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- Convenors:
-
Alexandre Duchene
(University of Fribourg)
Anita Sujoldžić (Institute for Anthropological Research)
- Stream:
- Relational movements: Lively Languages/Mouvements relationnels: Langues vivantes
- Location:
- VNR 4084
- Start time:
- 4 May, 2017 at
Time zone: America/New_York
- Session slots:
- 3
Short Abstract:
The goal of this panel is to problematize the linguistic dimension of people's circulation processes under complex migration regimes. While open to diverse, it primarily targets ethnographic work, thus highlighting the frictions and the complicated pathways of speakers on the move.
Long Abstract:
The goal of this panel is to problematize the linguistic dimension of people's circulation processes under complex migration regimes. Political and economic crises, as well as war situations, make many individuals (try to) move, attempting to cross material, linguistic and symbolic borders and thus facing state and supra-state regulation, and surveillance mechanisms. Many linguistic stakes emerge in this context, bearing on linguistic competences for employment access, on linguistic demands for legal recognition of migration status, on linguistic analysis as an argument to determine veracity of asylum requests etc. Furthermore, these situations bring about the emergence of language industries specifically targeting speakers desiring to move or on the move, such as language schools preparing workers for mobility or non-governmental organisations in the arrival countries meant to create the conditions for an "adequate" linguistic integration. Finally, there are blossoming, constant debates in public and political spaces on the role of language as a means for exclusion and inclusion. These make language an arena for political and ideological confrontation, where the question of governmentality, engagement or disengagement on the part of citizens, the state and migrants themselves is deployed. In this way, this panel seeks to take issue with these different components in requesting contributions that will try to grasp the linguistic dimension of people's circulation in both contemporary and historical contexts. While open to diverse methodological, conceptual and theoretical approaches, it primarily targets ethnographic work, thus highlighting the frictions and the complicated and often unexpected pathways of speakers on the move.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper short abstract:
This paper will consider some of the implications of the very high and and even conflicting linguistic demands set by asylum authorities for the construction and evaluation of asylum identities in the asylum determination process.
Paper long abstract:
In response to the current refugee 'crisis', significant efforts are being made at EU level to manage its asylum and migration systems more efficiently. Still, when it comes to the determination of refugee status, it is worrying how little attention is paid to the role of language in what are essentially discourse-based procedures, where spoken and written discourse form the main input for the representation and the assessment of asylum cases (Barsky, 1994; Pöllabauer 2004, Inghilleri 2005; Maryns 2006, Tipton 2008; Blommaert 2010). This paper aims to explore two areas of tension in the discursive management of asylum cases: (a) the tension between the often very rigorous conditions for submission, representation and assessment of asylum applications on the one hand and the unreasonable linguistic demands set by the asylum authorities on the other; and (b) the unclear and to some extent even conflicting roles attributed to language, either as a meaning-making tool (for the representation of the asylum seeker's account) or as a verification tool (for the evaluation of the veracity of the asylum seeker's account). Drawing on linguistic-ethnographic data from the Belgian asylum context, this paper will consider some of the implications of these conflicting linguistic demands for the construction and evaluation of asylum identities.
Paper short abstract:
A partir de données issues d’une recherche ethnographique, cette contribution investigue la manière dont la langue, conçue comme clé à l’« intégration » des requérants d’asile dans la société d’accueil, matérialise et renforce durablement les inégalités sociales à tous les niveaux de la procédure.
Paper long abstract:
Sur la base d'une recherche ethnographique menée entre 2015 et 2017 sur le terrain de la procédure d'asile en Suisse, j'analyserai la manière dont «la langue» et «l'intégration» - terme aussi tabou dans la recherche scientifique que présent dans les discours individuels et publics - sont systématiquement couplés sans jamais être explicités, ni dans leur nature, ni dans les liens qu'ils entretiennent entre eux. Considérée implicitement comme clé de l'intégration, la langue apparaît au contraire comme la matérialisation des barrières qui la freinent. Du latin 'integrare', c'est-à-dire «réparer, renouveler, refaire», l'intégration de la personne dans et par la société devrait lui permettre de reconstruire sa vie dans de nouveaux paradigmes, que l'étymologie souhaiterait positifs. Qu'il s'agisse des niveaux de langue exigés pour entrer sur le marché de l'emploi ou de la formation, de la maîtrise linguistique brandie comme étendard de discours politiques à visées électoralistes, des tests de lange destinés à déterminer la véracité d'une origine, ou plus simplement des cours de langue prodigués par différentes instances, la barrière linguistique apparaît toutefois surtout comme un argument commode pour réguler l'espace social en termes d'immigration et de maintien de l'ordre établi. Cette dynamique que je présenterai schématiquement à trois échelons - fédéral, cantonal et associatif - de la procédure contribue à figer les requérants d'asile dans une identité de réfugiés redevables envers la société d'accueil, en marge de laquelle ils se constituent progressivement en une minorité insidieusement réduite à un silence linguistique et social.
