Description
Book SynopsisThis unique critical sociolinguistic ethnography explores alternative migrant-regulated institutions of resistance and subversive communication technology: the locutorios or ethnic call shops. These migrant-owned businesses act as a window into their multimodal and hybrid linguistic and communicative practices, and into their own linguistic hierarchies and non-mainstream sociolinguistic orders. Here, socially displaced but technologically empowered transnational migrant populations actively find subversive ways to access information and communication technologies. As such they mobilise their own resources to successfully inhabit Catalonia, at the margins of powerful institutions. The book also focuses on the (internal) social organisation dynamics, as well as on the simultaneous fight against, and re-production of, practices and processes of social difference and social inequality among migrants themselves.
Trade ReviewThe strength of this book is that it addresses a hot topic in a way that is exemplary and will last.
-- Florian Coulmas, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany * International Journal of the Sociology of Language, Volume 2018, Issue 254 *
This book is of interest to scholars and students in Discourse Studies, Linguistic Anthropology or Intercultural Communication. It presents a very comprehensive approach and opens up avenues of inquiry into the intersectionality between language, mobility, identity and new technologies.
-- Adriana Patiño-Santos, University of Southampton, UK * Spanish in Context, Vol. 14:1 (2017) *
The extreme richness and deepness of the ethnographic analysis provided by the author provides a compelling contribution for a complex understanding of the multilingual practices and the everyday challenges faced by migrants in their everyday lives in current Catalonia. With her rich discussion of the mundane activities that she was able to track during her in-depth ethnography, Maria Sabaté i Dalmau grasps the mechanisms and sometimes contradictory logics that make and regulate social life and that contribute to the distribution of resources in society.
-- Alfonso Del Percio, University of Oslo, Norway * Multilingua 2016; aop *
In her in-depth and, at times, moving ethnography of a Barcelona locutorio, Maria Sabaté i Dalmau affords us a unique and fascinating glimpse of migrants' multilingual practices, connections and mediations normally hidden from view. This book is an important contribution to the growing literature on languages, mobilities and globalization.
-- Adam Jaworski, University of Hong Kong
Maria Sabaté I Dalmau's work is a most welcome contribution to the sociolinguistics of globalization, particularly at the intersection of migration, multilingualism and communication technologies. This book makes a compelling account of how states and the telecommunication industries attempt to control and contain migrants in how they use languages or how they access mobile communications, even as migrants develop their own forms of sociability to cope with these restrictions or circumvent them.
-- Joan Pujolar Cos, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Spain
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements
List of Figures
List of Tables
List of Acronyms
Transcription Conventions
1. New Steps into the Sociolinguistics of Globalisation: The Critical Exploration of Migrant Institutions of Resistance in Late Capitalism
2. The Rise of Anti-Migrant Governmentality Practices: Prelude to the Emergence of Locutorios
3. Locutorios as Challengers to Established Politic-Economic Orders and Sociolinguistic Regimes
4. The Self-Provision of Technology Capital in Locutorios: A Diversity of ICT-Mediated Networking Practices
5. Locutorio Voices: Language and Literacy in Migrant-Regulated Discursive Spaces
6. Locutorios as Migrant Spaces of Mismeeting and Conflictive Togetherness
By Way of Conclusion: Informal Migrant Shelters Where to Critically Explore the Mundane Alphabets of the Future
References
Appendix
Endnotes
