(Image credit: Australian Government, Study Australia)

In her 2007 ethnographic study of eight US law schools, Elizabeth Mertz traces the process through which law students learn to “think like a lawyer” in order to become one. She shows how this process is essentially about language: learning to think like a lawyer means adopting new ways of reading, writing and talking.

Crucially, Mertz demonstrates that underlying these processes is a set of linguistic ideologies – assumptions we make about language and how it should manifest in particular social contexts. For example, she identifies a practice in legal analysis and reasoning, as taught in these classrooms: the social characteristics and personal perspectives of people who appear in legal cases and problem questions are rendered irrelevant and made invisible, in favour of the legally relevant facts. Issues of morality and emotion are likewise pushed aside as unimportant.

As students undergo this transformative process of learning to think and speak like a lawyer, Mertz questions the effects this may have on how law students see the world, their ability to see social diversity and inequality and to identify and challenge issues of injustice in their future work.

But what about how students think about themselves? What if they personally face marginalization? And what of their diverse language repertoires? If thinking like a lawyer depends on speaking like one, what is this speech expected to sound like? And what impact does sounding differently have on one’s sense of professional identity and self-worth?

These were just some of the questions raised in my recent digital ethnographic research with students enrolled in a Graduate Diploma in Migration Law and Practice (GDMLP). This one-year university program is required for people who do not have an Australian legal qualification to become Registered Migration Agents (RMAs) and offer professional assistance to people applying for a visa in Australia. Unlike law degrees, which remain difficult to access for many, it has been estimated that at least half of the GDMLP cohort has English as a second language (L2), and perhaps even more are first generation migrants.

I attended online workshops during which students practiced their client interviewing skills through role-plays, observing this practical work and debriefing with them. I also conducted research interviews with students at various points during their study and after graduating, over a period of three years. To have immediate impact, I also offered my interdisciplinary expertise to enhance learning, presenting on various aspects of communication, and helping the teaching team to develop and refine learning materials (see Smith-Khan & Giles 2025).

In a new article, I share some of the ways students talk and think about their study, their future professional goals, their existing strengths, and the skills they wish to improve and how. The discussions brought up beliefs about language, closely tied to ideas about proficiency, professionalism and identity.

Bilingualism: optional benefit, real risk

While every participant who speaks multiple languages planned to use them in their future job, with at least some of their clients, there was a clear hierarchy in how different languages were valued, with English appearing at the apex as non-negotiable, and other languages more as optional extras (see also Piller & Gerber 2021).

Paolo*  The English level, I think it’s very very important too.

Laura   Yeah.

Paolo    I’m Italian, as I said before, I work with a lot of Italians, and they don’t speak English. And will have, a hundred percent sure that I will have a lot of consultations within Italian community. I will go to Italy to do seminars, and that will be in Italian.

Laura   Yeah.

Paolo    So in that way, if you think in that, in that way, you don’t need English, okay?

Laura   Yes.

Paolo    I mean, ‘I don’t need to have a very high English level, because my-, ‘I’m Chinese, I just talk in Mandarin, my consultation in Mandarin, my clients are in Mandarin.’ Okay. And it makes sense. But then you have to do applications in English, you have to study the uh legislation in English. So if the legislation, if you don’t understand properly the legislation, if you mixed up a word, all your translation in Chinese, or in Italian, or in any other language, won’t be, won’t be correct.

Okay? So it’s very, very important that they understand, the people that they want to become a migration agent, that they understand everything. [Paolo, interview 1/2, 2020]

On one level, this makes perfect sense: the work does indeed require close engagement with legal and institutional texts that are only available in English, and application forms required to be submitted to the Immigration Department only are allowed in English. However, this type of discourse also assumes bilingualism is a potential risk to English language proficiency: rather than acknowledging the crucial skills bilingual and multilingual people bring to this work, the fact that they speak more than one language is regarded as a threat to their English. This resembles political and institutional discourses in which the ‘monolingual mindset’ is evident, including in the language proficiency rules around becoming an RMA, and in other areas like skilled migration and university admission, where proficiency is assumed for some, but not for others (Smith-Khan 2021a; Piller & Bodis, 2023). Such discourses are also evident in public political debates about migration and registered migration agents (Smith-Khan 2021b).

‘Australian’ native speakers and language choice

Perceptions about identity are also closely connected with these types of ideologies. As L2 English speakers discuss their experiences and efforts to develop speaking skills in class and connect these evaluations with their future language practices and career plans.

Gemma: If you have poor communication you give them the impression you’re not professional. You probably have lots of knowledge in your mind but you just can’t express yourself properly, or too slow, or I don’t know. You’ve got to give them, the client the impression that oh no, you are professional. I can trust you. You can do the job for me. So I try to, the reason why I said um, um, the native English speaker is better, probably that’s just one side about um, they easily use language um, uh, like more vocabulary than us. We can’t use like beautiful words or whatever it is to express myself uh, precisely. So uh, that will give client the impression like, you not professional like I can’t trust you…. So, yes. So that’s why I said if I speak to Chinese, probably I’ll be more confident. They, they will, will feel less, um, less suspicious. I don’t know. Um, less, how will I say? Um, more trust on you than English-speaking people. [Gemma, interview 1/1, 2020]

Evaluations like these compare L2 English speakers’ skills vis-à-vis what they consider the ideal student and future RMA, an L1 English speaker, with implications for professional identity and future work plans. They also link general professional competence with language proficiency and oral fluency, something that again also comes up in the broader discourse (see Smith-Khan 2021b).