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines the nexus of language investment, student mobilities, and the language teaching industry in the context of youth unemployment. Drawing on ethnographic research of South Korean youth studying English abroad, it traces the emergence of consumerism in the English teaching industry.
Paper long abstract:
This paper will examine the nexus of language investment, student mobilities, and the language teaching industry in the context of youth unemployment. It draws on ethnographic research of South Korean young adults who pursued overseas language education to acquire global English and experiences for their employability. Especially, criticizing "methodological nationalism" (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002) in student mobility studies, it focuses on the ways in which students geographically move not only across nation-states but also within a single nation-state.
Facing the high rate of youth unemployment in post-crisis and neoliberal South Korea, the youth are investing their material resources and life energies to be competitive in the job market, that is, what Brown, Lauder, and Ashton (2011) term "positional competition." As a result, on one hand, the youth have been highly calculative and strategic in their skills development projects. On the other hand, the educational businesses have differentiated their commodities and service to satisfy students' demands. This ethnographic research shows that South Korean young adults studying English abroad create transnational trajectories of moving and mooring in multiple locations; for example, from the Philippines to Canada globally, and from Montreal to Toronto within Canada. Their patterns of mobilities are not only governed by their own mapping and valuing of linguistic and cultural resources in different locations (Park 2014), but are also conditioned by the language teaching industry. The paper concludes that one of the consequences of such agentive performances and market differentiations is the emergence of consumerism in the language industry.
Paper short abstract:
This paper investigates how - in the context of labor migration - language education is set up as a market. The analysis of language education as industry also helps to identify who holds the power over what language, who positions the speakers and who scripts the language.
Paper long abstract:
This paper investigates language education as industry by focusing on the current recruitment of nurses from the Philippines for work in Germany. The care shortage in Germany has prompted the recruitment of non-German speaking personnel from countries such as the Philippines. In 2012 the German and the Philippine government signed a bilateral labor agreement which promotes and regulates the migration of Philippine nurses to Germany. In March 2016 they officially opened the market for other brokering agencies outside the governmental pilot project. In order to be eligible for a work visa in Germany, Philippine nurses need to certify a German language knowledge of B2 (Common European Framework of Reference for Languages) - a high level of language competency which the nurses generally reach after a one year full-time German course. This need for German language competency in the Philippines has resulted in a rapidly expanding market.
The language industry is heavily intertwined with the brokering of the workforce as language schools act as brokers or collaborate with brokering agencies, or as brokering agencies start to set up German language programs. Next to the private language schools that cater to adults, the Philippine state (and the Goethe Institute) promotes foreign language learning at high school level. The paper draws on material from ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the Philippines. It identifies various levels of market expansion and market diversification in order to uncover structural inequalities in a modern/colonial, capitalist, patriarchal world system.
Paper short abstract:
In this paper I discuss the changing nature of multilingualism among the people of Byans, far western Nepal and adjacent regions, by focusing on recent development of language ideologies and practices among Rang migrants, based on my fieldwork in Darchula, Kathmandu, and the Greater Boston area.
Paper long abstract:
The people of Byans and two adjacent Himalayan regions share the ethnonym 'Rang' and their own language generally called 'Rang lwo' which actually consists of several sub-varieties. Many Rangs have traditionally been people 'on the move' as trans-Himalayan traders who use Tibetan and Pahari languages besides their mother tongue. The fact that the international border divided their homeland into the territories of two countries, India and Nepal, has made their multilingualism still more complicated, especially after the introduction of formal school education. Moreover, some Nepali Rangs have lived in Kathmandu for about 50 years, and from the 1990s a substantial number of Rangs in Nepal have migrated outside South Asia, temporarily or permanently. The largely 'successful' process of their migration has had various impacts on the nature of multilingualism of Rangs in their homeland and abroad, to which recent development of ICTs have added further twists.
