Everyday Communicative Practices and Repertoires in Contexts of Involuntary and Enforced Immobility

The focus of this chapter is on a specific kind of immobility: the one experienced by refugees and asylum seekers in temporary reception centers (henceforth TRCs), a domain that has not received the attention it deserves in sociolinguistic studies. As migration increasingly turns into the privileged battleground for far-right governments and politicians, the importance of analyzing and understanding the conditions of undocumented migrants, and particularly of asylum seekers for socially minded linguists also becomes more and more evident. Indeed, social scientists and human rights experts have been pointing to the many ways in which the handling of refugees by postmodern states represents a litmus test for democracies claiming to be based on the respect of human rights by demonstrating their incapability to define such rights outside the territorial boundaries of the nation. Undocumented migrants and asylum seekers alike are more often than not denied the rights and protections to which ordinary citizens are entitled precisely by virtue of the fact that they are not seen as citizens of a specific nation (Wee, 2007). For this reason Agamben states for example that the refugee represents the most disquieting figure in post-modern advanced societies precisely because ‘by breaking the identity between the human and the citizen and that between nativity and nationality, it brings the originary fiction of sovereignty to crisis’ (2000: 21). In view of that, we argue that TRCs represent a very significant vantage point from which to observe the dynamics between mobility and immobility in highly globalized post-modern societies. Here we will focus on the representation of social and linguistic conditions within such environments in the discourse of participants in these institutions and on the role of language practices in the dynamics between mobility and immobility. In particular, we will attempt to provide some answers to the following research questions: How can spaces designed for the detention, containment and administration of migrants be described and characterized? How are these spaces related to mobility and immobility in the discourse and language practices of migrants? How are linguistic resources deployed within different social spaces in which migrants carry their everyday interactions both inside and outside institutionally regimented areas? Before we present our data and analysis, we briefly discuss the theoretical methodological trends and constructs that underlie our approach. More specifically, we first expand on ways in which our work relates to and takes inspiration from the sociolinguistics of globalization and the superdiversity movement. Then, we turn to our conception of the relationships between language, resources and language practices. Finally, we present a review of relevant theorizations about the dynamic connections between languages/identities and space-time coordinates and we briefly introduce our views on mobility/immobility.