Never alone: clarifying the role of unseen families in the educational careers of unaccompanied foreign minors living in Friuli Venezia Giulia (Italy)

Unaccompanied Foreign Minors (UFMs) are subject to ongoing concerns by European institutions (Carvalho & Paoletti, 2023). The research presented in this paper takes place at ‘Convitto San Luigi’, a residential facility hosting up to 88 UFMs located in Friuli Venezia Giulia (Italy), at the border with Slovenia. San Luigi also provides UFMs with educational services, most of which are outsourced to local schools. Consequently, community members express concerns about the invisibility of UFMs families asking researchers to investigate their roles in UFMs’ educational careers. This pragmatic concern is mirrored by the literature. Evidence collected by Pèrez and Morgade Salgado (2019) shows families of origin act as an unseen presence in UFMs’ lives. They act in a regulatory way that is enabled by communication technologies but hindered by the ignoramus of the Care System. Bonomi and Terzera (2023) maintain there is a weak correlation between educational success and defiance of parental control, suggesting familial impact is negative. Hence, the question: what causes families of origin to become a problematic factor in UFMs’ educational careers? To answer this, Situational Analysis is adopted (Clarke et al., 2022). Its interactional nature enjoys the epistemic benefit of attributing great value to sources that are neither strictly ethnographic, nor distinctively documentary—such as evidence resulting from brief communications and interactions between UFMs, families, caretakers, and school staff. Results are constituted by relational maps produced in conjunction with the educational staff working at the San Luigi facility. Evidence is compounded by the testimonies of UFMs themselves, jointly with school documents that report educational outcomes. Maps show families have a negative impact on UFMs’ schooling precisely because of their ‘unseen’ character—a status that is enforced by the Care System, which keeps them out of the discursive arena surrounding the future of the child.