In this paper I analyse the changing nature of multilingualism among Rangs in both practical and ideological levels, based on my fieldwork in Darchula where many Rangs in Nepali Byans have their winter houses, Kathmandu, the capital of Nepal, and the Greater Boston area. I deal with three ethnographic fragments: the language use in Rang gatherings in Kathmandu; a music clip made by a Rang migrant in the United States; and a speech made by a Rang groom who came back home from abroad for his own marriage during his marriage ceremony.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores how “spaces as practiced place” (de Certeau 1984) are created by and for Cape Verdeans in Luxembourg. It examines the role that spaces play in Cape Verdean immigrant experience and their articulation with discourses of multilingualism and employability.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores how Cape Verdeans create spaces, how spaces are created for them in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg and considers how the idea of 'space as practiced place' (de Certeau 1984) plays a central role in their immigrant experience. Cape Verdeans are considered to be the first African immigrants in Luxembourg (Kollwelter 2007). Finding spaces in migration contexts demands a lot of migrant's efforts and this is becoming even more complex with the tightening of migration rules in the global North in this paradoxical era of growing mobile inequalities (Duchêne et al. 2013). In his analysis on societies and systems on the move, John Urry (2007: 185) stresses that 'the notion of space makes significant differences to understanding economic, political and cultural processes that produce and reinforce social inequalities.' This paper shows how Cape Verdeans invest in and experience physical, social, communicative and imagined spaces to make sense of their migrant lives. As part of a bigger project on language and migration (STAR project), interviews and broader ethnographic data were collected in and around an ethnic grocery store (Epicerie Créole in Bonnevoie). In this paper I ask how Cape Verdeans intersect with other immigrant spaces and groups (notably Portuguese and Bissau-Guinean) whose linguistic and cultural repertoires partly overlap with Cape Verdeans for historical reasons. In conclusion, the paper investigates how those places and spaces are shaped by wider discourses of multilingualism and their articulation with employability in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg.
Paper short abstract:
This paper looks into the mobility constraints and the resulting pathways for Arabic-speaking communicators in an international humanitarian agency. It ethnographically defines a complex mobility regime emerging out of linguistic requirements and aceptable “neutral” nationalities.
Paper long abstract:
The goal of this presentation is to understand the complex mobility regime that regulates Arabic-speaking mobile staff at the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). These humanitarians' pathways are shaped by institutional (linguistic) requirements combined with national constraints on international organisations. My study specifically looks into Arabic-speaking communicators' allocation to delegations and their mobile trajectories in the ICRC's Communication Pool. Methodologically, it draws on a historiographic approach to institutional archives complemented by ethnographic interviews with (former) mobile communicators in Arabic language.
The mobility of humanitarian workers is subject to regulatory processes mediated by not only language ideologies that valorise and test their linguistic competences as technical skills but also nationality categories that allow/deny them access to the operations by national authorities. Allocating these mobile workers to 80 ICRC delegations worldwide is a "puzzle" of nationalities and linguistic repertoires. Mobile communicators are institutionally required to speak English and two other working languages, with Arabic being sought-after. The value and shortage of Arabic speakers might have influenced their repeated assignment to "hardship posts" (e.g. Iraq or Syria) with strict security measures. Consequently, their mobile trajectories have had an impact on their higher turnover. Besides, mobile staff cannot work in the countries of which they are nationals in the interests of "neutrality". Furthermore, the history of wars and alliances makes certain foreign nationalities unacceptable for belligerents. The intersection between the dimensions of language and nationality explains the current shortage of Arabophones whose nationality is accepted to enter Syria for ICRC humanitarian work.
Paper short abstract:
The terms used in the Occupied Palestinian Territories for military restrictions on movement are analysed for their changing ideological coordinates expressed in interviews and in the media; notably, the most common and integrated Hebrew loanword in Palestinian Arabic is maḥsūm, for 'checkpoint'.
