Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses on the role of multilingualism in the communications between refugees and displaced people in the Global South and their interactions with the NGOs that support them

Paper long abstract:

The central theme running through this panel is the role of language in communication and how we can better understand the stories we live by, particularly when rethinking connection and agency in low-resource settings. This paper focuses on the role of multilingualism in the communications between refugees and displaced people in the Global South and their interactions with the NGOs that support them. Much has been written about the prevalence and politicization of public discourses on migration. Less prevalent are analyses of the role of language in the mediation of written language, and therefore written culture, by refugees, as part of their everyday practices. With this in mind, this paper takes a discourse-ethnographic approach to the analysis of discourses of displacement by focusing on the mediation that refugees engage in with each other, across their transnational networks, as well as in humanitarian settings, and sheds light on the means by which refugees and humanitarian actors negotiate the unequal power dynamics of humanitarian interactions. Findings suggest that the institutional complexities of humanitarian efforts are reduced when mediators translate discourses in their literacy practices, thereby providing refugees and displaced people with the socio-culturally mediated capacity to act, negotiate and resist.