4th Workshop of the Language and Work Group
Nowadays, “mobility” has become a keyword with differing values and interpretations.
Sociolinguistics shares this keyword with not only other academic disciplines but also organisations and actors that structure or react to geographical mobility, such as commercial and corporate recruiters, bureaucrats, NGOs, international organisations and ICT. A special focus lies in workrelated mobility and its effects on the labour market integration of migrants and refugees, the accommodation of highly-qualified “expats”, as well as on all workers involved in past, present and future mobilities. This workshop explores the nexus between language and work from the perspective of multiple, interconnected actors in the complex infrastructure that mediates and regulates migration policy, including linguistic requirements, and discourses about different types of (potentially) mobile workers. This migration infrastructure (Xian and Lindquist, 2014) encompasses commercial services that facilitate migration (e.g. brokers, language schools), agencies and migration policies that regulate migration at state level (e.g. border control), humanitarian infrastructure concerned with public advocacy and policy interventions (e.g. NGOs) and migrant networks. Together with actors involved in this infrastructure, our goal is to unpack how various forms of voluntary and involuntary geographical mobility are categorised and valued for/in different types of work. We aim to analyse the construction of key figures (Salazar, 2018) with idealised work experiences and linguistic repertoires (e.g. the refugee intern, the international academic, the mobile humanitarian) in a wide range of socio-political and historical contexts. Further, we seek to problematise the widespread positive considerations of geographical mobility as symbolic, and even economic, “moving up” and positive change for oneself (e.g. as in economic migration) or for others (e.g. in the case of NGO delegations) by means of fine-grained analyses of the socio-political conditions for legal and linguistic pre-requisites for work.