Eva Codó

Multilingual discursive practices and processes of social change in globalising institutional spaces : a critical ethnographic perspective

This special issue aims to study multilingualism in relation to contemporary processes of transformation of institutional spaces. Our focus is on the ways in which multilingual communicative practices, institutional logics and wider processes of social change are interwoven in the production of everyday life in contemporary institutions (Heller & Martin-Jones, 2001). By drawing on sociolinguistic ethnographies carried out in different institutional contexts across the world (Spain, the United States and Argentina), the present volume seeks to reflect on how socio-cultural processes of change derived from economic neoliberalization and the increasing mobility of people, ideas and practices around the globe are forcing local institutions to reposition themselves, and redefine their missions and social functions. We believe multilingualism is a privileged standpoint for the study of those processes, and particularly so in the case of institutional spaces connected to the modern nation-state. As such, they are social spaces historically tied to those socio-economic and political forms of organization built upon the discursive construction and legitimization of a monolingual citizenry, which in turn resulted from the one-state-onenation-one-culture-one-language ideological framework (Bauman & Briggs, 2003). Thus, the increasing multilingual configuration of late modern societies poses various dilemmas and challenges which need to be empirically traced. Discourse is central to

Regimenting discourse, controlling bodies: Disinformation, evaluation and moral categorization in a state bureaucratic agency

This article examines, from a critical and ethnographic sociolinguistic perspective, the socio-discursive practices unfolding at the information desk of a Spanish immigration office in Barcelona. Drawing on a corpus of ethnographic materials and interactional data, the article discusses why frontline communication became constituted as it did, what practical routines and ideological considerations grounded it, and how multiple social and institutional orders intersected in the shaping of practical and symbolic gatekeeping. I claim that, through various micro-strategies of control, evaluation and moral hierarchization, the government employees at this bureaucratic agency enacted the disciplinary and exclusionary regime of the nation-state, and socialized their clients into becoming ‘good’ migrants.

Shifting discourses of migrant incorporation at a time of crisis: understanding the articulation of language and labour in the Catalan non-governmental sector

In this article, we investigate the discursive transformations that occurred at a migrant-support non-governmental organisation (NGO) located in the outskirts of Barcelona (Catalonia, Spain) and how they intersect with broader sociopolitical and economic processes. In particular, we focus on the revamping of the key notions of language and labour in the institutional imagination of migrant incorporation processes. Our data was collected over the course of a six-year period (2007–2012) and consisted of in-depth interviews with multilingual NGO users and institutional agents, ethnographic narratives and institutional documents. We trace a discursive shift from ‘integration-through-labour’ during the economic boom to an official ‘integration-through-language’ to gain access to paid employment in the early years of the recession, and recently, with the worsening of the crisis, a paradigm that focuses on language-cum-affective labour to craft relational and moral selves through voluntary work in local NGOs.

The intersection of global mobility, lifestyle and ELT work: a critical examination of language instructors’ trajectories

ABSTRACT This paper examines the intersection of one form of contemporary mobility, i.e. lifestyle mobility, with the ELT industry. It draws on the discursive analysis of a small corpus of life story data produced by native English language teachers of different ages residing in Barcelona. Through their own personal and professional accounts and rationales, it seeks to comprehend how they construct their work experiences in the light of previous professional trajectories, prior expectations and future mobility plans, but also against the backdrop of a highly precarised job market. The article argues that the ‘backpacker’ language teacher is certainly a reality but also a contemporary cultural myth that works to disguise a complex humanscape of relocators of different ages and aspirations who face difficulties fitting in an industry that expects docile and inexperienced bodies and a local market where nativeness enables quick access to teaching jobs but only to unskilled and temporary ones. The younger informants narrate biographies in flux and a sense of life stagnation or development to which commercial ELT may be differently instrumental. This article challenges assumptions about the value of (native) English in the work field and how easily work experience and qualifications travel around for middle-class professionals.