However, these ideologies extend even further, to national identity and moral worth.

Gemma: Yes, with my, one of my classmates… Uh, at the beginning it wasn’t very good. Oh, he’s local. He’s Australian. And he’s very, I feel he pick up very quickly and easily and then he has to put up with me because I have to think. And, you know, thinking probably slower than, than him and then speak slowly. Uh, yes so I find the difference and I try to, I just want to try to improve that by talking more [Gemma, interview 1/1, 2020].

In this encounter, Gemma evaluates herself in relation to an “Australian”, “local” L1-speaking classmate. Here, speaking and thinking are closely connected, and she comes out positioned as a burden in the interaction – something her classmate must “put up with” because of her slower thinking and speaking.

While such discourse is not surprising in this particular social and political context, it sits uneasily against the facts we have about Gemma’s personal and professional background, along with the direct linguistic data collected in the project. She came to Australia as a skilled migrant and was granted a permanent visa because of her professional qualifications. She has been an Australian citizen for over a decade, working as a civil servant in a professional role, in a regional Australian city, in a highly monolingual English office environment. Her English language proficiency is indisputably high. Yet her evaluation demonstrates the power of native-speaker and monolingual mindset ideologies about languages: her capability, her professionalism, and even her nationality become inferior and vulnerable to the point that she imagines herself as at best a burden, and at worst incapable of being trusted, for an L1 English speaking audience in this context (see Piller et al 2024).

Hard work, pushback and pragmatism

However, all is not lost for this group of aspiring migration practitioners. Both L1 and L2 English speakers heavily stressed the need to practice speaking and to study hard to continue to improve their professional skills. While this emphasises individual responsibility and creates an additional burden for L2 speakers, it still allows for a degree of agency and a sense of opportunity: developing professional skills and identity are not regarded as impossible.

At the same time, students also demonstrated a critical awareness of the broader social and political contexts, and what these mean for how people are (sometimes unfairly) evaluated. For example, one student pointed to the broader political context of migration and perceptions of migrants to make sense of how RMAs are perceived: if the government is “very anti-immigration”, it follows that RMAs would be seen as “unnecessary” or a “pain to deal with”, and it would be made difficult for them to enter the profession.

Another student pushed back against the apparent need for people to speak standard Australian English. Nitin explained how whether someone comes across as rude can be a matter of the listener’s perception. He was thus able to turn the spotlight onto the interlocutor, who may misjudge L2 speakers who “don’t have those little, nice touches” in their speech, rather than the “deficient” speaker, and at the same time claim an advantage over L1 interlocutors, as more compassionate and knowledgeable in interactions involving speakers of diverse language varieties or proficiency. However, Nitin still ends on a pragmatic note, related to his own lived reality:

Nitin: People, when I talked to the native speakers here, sometimes they’d think I’m talking rude. My colleagues said that on a few occasions, and I started thinking, what was rude in that? … So I adapted it over a period of about nine years. Now I know what to speak and what not to speak. [Nitin, interview 1/2, 2020]

Therefore, while it is clear that students may come to internalize linguistic ideologies that frame their language practices and repertoires as inferior or in need of ongoing improvement, there is still space to reclaim and challenge these ideologies. However, even while doing so, they must still navigate the very real and enduring practical effects such ideologies have within their social and professional contexts.

Note

*Participant names are pseudonyms.

References

Mertz, E. (2007). The language of law school: Learning to “think like a lawyer”. Oxford University Press.

Piller, I. & Bodis, A. (2024). Marking and unmarking the (non)native speaker through English language proficiency requirements for university admission. Language in Society, 53(1), 1-23. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404522000689

Piller, I. & Gerber, L. (2021). Family language policy between the bilingual advantage and the monolingual mindset, International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, (24)5, 622-635. https://doi.org/10.1080/13670050.2018.1503227

Piller, I. et al. (2024). Life in a New Language. Oxford University Press.

Smith-Khan, L. (2025, AOP). Language, culture and professional communication in migration law education, Language, Culture and Curriculum, https://doi.org/10.1080/07908318.2025.2481051

Smith-Khan, L. (2021). ‘Common language’ and proficiency tests: a critical examination of registration requirements for Australian registered migration agents. Griffith Law Review, 30(1), 97–121. https://doi.org/10.1080/10383441.2021.1900031

Smith-Khan, L. (2021b). Deficiencies and loopholes: Clashing discourses, problems and solutions in Australian migration advice regulation. Discourse & Society, 32(5), 598-621. https://doi.org/10.1177/09579265211013113

Smith-Khan, L., & Giles, C. (2025, AOP). Improving client communication skills in migration law and practice education. Alternative Law Journal. https://doi.org/10.1177/1037969X251314205

This conversation builds on a chapter written by Karen McAuliffe, Liana Muntean & Virginia Mattioli in the book Researching the European Court of Justice: Methodological Shifts and Law’s Embeddedness, edited by Mikael Rask Madsen, Fernanda Nicola and Antoine Vauchez and published by Cambridge University Press in 2022.

