Exploring the links between language, everyday citizenship, and community

Abstract

The so-called migration and refugee ‘crisis’ has seen a wide-spread phenomenon across the world where people come together to build relationships to enact their visions of community, regardless of different ways in which they are included in or excluded from the citizenship regime. This special issue contributes to the studies of these political struggles to explore how such encounters of people are facilitated, negotiated, and contested, from the angle of language. In particular, we use the everyday as a lens to explore how spaces for agency are mobilised and practices of community-making take place. Drawing on a range of geographical locations as well as disciplinary backgrounds, the contributions look at multiple sites of seemingly uneventful and mundane social interactions. The authors collectively demonstrate the critical role language plays in these various everyday interactions, through which the boundaries of community, between ‘us’ and ‘them’, are contested, reproduced, and negotiated.