New book: LANGUAGE, MIGRATION AND SOCIAL INEQUALITIES A Critical Sociolinguistic Perspective on Institutions and Work Edited by Alexandre Duchêne, Melissa Moyer and Celia Roberts

This stimulating volume brings together classic strands of critical sociolinguistic work on how immigrants are disadvantaged in social gatekeeping institutions and the contemporary sociolinguistics of globalization. Taking a broad view of ‘migrants’ as sociolinguistically mobile citizens, the authors mobilize an impressive array of ideological, political and economic frameworks to explore the continuing power of institutions to confer and withhold status and opportunity as well as forms of resistance to these processes.

Alexandra Jaffe, California State University, Long Beach, USA

This major sociolinguistic contribution, with its wide-ranging and detailed ethnographic attention to the structures shaping migrant experiences of language, sheds innovative analytic light on the neoliberal regimentation of language at work, in school, and in bureaucratic processes, the commodification of language skills, and the contradictions of contemporary capitalism that shape linguistic practices and ideologies.

Bonnie Urciuoli, Hamilton College, USA

This book does a wonderful job of focusing critically on the sociolinguistics of migrant workers – the protagonists of the book – in various institutions and workplaces (or their exclusion from them). From the informal locutorios of Barcelona and Congolese la débrouille in Cape Town, to the decapitalisation of migrant students in Madrid schools and the mismatched aspirations and actual work of Japanese flight attendants, these studies focus both on local migrant sociolinguistics as well as wider social and economic orders. Making questions of the (re)production of linguistic, social and economic disparities central, this book thus provides vital insights into language, mobility and inequality.

Alastair Pennycook, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia

This collection provides an account of the ways language addresses core questions concerning power and the place of migrants in various institutional and workplace settings. It brings together contributions from a range of geographical settings to understand better how linguistic inequality is (re)produced in this new economic order.

Contents

1. Alexandre Duchêne, Melissa Moyer & Celia Roberts: Introduction: Recasting Institutions and Work in Multilingual and Transnational Spaces

Part I: Sites of Control

2. Eva Codó: Trade Unions and NGOs under Neoliberalism: Between Regimenting Migrants and Subverting the State

3. Kori Allan: Skilling the Self: The Communicability of Immigrants as Flexible Labour

Part II: Sites of Selection

4. Celia Roberts: The Gatekeeping of Babel: Job Interviews and the Linguistic Penalty

5. Ingrid Piller & Kimie Takahashi: Language Work aboard the Low-Cost Airline

6. Luisa Martín Rojo: (De) Capitalising Students through Linguistic Practices. A Comparative Analysis of New Educational Programmes in a Global Era

7. Vally Lytra: From Kebabç? to Professional: The Commodification of Language and Social Mobility in Turkish Complementary Schools in the UK

Part III: Sites of Resistance

8. Werner Holly & Ulrike Hanna Meinhof: ‘Integration hatten wir letztes jahr.’ Official Discourses of Integration and their Uptake by Migrants in Germany

9. Melissa G. Moyer: Language as a Resource. Migrant Agency, Positioning and Resistance in a Health Care Clinic

10. Cécile B. Vigouroux: Informal Economy and Language Practice in the Context of Migrations

11. Maria Sabaté i Dalmau: Fighting Exclusion from the Margins: Locutorios as Sites of Social Agency and Resistance for Migrants

Mike Baynham: Postscript