Beyond the Script: Decentring the Vulnerability Paradigm Through Comics-Based Participatory Research with Unaccompanied Migrant Minors in Italy

In contemporary asylum governance, ‘vulnerability’ operates as an administrative idiom of protection and a classificatory technology: it sorts cases, organises priorities, and authorises differential treatment by determining what counts as a recognisable need. While critical scholarship has mapped the institutional architectures through which vulnerability is produced and operationalised, we still lack fine-grained accounts of how such classifications are negotiated, resisted, and reworked by those at the margins of epistemic authority—whose accounts are routinely met with scepticism and whose public voice is structurally constrained.