Karen mentions the Law and Linguistics Interdisciplinary Researchers’ Network. You can subscribe to the Network’s listserv and read member profiles on Language on the Move. She also mentions iCourts, which is the Danish National Research Foundation’s Centre of Excellence for International Courts and Governance, and the Language, Culture and Justice Hub at Bard College.

If you enjoyed this show, say hi to Alexandra on LinkedIn and to Karen on BlueSky @profkmca.bsky.social. Also, leave a 5-star review on your podcast app of choice

Transcript

Alexandra Grey: Welcome to Language on the Move Podcast, a channel on the New Books Network. I’m Alex Grey, and I’m a research fellow and senior lecturer at the University of Technology in Sydney. My guest today is Professor Karen McAuliffe. Karen is a Professor of Law and Language, and a Birmingham Fellow, at Birmingham Law School in the UK. We’re going to talk about doing research that pools together, law and linguistics, a pet topic, a key interest for both of us. Karen, welcome to the show.

Karen McAuliffe: Thank you so much. It’s lovely to be here. Always a delight to talk about my research.

The European Court of Justice Building in Luxembourg (Image Credit: CJUE)

Alexandra: what we’ve decided to do today is to cover both a specific part of your recent research, and then to talk more generally about the research that you do and how you manage to straddle law and linguistics. But before we get into any of those specifics, let’s just first get to know you a little. You’ve got a really unusual job title. I just read it out. How did you come to be professor not only of law but of language at the same time?

Karen: Well, it’s an interesting story. It’s not a very linear journey to it. So, I originally studied my undergraduate degree was a common and civil law degree at Queen’s University, Belfast. As I’m Irish, I should add, I work in the UK. For anybody listening who wonders why I don’t have a British accent, that is why. So, I studied in Northern Ireland, in Queens University of Belfast, and also at Université catholique de Louvain in Belgium. So, I studied Northern Irish UK law and Belgian law and the Belgian law part of the degree was obviously in French. So, so I did this dual qualification, dual language degree. And when I graduated, to be honest, I didn’t really think very hard about my career, or what I wanted to do while I was at university, and after graduation I did a– what’s called a competition to work as a lawyer linguist in the European Union and the European institutions, the EU institutions. And so I got a job as a lawyer linguist in at the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg. Worked there for a while. I began to realize that I was a bit more interested in thinking about what I was doing than actually doing it. So, I returned to Academia to do a Phd. I was lucky enough to get a scholarship to do a Phd. And I went back to Queens to do it, actually back to Belfast, and this time not to the Law School, but to the Institute of Governance.  While I was working in Luxembourg as a lawyer linguist, I just became fascinated with the job that I was doing. Insofar as  you know, my job was to try to translate judgments that had been drafted in French into English in a way that they would have the same legal effects  in Ireland and the UK then – which was part of the EU back then – as they would, you know, anywhere else in in the EU, and that intersection between law language and translation really, really fascinated me. So that was the topic of my Phd. It was on legal translation at the European Court of Justice, specifically, and in that Phd, I did a lot of I guess what you call it socio legal research.

I ended up staying. I stayed in Academia and in 2016, I moved to the University of Birmingham as a Birmingham Fellow, which was very exciting, really lovely post to get. I had previously got some large grants from the European Commission, so European Research Council Grants, including one, it’s called a Starter grant, which is like a 5 year project to look at law and language in the European Union. And when I got my Chair it was a named chair, and I was allowed to choose the Chair, so it was a Professor of Law and Language. That’s how I got here, I guess.

Alexandra: It’s marvelous to hear, Karen, because I think there are listeners out there, there are academics who email me, who say, ‘Look, I’m interested in law and language but until I, you know, found someone else doing that online, I had no idea that it was a career path’.

Karen: It was all very serendipitous, really, and not as linear as I’ve made it sound there.

Alexandra: But we’re going to make it sound even more linear because you’ve created a perfect segue to the specific piece of work that we’re going to talk about today. It’s a chapter you wrote and published in 2022, along with Liana Muntean and Virginia Mattioli.  It’s called Through the Lens of Language; Uncovering the collaborative nature of Advocates General’s Opinions. I’ll put the full link in the show notes with the book that it’s from. But in this chapter you’re talking about a study where we meet lawyer linguists, exactly the role that you yourself once held and the kinds of people who work alongside them, or for whom they work at the European Court of Justice. The Advocates General, we hear a little bit about the judges. We hear about another type of staff member called a référendaire, who works alongside the Advocates General. And this chapter then gives us an insight into how those people are working together and doing exactly that interaction of law, language and translation that you’ve spoken about.

What I wanted to talk about with this chapter is a little bit your specific findings. But then also to talk more generally about what this chapter is saying in terms of method and how to do research that draws together law and language. So, we’ll come back to that more general question in a minute. But first we’ll focus on the specific context. And I’m just going to read out a little quote from the Chapter, too, to give a bit of background to listeners who might know nothing about the European Court of Justice.

