472
International Family Migration and Normative Languages

Thursday, 19 July 2018: 08:30-10:20
Location: 717B (MTCC SOUTH BUILDING)
RC25 Language and Society (host committee)

Language: Spanish, French and English

Family reunification, mixed marriages and other forms of international family migration are highly politicized topics depicted as threats for national identity. In some countries, the conditions to access the family rights have been reformed complicating the processes of applications for visa, residence permit and nationality. In other countries, migrant and binational families encounter administrative and religious constraints to formalise their unions, to pass on nationality and rights to the children or simply to be socially accepted. Political, administrative and judicial language employed to regulate and to address family migration is not neutral. A (re)production of racialized, classed, gendered and cultural inequalities in institutionalized immigration policies and practices appear. These processes of ‘governing through the family’ are used to reproduce the idea of ‘pure’, ‘nation’ and ‘hegemonic culture’. Thus, language becomes the symbolic arena through which reaffirm boundaries. This session explores the language employed to define family migration ‒ and the social-administrative processes that go with ‒ by politicians, media, bureaucrats, civil society actors and by family members too. The session welcomes papers from a broad empirical perspectives that explore the changing (or the persistence) of normative languages related to family migration over time.
Session Organizers:
Francesco CERCHIARO, University of KU Leuven, Belgium and Laura ODASSO, Aix-Marseille Univ, CNRS, Laboratoire Méditerranéen de Sociologie LAMES & Temps, Espaces, Langages, Europe Méridionale - Méditerranée TELEMMe, Labexmed, France
Oral Presentations
Mixed Unions and Women's Religious Conversion: An Inquiry into the Role of Media Language
Mara TOGNETTI, University of Milan-Bicocca, Italy; Alberto MASCENA, University of Milano, Italy
Children As Storytellers. Migrant Narratives in Primary Schools
Angela SCOLLAN, Middlesex University in London, United Kingdom; Federico FARINI, University of Northampton, United Kingdom
Adaptation of Immigrant Women Living in Smaller Communities to the Challenge of English Language Barrier
Choon Lee CHAI, Red Deer College, Canada; Amal Ibrahim MADIBBO, University of Calgary, Canada; Liza MCCOY, University of Calgary, Canada; Tabitha PHIRI, Central Alberta Immigrant Women's Association, Canada