Paper short abstract:

Language is rarely considered in discussions of mobility. This paper explores the “conversation trails” of migrants and advisors, spanning multiple speakers, sites, and time. In doing so, it demonstrates the mobility of language and speakers and offers new opportunities for ethnographic practice.

Paper long abstract:

Language is rarely considered in discussions of mobility in ethnography, both as a driver of human movement and as something that transcends spatial and temporal boundaries itself. Drawing on 12-months of ethnographic fieldwork, this paper explores the mobility of language and speakers among migrants accessing the UK advice sector. Specifically, it identifies how common expectations of advice interactions as static (bound to a particular place and time), monologic encounters (Bakhtin, 1986) are challenged when people get to talking.

Any given conversation between advisors and those seeking advice is unlikely to be the first or, depending on the outcome, the last its kind. Participants are often required to travel between multiple sites and speak with multiple advisors to access the advice they need. Resultantly, conversations about individual issues are best understood as “conversation trails”, that move with participants across different spaces, different speakers, and over prolonged periods of time. For advisors and those seeking advice, a key challenge becomes picking apart these trails and relating the subsequent information and expectations to the present space and time.

The paper concludes by considering some of the benefits and challenges of conversation trails for ethnographers trying to follow participants’ experiences. Although conversation is already a staple of ethnographic practice (Hammersley and Atkinson, 2019) a language-centred approach to mobility creates new opportunities for methods, including taking influence from common practices in journalism and sonic studies.