Description
Book SynopsisMigration and the mobility of citizens around the globe pose important challenges to the linguistic and cultural homogeneity that nation-states rely on for defining their physical boundaries and identity, as well as the rights and obligations of their citizens. A new social order resulting from neoliberal economic practices, globalisation and outsourcing also challenges traditional ways the nation-state has organized its control over the people who have typically travelled to a new country looking for work or better life chances. This collection provides an account of the ways language addresses core questions concerning power and the place of migrants in various institutional and workplace settings. It brings together contributions from a range of geographical settings to understand better how linguistic inequality is (re)produced in this new economic order.
Trade ReviewThis stimulating volume brings together classic strands of critical sociolinguistic work on how immigrants are disadvantaged in social gatekeeping institutions and the contemporary sociolinguistics of globalization. Taking a broad view of 'migrants' as sociolinguistically mobile citizens, the authors mobilize an impressive array of ideological, political and economic frameworks to explore the continuing power of institutions to confer and withhold status and opportunity as well as forms of resistance to these processes.
-- Alexandra Jaffe, California State University, Long Beach, USA
This major sociolinguistic contribution, with its wide-ranging and detailed ethnographic attention to the structures shaping migrant experiences of language, sheds innovative analytic light on the neoliberal regimentation of language at work, in school, and in bureaucratic processes, the commodification of language skills, and the contradictions of contemporary capitalism that shape linguistic practices and ideologies.
-- Bonnie Urciuoli, Hamilton College, USA
This book does a wonderful job of focusing critically on the sociolinguistics of migrant workers - the protagonists of the book - in various institutions and workplaces (or their exclusion from them). From the informal locutorios of Barcelona and Congolese la débrouille in Cape Town, to the decapitalisation of migrant students in Madrid schools and the mismatched aspirations and actual work of Japanese flight attendants, these studies focus both on local migrant sociolinguistics as well as wider social and economic orders. Making questions of the (re)production of linguistic, social and economic disparities central, this book thus provides vital insights into language, mobility and inequality.
-- Alastair Pennycook, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia
This book contains a wealth of good scholarship and revealing critical analyses of the local ways in which social inequality is produced or contested. Each of the contributions has been very well written and the authors show a sincere commitment to learning how language issues affect people’s life chances.
-- Joan Pujolar, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Spain * Journal of Sociolinguistics, 2015-2016 (Volumes 19-20) *
Table of Contents1. Alexandre Duchêne, Melissa Moyer & Celia Roberts: Introduction: Recasting Institutions and Work in Multilingual and Transnational Spaces
Part I: Sites of Control
2. Eva Codó: Trade Unions and NGOs under Neoliberalism: Between Regimenting Migrants and Subverting the State
3. Kori Allan: Skilling the Self: The Communicability of Immigrants as Flexible Labour
Part II: Sites of Selection
4. Celia Roberts: The Gatekeeping of Babel: Job Interviews and the Linguistic Penalty
5. Ingrid Piller & Kimie Takahashi: Language Work aboard the Low-Cost Airline
6. Luisa Martín Rojo: (De) Capitalising Students through Linguistic Practices. A Comparative Analysis of New Educational Programmes in a Global Era
7. Vally Lytra: From Kebabçı to Professional: The Commodification of Language and Social Mobility in Turkish Complementary Schools in the UK
Part III: Sites of Resistance
8. Werner Holly & Ulrike Hanna Meinhof: ‘Integration hatten wir letztes jahr.’ Official Discourses of Integration and their Uptake by Migrants in Germany
9. Melissa G. Moyer: Language as a Resource. Migrant Agency, Positioning and Resistance in a Health Care Clinic
10. Cécile B. Vigouroux: Informal Economy and Language Practice in the Context of Migrations
11. Maria Sabaté i Dalmau: Fighting Exclusion from the Margins: Locutorios as Sites of Social Agency and Resistance for Migrants
Mike Baynham: Postscript
Contributors
