Lost in administration: the critical role of language in assessing refugees’ needs for international protection
Katrijn Maryns (Ghent University)
Determining whether an individual qualifies for international protection poses significant challenges. Asylum bureaucracies receive migrants from all over the world, who bring along
complex repertoires of sociocultural and linguistic resources (Blommaert & Rampton, 2011). Language diversity and multilingualism are therefore more prominent in these procedures than in any other type of institutional environment. Research in the field of language and migration has revealed, however, that the opportunity for migrants and refugees to express themselves in institutional encounters is often thwarted by language ideologies that presume choice where individual speakers face constraints (Smith-Khan, 2017; Gill & Good, 2019; Jacobs & Maryns, 2022; Vogl, 2024). In this talk, I will draw from linguistic-ethnographic data from the Belgian context to address (a) the conflicting roles attributed to language in migration-related institutional encounters—as interaction, representation and verification tool—and (b) how these tensions affect oral testimony, the processing of discursive input in case files and, subsequently, the decision-making process.
References
Blommaert, J. & Rampton, B. 2011. Language and superdiversity. Diversities. 13(2): 1– 21.
Gill, N. & Good, A. 2019. Asylum Determination in Europe: Ethnographic Perspectives. London: Springer Nature.
Jacobs, M., & Maryns, K. (2022). Managing narratives, managing identities : language and credibility in legal consultations with asylum seekers. Language in Society, 51(3), 375–402. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404521000117
Smith- Khan, L. 2017b. Negotiating narratives, accessing asylum: evaluating language policy as multi- level practice, beliefs and management. Multilingua. 36(1): 31– 57. https:// doi.org/ 10.1515/ multi- 2015- 0072.
Vogl, A. (2024) Judging Refugees: Narrative and Oral Testimony in Refugee Status Determination. Cambridge University Press.