Paper long abstract:
In the early 1990s, during the first Iraq war and during negotiations on the Arab-Israeli conflicts, Israeli military checkpoints were set up in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT). The Palestinians' term of choice to refer to these is a Israeli Hebrew loanword, maḥsūm. Ten years later, the Israeli government approved a military plan to build a fence and wall around Palestinian localities in the West Bank of the OPT. The term of choice to refer to that is from Modern Standard Arabic, al-jidār, at the expense of any available Hebrew or Palestinian Arabic lexical equivalents. The differences in the linguistic sources for these terms reflects and feeds into three contextual processes: firstly, the global political changes of the 1990s—the subsuming of neoliberalism into securitism; secondly, differences in the occasions arising around the two types of barriers—as researched by Cédric Parizot regarding the porosity of borders; and thirdly, the role of Palestinian institutions, as presented by Mandy Turner and Omar Shweiki.
Palestinian respondents interviewed and observed between 2002 and 2016 have presented patterns fitting with a fourth process: stoicism. Their perspectives on the checkpoints and the fence/wall are practically as well as ideologically committed to access and movement. Linguistically, the emphasis in Palestinian discussions is on how to make the passage easier, for instance by responding adequately to shibboleth-type questions. One of the mythological checkpoint shibboleths involves the soldier ordering: tagid po politika 'Say here is politics', with the phoneme [p] that Arabic speakers stereotypically find hard to pronounce.
Paper short abstract:
Translation or interpreting services are directly connected to the linguistic dimension of people’s circulation processes. This paper analyzes how different interpreting services are organized and valued at a public hospital in the German-speaking part of Switzerland.
Paper long abstract:
Perhaps more than any other language industry, translation or interpreting services are directly connected to the linguistic dimension of people's circulation processes. They are a means of addressing the immediate language needs of migrants; at the same time, other migrants often do the interpreting work. This paper examines the linguistic stakes that emerge as interpreting services capitalize on the circulation of migrants. Specifically, this paper focuses on the contexts of healthcare, a central terrain where interpreting services are utilized and managed. Against the backdrop of a linguistically diverse workforce and an increasing number of patients with equally diverse linguistic backgrounds, this paper analyzes how interpreting services are organized at a public hospital in the German-speaking part of Switzerland. While the ability to communicate with patients from various linguistic and cultural backgrounds is a central motivation for the provision of interpreting services, it also ensures the effective management of patients and the functioning of the hospital. This raises the question of the valorization of languages and speakers. The hospital utilizes the linguistic resources of interpreters from a non-government organization, a for-profit telephone interpreting service and in addition, it trains its own workers who have migrant backgrounds to be flexibly available as medical interpreters. Informed by ethnographic research as well as semi-structured interviews with workers, we intend to trace the trajectories of different sets of interpreters and highlight the tensions between the language ideologies that shape how their work is understood, justified and evaluated within the hospital.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores language use in the tourist sector of Marseille. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, it will show how the management of linguistic resources and spontaneous language negotiation in interaction combine to promote a small number of linguistic resources, thereby creating inequality.
Paper long abstract:
Tourism is perhaps the most wide-reaching form of human mobility. Across the world, people choose to be on the move, thereby benefitting from the processes of globalisation.
This paper aims to explore this privileged form of (chosen) mobility from a linguistic perspective. This study is based on an ethnographic fieldwork project undertaken in various tourist sites of a well-known French city seeking to garner itself a reputation as a global city: Marseille.
Firstly, the management of language and linguistic resources by the main actors of the tourist sector in response to this globalised mobility will be explored. A small number of specific languages are seen as especially valuable for the development of the tourism industry and are thus promoted in these spaces.
Secondly, it will be revealed how spontaneous language negotiation sequences between tourists and tourism workers also result in the selection of a very small, similar repertoire of linguistic resources. Therefore, despite complex pathways of mobility, language use in the tourist sector of Marseille is remarkably homogenous.
In conclusion, it will be shown how these processes reinforce language ideologies that empower certain global languages and their speakers, while disempowering a large range of other linguistic resources and their users. This will lead to a discussion on how language acts as a means for exclusion in a context that seems to promise the world to all.