WP339 Gaining and gauging trust through small stories in the interaction between guardians and unaccompanied minors

In the lead-up to their asylum interviews, unaccompanied minors often struggle to disclose the highly sensitive and personal narratives of their migration journeys to their legal guardians. Instead, they may resort to “thin stories”: generic, rehearsed stories of suffering, which risk being qualified by the authorities as “inauthentic” or even “untrue”. Guardians report how a lack of time and the high stakes of interview preparation undermine their relationships of trust. However, little research has looked at which strategies might actually help establish a trusting environment. To this aim, this paper draws on transcribed audio-recordings of ethnographically-observed guardian-minor interactions to study the social role small stories and personal anecdotes might play in these encounters. The paper argues that leaving room for everyday and experiential stories could contribute to a generally more open story-telling environment, and introduces the concept of “alter-narratives” to further theorise the tension between “small” and “big” stories in (semi-)institutional contexts.