Annual theme: 2022 – 2024: Language, migration and refugees

While often overlooked or taken for granted, language is central to the trajectories, lives, and identities of migrants and refugees. This is what makes language an intrinsic part of all migration research. CESSMIR’s biennial theme aims to address the discursive and multilingual challenges and opportunities of migration, by focusing on the impact of language at the interrelated levels of access, representation, mediation and categorization.

First, language shapes access in many ways. Learning and mastering a particular language —or set of languages/language varieties— can enhance mobility and boost chances of success (e.g. on the labour market), just as much as lacking particular language skills can impede access to basic services (e.g. health, housing, education) or be used as a criterion for exclusion in integration processes. Second, language is key to the discursive representation of migrants and refugees in politics, offline/online media and academia. Metaphors, stereotypes and frames are articulated through language in ways that can heavily influence public perception and migration policies. Third, language is inherent to the mediation of the voice, identity and interests of migrants and refugeesin institutional encounters (e.g. contexts of legal, medical or public service provision). For instance, the way in which newly arrived migrants can share their needs and concerns with health care and social service providers, largely depends on the language support they receive and the ways in which their voice is mediated in translation. Fourth, language serves a pivotal categorization function: while migration implies multi-dimensional experiences, institutional, public and academic perspectives entail reducing the complexity of the migration experience into single categories (‘economic migration’, ‘marriage fraud’, ‘family reunion’, etc.). Not ‘fitting the category’ may affect migrants’ access to rights and resources (e.g. the category of ‘refugee’ leaves out particular motives of involuntarily migration such as environmental or urgent economic causes). Likewise, language ideologies and locally defined regimes of language contribute to categorizing certain languages —and their speakers— as more or less valuable in society.

In accordance with its commitment to address the social aspects of migration and refugees, CESSMIR will focus on the discursive and multilingual challenges of being a migrant or a refugee, focusing on the critical role of language at the interrelated levels of access, representation, mediation and categorization. In selecting this topic as biennial theme in 2022-2024, CESSMIR will stimulate research and debate on the role of language in its ability to (re)produce but also to challenge social inequalities. CESSMIR’s interdisciplinary approach and focus on practice, policy and research invites discussion on a broad range of issues related to this theme. These issues will be explored in a variety of activities, including the Migration Research in Practice seminar, PhD workshops/ lectures for master students and an international conference.