Who Cares: Mapping Systems of Care for Unaccompanied Children

This organizational case study will identify and examine a broad range of services that are provided for unaccompanied migrant children (UC)--what we describe as “the UC system of care.” The project will address how organizations within this system of care adopt and justify distinct approaches to serving UC, and how these logics of care work within and against legal frameworks, social discourses, and a fluid policy landscape. The project has the following aims: 

1. We seek to categorize what factors (care priorities, care facilitators, and barriers to care) shape how agencies and organizations approach their work with UC.
2. We intend to analyze the connections between immigration policy and organizational practice which create the conditions of resource and constraint within which care-workers—and the organizations the employ them—engage with UC. 
3. We aim to trace how individual care workers navigate these factors as they seek to achieve particular outcomes for UC

Principal Investigators: Jessica Darrow (University of Chicago) John Doering-White, Breanne Grace, Benjamin Roth (University of South Carolina)