The making of unaccompanied children

This paper deals with the management of unaccompanied child migration. A legal framework laid out in international law aims to give internationally recognised human rights to children. These legal texts (re)invent the label of “child”, and more specifically, of “unaccompanied child”. This is a legally prescribed lexical label that discursively produces the figure of “child” as a legal, psychological and biometric surveillance object, resulting in ambivalent management of the children. In this paper, I show how this figure of the unaccompanied child is (re)invented in legal texts and then circulates in the humanitarian world via a process of entextualisation on supra/national and local levels in Greece. Drawing on eight months of ethnography on Lesvos Island, I demonstrate the tensions, disruptions, refusals and unsettling moments of struggle that arise when this definition and its related policies are implemented on the ground.

Towards a (re)imagined posture on (im)migration

The hegemonic production of knowledge on (im)migration from the geopolitical and epistemic location of the United States has made legible and knowable a particular conception of (im)migration shaping in turn how (im)migrant subjects are made and remade. As a corpus these dominant conceptions of (im)migration are legible through a dominant discourse that has, in the particular case of the U.S., contributed to a racialized (im)migrant personhood and to the study of outsiders coming in to settle. In a two-pronged approach the piece (a) shows the settler colonial logics embedded in (im)migration discourse while (b) simultaneously enacting work of (re)imagining by putting in conversation the work on discourse and racialization within the contexts of (im)migration with Indigenous scholars’ work on borders, settlement, and sovereignty. As such the goals are to disrupt the naturalized ways whereby the racialized (im)migrant and (im)migration are conceptualized within the U.S. context and to offer an aperture for a (re)imagined posture on (im)migration. These initial and fragmentary dialogic exchanges offer a potential path towards a (re)imagined posture on (im)migration that does not reproduce settler colonial logics while sustaining the coexistence of antagonisms and tensions in our quotidian interactions needed to live with the discomfort of contradictions.

Imperial straightening devices in disciplinary choices of academic knowledge production

In this piece, the authors question whether critical language research, in its complex collection of researcher choices, is possible beyond the discursive imaginary of critical academic scholarship. In other words, how do (allegedly) anticolonial efforts re-orient towards contribution to the imperial record? We present three vignettes, through which we grapple with the notion that researcher choice exists within the solipsism of academia. In doing so, we frame research and scholarship as a collection of choices, which we believe are better understood as a collection of fraught dilemmas. These dilemmas recognize that all academic scholarship production and its processes are birthed from, and serve, an epistemology of hierarchical social configurations, which serve empire maintenance and expansion. As critical language scholars who bring overlapping and distinct sociopolitical, geographic, and methodological positionalities, these autoethnographic narrative vignettes allow us to begin to see the landscape of researcher choice in the processes and projects of accumulating knowledge production. We identify imperial straightening devices for legitimization into the imperial archive and examine how they work to orient and re-orient critical language scholars towards the ideological and material production of the imperial archive.

Debating translanguaging

In this article, we discuss the concept of translanguaging by showing how theoretically unhelpful it is to account for language dynamics among Indigenous speakers leading revitalization projects in the Southern Cone of Latin America. We show how clear-cut distinctions between Spanish and Indigenous languages are crucial for minority speakers’ socio-political struggles against Spanish cultural, political, and social hegemony. We open our discussion by reviewing the different definitions of translanguaging in sociolinguistics and applied linguistics. We examine how the term sometimes overlaps with other previously established concepts such as code-switching and code-mixing and show the importance of inscribing any concepts in the historical and socio-political context in which they are used. We illustrate how Indigenous peoples’ understanding of multilingualism challenges linguists’ discourse on translanguaging. Our analysis aims at prompting scholars to reflect on the ideologies and practices we describe here to understand and attend more responsibly to Indigenous peoples’ political concerns.

Transcription as embodied entextualization

This article analyzes transcription as a form of knowledge production, distinguishing between the role of transcription as a tool and the contingent nature of transcription as a process. It uses the lens of embodied entextualization, or the culturally specific ways bodies are incorporated into as well as produce texts (Cavanaugh 2017), to illuminate the interdiscursive process of transcription and how it is shaped by social factors such as race, gender, politics, and class. I do so by presenting and analyzing text-objects from my own research on language ideologies and language shift in northern Italy at various stages of entextualization, highlighting the multiple choices that shape transcription and how such choices are in turn shaped by a number of factors often invisible in the final, or at least public, versions of these texts that circulate the most widely. Transcripts such as the ones I discuss endure as evidence, in published and other forms, even as intertextual gaps punctuate their interdiscursive reproduction across instantiations. This work raises questions about the role of transcripts as evidence, their authority, and their varying ontological statuses as text objects in order to further conversations about how scholarship about language in use may be reflexively undertaken.

Okra in translation

This article explores the theme of food translation, based on research conducted in Italy in 2018 with a group of asylum seekers from different West African countries. It concentrates on a community gardening project revolving around the cultivation of okra: a vegetable that is a staple in many African cuisines, but not very popular in Italy, which provided the occasion for the participants to communicate their home foodways. As something that is linked to the most basic human needs, and yet bears high cultural significance, food can be used as a lens to explore the shifting relationship between language and other embodied forms of meaning. Translating food means engaging with a complex interplay of language, sensory experiences, and socio-cultural norms. Drawing from recent semiotically-oriented developments in translation studies as well as applied linguistics, and the semiotics of food, I analyze key participants’ involvement with the project.

The making of “deep language” in the Philippines

This analysis interrogates one of the most highly recognizable, but little understood metalinguistic descriptors of language in the contemporary Philippine linguistic scene: the concept of “deep language.” Here, “deep language” is explored as a complex, polysemous term generally used to describe homegrown conceptualizations of “pure” forms of Philippine-type languages and speakers. The contemporary understanding of “deep language” in the Philippines is theorized to have been informed by a complex combination of folk and academic discourses that have percolated throughout shared ideologies and discourses of language since national independence at mid-20th century. The metric of “depth” in the analysis of language is shown to function centrally as a conceptual metaphor that enables everyday speakers to theorize speaker types and the passage of time in a folk chronotope reckoned through the sign of language.