Karen: Right.

Alexandra: Early in the chapter you and your co-authors begin by explaining that in ‘The EU legal order, with twenty-four official languages, integrated in twenty-seven member state legal systems, is linguistically, as well as substantively, unique.’ So, this is a really unusual legal system in many ways, I guess, but particularly here you’re highlighting how multilingual it is. And you’ve done a lot of analysis on how this multilingualism impacts on the development of law in the EU in this chapter but in other works as well. And so, this chapter is specifically a case study about the European Court of Justice, and even more specifically about the role of the Advocate General in presenting legal opinions to that court and the languages that Advocates General use to draft those opinions.

Karen: I might go back a bit further, if you don’t mind. I’m very aware that your listenership is very international, um, and so there may be people listening that don’t know anything at all about the European Court of Justice and how it works. So, the first thing to point out about this particular chapter is that I’m not talking about the judges. The Advocates General are separate. They’re not judges. So, the court itself, it’s seated in Luxembourg. I guess you could call it like the Supreme Court when it comes to European Union law. There’s two sections to it. There’s a General Court, which is the lower court, and then the European Court of Justice, which is the higher court, and I’m focusing on the higher court in this paper.

The court delivers judgments in 24 languages but it works in French. So internally the court works in French, but it delivers judgments in 24 languages. Each case that comes before the court will have what’s called a language of procedure or a language of the case. So, for example, if a Greek court um sent a question to the European Court of Justice for interpretation on a piece of EU law, the language of the case would be Greek, so the question would come to the European Court of Justice in Greek. It would be translated into French. It’ll be worked on within the Court in French, and then the judgment that is delivered, the first version of the judgment that’s drafted, will be in French, and then it’ll be translated into all the other languages. But the authentic version, the version that the judges sign will be the Greek version.

So that’s the first thing about judgments. The second thing is that they are collegiate documents. So, the deliberations of judges are secret. We never know, you know, where compromises might lie in the text of a judgment. They’re a very particular type of document. I’ve described them in in a previous paper as sort of Lego-like building blocks that are put together to make the judgement. The Court doesn’t engage with sort of legal reasoning in a very in-depth way. It answers the questions before it, and a large part of that is because the deliberations are secret. We don’t know what happens in there. Because of the nature of these judgments, because they are collegiate because of the deliberations are secret because there’s no dissenting judgments, you have these members of the court called Advocates General and this is borrowed from the French administrative law system.

So the Advocate General’s job is to deliver an opinion, a reasoned opinion on the case, to guide the court in its judgment and back in the early days of the court, the advocates general delivered opinions in every case but as workload grew, and as members of the European Union grew, you know that just became untenable. And so nowadays opinions, advocates, generals, opinions are delivered in sort of important cases, constitutionally important cases or cases where a Member States requests it specifically. And the Advocate’s general opinion, first of all, historically, was written in the language of the Advocate General. So, you know, there are 11 Advocates General, and there are a number of permanent Advocates General, as in there will be there’s a French permanent Advocate General, there’s a Polish permanent Advocate General, and then the others are rotated among the sort of smaller – in inverted commas – EU Member States. So, these people, they deliver opinions, and historically, that was in their own language. And so that’s the first thing. And the second thing is, the Advocate General can deal with anything they want in their opinion they don’t have to just stick to the questions the parties have asked. They don’t just have to stick to the things that have been raised by parties in the case, and you know, they can act almost as a sparring partner in that they can force the Court to engage in dialogue on certain concepts of EU law. And so any scholar of EU law will tell you that the judgments of the Court, while you know you can look at the judgment of the Court, and you can think about well, you know, how has the court applied that? Or how has the court interpreted the law here, where you really find the interesting dialogue and conversation about where EU law might be going is the is the opinion of the Advocate General. The Court of Justice of the European Unio is famously or infamously known for sort of creating the legal order of the EU. So you know this. The narrative is that that this EU legal order wasn’t created really by treaties and legislation. It was. It was done, you know, by the European Court of Justice kind of reading gaps in those treaties, and then creating these constitutional type principles.

But every one of those big constitutional type principles of EU law was fist seen in an Advocate General’s opinion. So, they’re really, really important in terms of EU scholarship. Now, they’re not binding on the court, but the court must take account of them when delivering the judgment.

Alexandra: They’re incredibly influential on the Court itself, but also influential on everyone else who’s teaching law.

Karen: Exactly. And so a lot of the work scholarship that had been done on the role of the Advocate General, when they talked about the opinion itself scholars would often point out that the fact that the Advocate General is writing in his or her own language first language makes a difference to how persuasive they can be. And so to finally come round to your question: in 2004 there was this sort of mega enlargement of the European Union. 10 new Member States joined in 2004, and then another 3 in 2007. And so what was happening was as Member States joined their languages got added to the list of EU official languages. So, prior to 2004 there were only 11 – only, I say! There were 11 official languages and then in– between 2004 and 2007, that number then rose to 24.

