"Forever 17 is outstanding, original, impeccably researched, and eminently engaging. With deep ethnographic engagement, humanity, and lucid prose, Bialas brings razor-sharp intellect to demystify the seemingly neutral category of age, debunking the taken-for-granted naturalness of social categories and revealing their complexity, ambiguity, and malleability. This brilliant contribution has enormous theoretical significance and will have a lasting impact on policy debates about the asylum system and beyond. I highly recommend it, especially to anyone open to having their assumptions challenged."
 

Cecilia Menjívar, University of California, Los Angeles

"This ethnography of young asylum seekers in Germany shows how a process that might seem obvious—defining a person’s age and its meaning—is a wobbly social construction erected by architects with competing visions. Bialas is a perceptive observer of the conflicts, mutual adjustments, and unintended consequences."
 

David Scott FitzGerald, coauthor of The Refugee System: A Sociological Approach

“This brilliant and incisive ethnographic study unpacks how to determine eligibility fairly under conditions of great demand. Bialas profoundly understands a crunch point at which global demand for opportunity confronts local desires to limit access, and explores all the ambiguities, ambivalences, and indeterminacy that follow. This is a must-read in terms of both the ‘bureaucratic incorporation’ of immigrants and the liminal lives so generated.”

John Mollenkopf, CUNY Graduate Center

"This book will be an excellent, generative guide to students and practitioners of German and European Studies, international migration, qualitative fieldwork, science and technology studies, and more. Forever 17 should be admired, cited, emulated, and revisited often as an exemplary piece of scholarship."

Social Forces

"Forever 17 makes a crucial contribution to the interdisciplinary fields of refugee studies, youth studies, and migration policy research while bringing a fresh perspective and approach to academic research and writing. Its accessible style makes it suitable for wider audiences beyond academia . . . The book strikes a balance of narrative writing with soulful depth and scholarly analysis which sets it apart, offering an innovative and compassionate depiction of young migrants’ lived experiences and struggles within the German asylum system."

International Migration Review