XIX ISA World Congress of Sociology (July 15-21, 2018)

472

International Family Migration and Normative Languages

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.