So two things with that. First of all, on a practical level, if you have to provide, if you have to do direct translation between 11 languages, now, I should have written this down beforehand, so don’t judge my math, but I think that it’s 52 combinations, I think. But if you are doing direct translation between 24 languages, that goes up to, I think it’s 552 or 554.

Alexandra: Wow!

Karen: It’s a lot. So in 2004, the European Court of Justice and the other EU institutions introduced a ‘pivot translation system’, they call it, which is relay translation. And the way it works in the court is that certain languages are assigned to– There are 5 pivot languages. So French is a pivot language for all of the other languages, because French is the working language of the Court, and then you have English, German, Spanish, Italian, and now, since 2018, Polish as well. So they’re the pivot languages, and all the other languages are assigned to a pivot language. So, to give you an example, what that means is, if a question or a case comes from a Lithuanian court or from Lithuania, it will be translated into English and then translated from English into the other languages. So, it’s sort of pivoted through relayed translation.

Alexandra: And so what is happening there to the role of the Advocate General, those people now have to start actually drafting and presenting their opinions in a pivot language. Am I right?

Karen: Yeah. Now, the interesting thing is that it’s not — it’s a convention rather than a requirement. They don’t have to. It was introduced early—the person who is, I believe he’s now Registrar of the Court, I think he’s still there, Alfredo Colon Escobar. He took over as Director of the Translation Directorate at the Court. And he introduced this system. But he was also thinking of what’s to come, and I mentioned earlier that Advocates Generals, they rotate. So you’ve got your permanent Advocate Generals, and then you have a number of Advocate generals that rotate countries. And so the court was aware and the director of the of the translation directorate was aware that in a few years you would have a Slovenian and a Slovakian Advocate General and if you had to wait for the translation to be pivoted from Slovenian into whatever the pivot language for Slovenian is back into another language, you’re adding a lot of time onto the process. So so this was all introduced for sort of for practical purposes, for expediency’s sake. And so in 2004 this convention was introduced, whereby Advocate Generals were asked to draft in one of the pivot languages of the court.

The reality of that is that you have the permanent Advocate Generals can continue to draft in their own language because they are the pivot languages of the Court. Other Advocate Generals have to choose to draft in in one of these languages, and they usually draft in English.

Alexandra: And, as you point out in your chapter, it’s not just they draft, as in, it’s not just the Advocate themselves. They have this whole team of a référendaire, who’s like a research assistant sort of position, maybe I’m underselling it; a lawyer linguist, you know. So actually, one of the things I found so interesting in your chapter, the data really shows how it’s a collaborative document, even though only one Advocate General sort of gets to put their name on it.

Karen: Yeah, so this is, this is the other very interesting thing about, I think, about this chapter in particular, is that again, historically. And the literature always talks about individual Advocates General and their opinions, but they’ve always worked in teams. So each advocate general has, I think, nowadays they have 4 référendaires. And a référendaire is similar to a clerk in the US System.

So there are lawyers and they will produce, like the initial drafts or the structures. It will differ from Advocate General to Advocate General. Some are much more hands on, some are much more hands off, but it is absolutely this this team effort. And that has always been the case. But that process remained invisible. And then all the literature talked about was the persuasiveness of this one person, this one very important person, the Advocate General. So what we were able to do in the research for this paper was sort of uncover or shine a light on on this process that’s happening behind the scenes and also shine a light on an additional role that only exists because of this linguistic convention. And that is, in certain cases some Advocate Generals or the teams of some Advocate Generals that the Chambers of some Advocate Generals will require what’s called ‘linguistic assistance’.

So because their référendaire may not be of English mother tongue, and they’re drafting in English, for example. And so what then they have is this wholly invisible part of the process from the outside, of a lawyer linguist coming in and providing what’s called linguistic assistance, and that linguistic assistance, again, will differ depending on who has written an opinion. It could be merely proofreading, there might be no need for linguistic assistance at all. Somebody might be very fluent in English, or, you know, in French, or whatever language they’ve chosen. But we’ll say English. But in other cases that linguistic assistance is much, much more than just proofreading. It’s it’s a rewriting in in certain cases, or a reframing of certain concepts. And so there’s much more of that legal creative work happening there. And that role of that sort of lawyer linguist as the linguistic assistant in the production of Advocate General’s opinions is something that, you know, just wasn’t known about outside of the Court or outside of the EU institutions, certainly not within EU scholarship, before we were able to do this research. So that was very exciting, very interesting.

Alexandra: It was interesting to me, not only to hear about that, but the way you found that out. So you and your co-authors in this chapter are very clear about what sorts of methods are allowing you to see what sorts of information, or what sort of behind the scenes reality might otherwise be invisible. And one of the key ways you do it is to interview not just the Advocates General, but the référendaires, the lawyer linguists, and in another, not in this chapter, in another part of the bigger study, the judges themselves. And what I found really interesting is that while, on the one hand, these interviews shine a light on the reality of this collaborative, interlingual production, on the other hand, what the people are overtly saying, and I’ll summarize, I’ll use a quote that you have in the chapter sort of summarizing the perspective of many interviewees: you say ‘language and substance appear to be distinct and separate things. Any overt acknowledgement of the impact of language on their work seems to be seen as undermining the quality of that work’. So even in the interviews, that invisibility is sort of perpetuated.

