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.

This project addresses that gap by decentring administrative vulnerability scripts through an inquiry at the intersection of critical sociology and visual studies. Focusing on unaccompanied migrant minors (UAMs) in Italy—where the protection of minors is repeatedly filtered through age related suspicion, credibility work and ‘false minor’ narratives—it examines how eligibility and credibility regimes shape the conditions under which vulnerability becomes sayable, showable and believable. The project advances the argument that vulnerability governance is stabilised through adult-centred scripts of legibility—culturally authorised expectations of ‘proper childhood’, dependency and innocence—that pre-structure what can be recognised as evidence, credibility and need, thereby translating discretionary assessment into uneven access to care and protection.

Methodologically, this project deploys comics-based participatory inquiry as a mode of visual knowledge-making suited to analysing legibility itself. By co-producing sequential narratives, it expands the interpretive register beyond the linear, text-centric grammar of administrative testimony, treating compositional choice, revision, omission and sequencing as analytically productive traces of meaning-making under governance. In doing so, the project will produce a youth-centred account of vulnerability as a contested classification, showing how credibility deficits are generated—and how alternative narrative forms can shift what becomes publicly intelligible within, and against, protection regimes. It will deliver two journal articles, a safeguarded graphic narrative, and a replicable visual inquiry toolkit.