the paper questions how US social welfare systems insist on specific ways of placing certain bodies and what that placing means to personhood. Attention is paid in particular to the ways in which the US resettlement industry and stakeholder care agencies inflict violence on young black bodies. Based on a literature of care, the paper traces how violence is woven into overlapping welfare systems. The processes of racialization and anti-Blackness present in the United States are framed within the awareness of a peculiar violence of care that emerges through bio-space, ambivalence and spatial understandings across time and location. This paper offers implications for future research for those working with black African diasporic youth who have experienced migration and resettlement. It further suggests how scaled integration practices and policies might be centred in the possibilities held in critical black geographies.