Karen: Absolutely. Yeah. And what was very interesting was when we when we coded the interviews the judges, the Advocate Generals for this paper, the référendaires, they all said, ‘oh, like it has no impact. The language that I’m working in has absolutely no impact on the substance that I’m producing, or the way that I’m thinking’. And then, in the same breath they will say, ‘Oh, but of course I think totally differently in my own language’. And I think there’s a quote we actually use in that paper, where they say, ‘my French colleague might come to a different conclusion’.

And what was very interesting to us was that you know, in the context of the interview, you come out of the interview and go, ‘Okay, they don’t think language is that important at all, really’. And at the same time when you go to code the interviews they’re saying this. They know it. It’s there in the back of their mind, and the Advocate Generals themselves will say, ‘Oh, no, no! My voice comes through, no matter what language I’m writing in, it’s my voice’. The fact that that goes against all research in sort of translation and linguistics is neither here nor there. But you know this is what they’re saying, ‘my voice, nothing’s different’. Everything is fine, it’s all the same, and in the same breath, they’ll say, ‘but it’s really important for me that I have a francophone, or that I have an English speaker in my chambers’. So again, they’re acknowledging it. And also the judges, when we interviewed them, said something along the lines of, ‘look, any EU lawyer can learn the law. What we need, what we need are people who are good at languages’. And they rate the linguistic capabilities of the lawyers that they’re hiring to be in their chambers, to be in their teams, higher. They say these things that don’t match up with how they’re acting, and that’s really interesting when you’re coding the interview to go.

Alexandra: One way you, you deal with that in this paper is, you know, to take that sort of reflective stance about the interviews. You don’t just take them at face value, but that’s not a reason not to do interviews. It’s very useful to find out some of these processes, but also to find out that sort of discursive production of the importance of just one voice. But then, what you do in this chapter is, you use an entirely different kind of data and method, and that is corpus linguistics, to then triangulate or compare, if you like, to show just how different these opinions can be depending on whether it’s the mother tongue language or another language that’s used for drafting.

Karen: You know, I am coming from this very privileged position, where I knew that the lawyer linguists were doing that job so I could. I could come up with this hypothesis quite easily, because it seemed to me that the opinions of Advocates General were becoming more synthetic, and more Lego-like, in in the same way. They were coming closer to judgments stylistically. And I was interested in that. So, I suppose I started with this hypothesis: you know I think these opinions are coming closer and closer stylistically to what the judgments are. And if that is the case, then then what’s the point of the opinion? So that’s where I started from, and we did the interviews. And then we did this corpus linguistics analysis on the actual texts themselves, the opinions themselves. And now I didn’t do– I’m not a corpus linguist, so I didn’t do the analysis. Virginia Mattioli did that analysis, and it’s all explained in detail in the paper. And Virginia and I have, I’m pretty sure, on Youtube, there are some presentations that we’ve done where she goes into a lot of detail about what we did there. But basically we compared opinions drafted in somebody’s first language. So, you know, French language opinions, or English language opinions. Italian; I think we looked at as well. Language opinions drafted in a first language. And then we compared them with opinions – post 2004 opinions – that were drafted in the first language as well in a second or third language, a non-native language. And what we found was very interesting, because the interview data which we had done first, so the interview data was saying, right, these people who are drafting the opinions don’t think that anything has changed. They don’t think there’s been a change in voice. They don’t think there’s been a change in style of the opinions since 2004. However, somewhere in the back of their mind they’re acknowledging that language is very important and maybe influences the results that they get to or the end product in some way. But fundamentally they don’t think there’s been a difference. And the corpus linguistics analysis showed us that indeed there is a difference, and the corpus linguistics data shows that opinions are becoming more stylistically like judgments. But very interestingly, not just those opinions drafted in a non-native language. So so even the opinions of the permanent Advocate Generals, Advocates General, who are ostensibly drafting in their own language, their first language, are becoming more stylistically synthetic and less fluent. Not reading so much like a like an academic article, like a fluent article.

Alexandra: Like a a genre, is converging the two genres.

Karen: Hmm, yeah. Yeah. And that’s where it becomes very interesting then to work in an interdisciplinary because, Virginia, I hope– I don’t think she’ll mind me saying this, you know, she got these results and was very excited. She was going, ‘Yes, look! This convention, this convention change in 2004 has resulted in these opinions becoming more like judgments. Wonderful. We’re finished’. And we had a difficult time for a while, because, you know, I was saying, ‘Well but it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s because of that convention change that there’s this, as you call it, like a shift in genre. There could be other reasons. There probably are multiple reasons to do with workload’. There are things that we can’t find out even through interviews, even if you did an anthropological study where you’re embedded in an institution like that. I think it will be very difficult to find out. For example, say you have an Advocate General who has a team of référendaires who are from various different places, but they will have been educated in multiple places. So, for example, myself, you know, I’ve been educated in Northern Ireland, in Belgium, in Greece. So all of that will impact the way that you work with language, the way that your mind works, the way that you reason. So things like that are difficult, if not impossible, to uncover. And so I think it’s very dangerous to rely on just one method to come to any kind of conclusion. So for us, what the corpus linguistics study showed was that our coding and our analysis of the interview data was true, because we had looked at the interview data, we had said, ‘Right, they think there’s no change or difference or relevance to them drafting in a language that’s not their own’. But our coding and our analysis of that interview data shows that actually there is. But we can’t prove that unless we look at the text themselves. And when we look at the text themselves and do the corpus linguistics analysis that corroborated what we were finding in the interview data. And it, I think, makes for a stronger argument at the end of the day.

