Presenter: Tanatswa Chineka
Title: The Adversity Grid: Beyond Epistemological Traps in the Gendered Liminality of Unaccompanied Migrant Boys
Date: Wednesday, 13 May 2026
Time: 12:30 – 13:30
Venue: ACMS Seminar Room (2163), Solomon Mahlangu House (2nd floor), East Campus, Wits University (directions)
Zoom link: https://tinyurl.com/3dwkccpp, Meeting ID: 957 8662 4514, Passcode: 012731
RSVP: Email ntokozo.yingwana@wits.ac.za

Abstract:
Unaccompanied migrant adolescent boys navigate health and protection systems from structurally precarious positions shaped by displacement, poverty, gendered expectations, and uneven institutional recognition. This paper argues that reductive framings of boys as vulnerable victims, resilient survivors, or problematic young men flatten the complexity of their lives and risk producing responses that are misaligned with their needs. Drawing on qualitative research in Zimbabwe, including interviews, focus groups, and field observations, I bring Renos Papadopoulos’ (2021) Adversity Grid into dialogue with scholarship on masculinities, constrained agency, and institutional misrecognition. Findings show that boys occupy a condition of gendered liminality and are subject to a girl-centred triage, achieving only partial recognition through the figure of the “good migrant boy.” I develop the concepts of interpretive displacement and differentiated recognition to show how boys are seen but misread. The Adversity Grid supports more accurate understanding, enabling informed best-interests decision-making and more appropriately tailored health and protection responses.

About the researcher/presenter:
Tanatswa Chineka is a joint doctoral researcher with the ACMS’s Migration and Displacement programme at Wits University and the University of Essex’s Public Health. He has a background in social work, and has research interests in child migration, health systems and policy, social security and mental health. His joint PhD examines how access to health care by unaccompanied migrant boys is determined by their experiences of masculinities and exercise of agency, as they move. The study interrogates the intersections between the notions of gender (experience of masculinities/femininity), age (being a minor/teenager), migrant identity (being unaccompanied) and migrant status (being irregular). He is interested in exploring how this intersection simultaneously frames/is framed by child agency, and in turn determines health care access. He is a member of various public health and migration research caucuses, including the IMISCOE PhD Academy, GEMMS and CoRE in Migration and Health.