The Transition Shock: Emancipating into State-Defined Adulthood

The American welfare state is increasingly fragmented, conditional, and tied to punitive interventions. A select few aspects of welfare, however, have expanded. This dissertation examines the case of youth aging out of child welfare, who are technically the beneficiaries of such expansion, yet largely do not receive support services. For context, the nominal aim of the child welfare system is to reunify the over 200,000 children who are separated from their families each year. Still, over 20,000 young people annually "age out" of the system rather than being placed in a long-term home. Even as youth struggle with social risks like homelessness and incarceration, they often do not receive the services meant to mitigate these outcomes. In response, this dissertation asks: Why does service uptake remain so minimal? And in turn, how do youth manage the transitional phase?

To answer these questions, I conducted multilevel fieldwork alongside youth and child welfare workers and administrators across the greater Chicago area for more than 18 months. Leveraging this data, I develop the concept of liminal legibility to argue that youth are formally recognized as deserving of care, yet often remain structurally unsupported due to workforce instability. As the state makes youth legible to a resource-rich category, the workforce needed to enact state vision, and thereby broker its resources, is chronically disrupted. Instead, youth are more often exposed to the controlling aspects of child welfare, contributing to their turn towards alternatives that can further reinforce social precarity. Taken together, this dissertation demonstrates how expanded legibility, when filtered through an unstable yet coercive system, can transform welfare deservingness into systemic entrapment, setting youth up to struggle with negative consequences as a result.