Alexandra: It does. It reads really well to show, I think you call it multiple strategies in the toolbox, you know, if you use multiple methodological strategies at once you get greater rigor. But also you manage to, you know, to articulate very clearly in this chapter that that doesn’t mean that any one of those strategies by itself is without any flaw or weakness, you know. That’s the point of combining them to sort of balance each other. And then I like that you end the paper on a, if you like a forward-looking note, or on a big question that none of that data by itself can answer but maybe another strategy or another study can, and that is well, what is the effect in terms of persuasion? So not just on sort of reaching one or a different legal conclusion in the opinion itself. What does that actually do on the forward development of the law in terms of the persuasiveness or the room to sort of tease out new and different and creative and dissenting ideas. That’s being reduced, you know. That’s a longer term, and if you like more difficult question, I guess, to answer.

Karen: Yeah. But I think in the conclusions to that paper, you know one point that I’m trying to get across, I guess, is that the research question is really important. So, all of that is interesting. You know what I what I have just described. It’s very interesting, but it’s quite– It is just descriptive. You know this conversation I’m telling you: ‘This is what we did. And this is what happened. And isn’t it interesting?’ But I don’t see the point of doing research – I  mean, look, there is point in doing research just for interest’s sake – but in the context of legal research that has any kind of rigor I think you do need to be asking bigger, broader research questions from the outset. And I think that’s very important. And so we try in that paper to come back to those questions. Because yes, we observe all this stuff in the data. But so what?

Alexandra: Hehe.

Karen: And the ‘so what’ in this case will depend on what we think the opinion is for.

Alexandra: Yes.

Karen: And if the opinion, if the job of the opinion, as set out in the treaty, is to guide the Court in its decision in a particular case then maybe the converging of linguistic styles is not a bad thing, because you have the Court and the Advocates General speaking the same language, and everybody is working in their second or third language, anyway. And so you know, you have that phenomenon where everybody’s a non-native speaker. Nobody’s the eloquent speaker, and the power is is dissipated equally, you know, throughout. If that’s what the opinion is supposed to do then maybe it’s not so problematic, and that’s fine. But if the role of the opinion is, as EU scholars would claim, in fact, to persuade more widely and to explain how EU law is developing, and importantly, how it might develop. So one of the most important things about the Advocates General’s opinions are what it’s called prospective.

And it’s this idea of the direction, the future direction of EU law. And if that, in fact, is where the importance of these documents lie. And they lose their fluency, and they just become these very synthetic, Lego- like judgment style documents, they’re not really going to tell us anything about where the law is going to go, or how the law might develop. They’re not really going to engage in that sparring and that raising of dialogue between the Court and the Advocate Generals, and in that case that shift or convergence of linguistic styles does become more problematic, and it and it raises a bigger question about ‘well, what’s the role of the Advocate General then?’

So, for me coming back to an initial research question or understanding why you’re doing these methods. It’s very easy to get caught up in the method and excited about the method – and I mean I do it myself – enjoying doing the method. But I always think you really, really must come back to the ‘so what?’ question. And when I’m writing a paper, I often have a Post-It note stuck on my computer that just says ‘so what?’ because it’s a tough thing to come back to. But I do think it’s important.

Alexandra: Totally, and I think that’s a great tip for our listeners right now find that post it note.

Karen: Write a Post-It note: ‘so what?’

Alexandra: And this maybe brings me to a bigger question I was thinking of when I was reading your work, and it’s about how you make that ‘so what?” meaningful not just for other academics or people who might already be interested, but to a broader group of stakeholders, or, you know, would-be readers, and particularly working in the legal context, I was puzzling over this. You know, I myself also work in a legal context. You know, I came up as a lawyer, and then a linguist, have a similar background to you. And many of the stakeholders in the kinds of work that I encounter, or that you encounter, these are people who’ve probably studied legal research methods, way back, but those methods don’t center anything other than sort of finding and reading jurisprudence. So how do you convince these people that interviews, corpus analysis, other socio legal methods, other linguistic methods, how do you convince them to be trusting partners as participants in your study as they were here? Or, you know, having confidence in you as someone telling them an outcome or the knowledge that’s produced?

Karen: That’s a really good question. Sometimes, with great difficulty. Anybody who has engaged in interviews as a method will know that you are often interviewing people who don’t think very much of what you’re doing, or you as a person. In this case, again, as I say, I come from a very privileged position in this case, in that I have access to people at the Court. So I you know, I worked at the Court back in gosh! The early 2000s like 2000, 2002. And so people that I worked with and who stayed at the Court are now in very senior positions. And so I have access to that institution in a way that other people didn’t, or I had access, you know, in a way that other people didn’t. And people were willing to talk to me.

