The Precarious Time of Unaccompanied Minors in Italy Between Border Regimes and the Covid-19 Pandemic
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper explores the experiences of unaccompanied minors (UAMs) in Italy during the Covid-19 pandemic through the concepts of border and precarity. Drawing on a qualitative study, we examine how border regimes shape and constrain the lives of UAMs, whose mobility is rendered irregular and precarious by institutional practices. Their trajectories are structured by what we conceptualize as a “precarity chain”: residence permits depend on securing regular employment, which is necessary for achieving housing autonomy, but in turn requires meeting specific educational criteria. As a result, UAMs envision a fragile future built on a present marked by uncertainty and structural vulnerability, a condition further exacerbated by the global pandemic crisis. We adopt a temporal perspective to analyze the vulnerable transition to adulthood experienced by UAMs, arguing that they experience a “precarious time,” rooted in global mobility inequalities between the Global North and South.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".