Then, in terms of yeah, in terms of the audience, like that is really tricky, and and it will depend like I, you will have different reactions. So you know, I’ve presented this type of work to audiences of lawyers, only lawyers, you know. And they’re like, ‘Well, that’s interesting. But it doesn’t really matter, because, you know, we’re making our money doing this, and and we need the law to be defined and definite, and not a malleable language like you’re saying it is.’

I’ve presented this type of work to audiences that are only linguists and linguists tend to be very focused on method, I find, and very interested in just observing these things that are happening. And they’re not always terribly interested in that big ‘So what?’ question.

And I, I suppose, finding your tribe, as anything in life, finding your tribe. The law and language community, I find, is is a very open, interested, curious, friendly community, generally. And this this paper is is published in a book that is specifically about new methods for studying law, studying European law or the European Court of Justice, I think, specifically, and that is the brainchild of researchers who are either permanently or temporarily based out of a center called iCourts, which is a Center for Excellence at the University of Copenhagen, and it’s a Centre of Excellence for international courts. And they are one of the pioneering institutes in law who have taken methods from the social sciences into law. And we actually had a book launch at the University of Luxembourg, and we had discussants from the European Court of Justice. So, we had judges and Advocates Generals discussing papers, which is kind of terrifying but also very fun, very pleasant.

So the Advocate General that that discussed this particular paper found it very interesting but remained unconvinced that their language, the language they were working in, affected their style, which is fine. That’s absolutely fine. People who are not scholars tend to think more in an ad hoc way, you know, than waiting to find out what the data says. And but interestingly, after that book launch, I had people from political science who had, who had come to the book launch. They all came up and went, ‘but these aren’t new methods, like we’ve been doing interviews for years, like, there’s nothing new about this.’ But the fact is that it’s new for Law.

Alexandra: Yes

Karen: Like you say, traditionally, this isn’t the type of stuff that has been done, particularly in European law where the focus has been much more doctrinal and sort of black letter.

Alexandra: Even in linguistics, you know what can be new is the combination of methods to answer one research question in one study. You know, you didn’t invent corpus linguistics, and I don’t think you’re pretending that you and your coauthors did.

Karen: God no!

Alexandra: You are making a really valid point, that it is quite novel and very useful to combine it with the interview method.

Karen: I like to think so. But I I think you know again to sort of try and answer your question a bit better, there are more of us now doing this type of work, which is wonderful. And so there are teams, you know: there’s my team at the University of Birmingham, there’s you guys, there are, you know, there, there are teams of more interdisciplinary people working on that interface between language and law, or just using language as a lens to interrogate other fields. And I think that’s the key. We just need more of us, more PhD students coming through – anybody want to come and do some more research with us? – and more, I guess, more freedom. And for, I guess, funding to do the type of projects that that we want to do. So, you also have to be convincing, depending on what you know the research academy looks like in your own country. You have to persuade a university or a funder that this is a good idea.

Alexandra: But, in fact, sometimes it can be that innovation of linguistics into law, you know, that can be the selling point that can be showing it’s new and worth funding. I’ll just jump in when you say, ‘and you guys’, I’ll just sort of put a little plug here. I think you mean the Law and Linguistics Interdisciplinary Researchers Network that Dr Laura Smith-Khan and I —

Karen McAuliffe: I do. It’s fantastic, and it’s so active. It’s wonderfully active and wonderfully supportive. It’s a it’s a wonderful research community that is somehow worldwide and feels very small and very supportive. There’s also the Language, Justice and Culture Hub.

Alexandra: Now based through Bard University.

Karen: Right. Yeah. And again, they’re all very, very welcoming communities and that isn’t a given, certainly not in the legal field.

Alexandra: It’s not, and that was Laura and my initial thinking, you know, sort of two things. First, we wanted a more welcoming space for ourselves and others. But also, back to what you were saying before, you know, a tide that lifts all boats, or, you know, a platform. It benefits each one of us to create a platform for the whole field.

Karen: And also, I think to create a field that’s rigorous, you know, in terms of scholarship because you sometimes– We can get very excited about building a new subfield and we get focused on our interesting data, and we don’t think about those bigger questions. And then the danger is that the subfield never becomes an established field because it doesn’t have [rigor] associated with it. So I think that’s important as well. And there’s lots of really interesting scholarship happening around the world. For a long time the law and language– the big names in law and language, we could list them on our on our hands, and they were white men.But there’s a lot more early career people, more people from the Global South that are doing really interesting and engaging work that is important to champion.

Alexandra: I totally agree. And so in the show notes, I’m going to put a link to a few other blogs where I think people can find those local and early career researchers in our law and linguistics field. But just to close the interview, I thought I might ask, where online can we find what you’re up to, or indeed in person, if you’ll be speaking.

Karen: I have no plans to speak right now. I have a period of study leave coming up, and I’m hoping that that is going to really get my creative juices flowing. I have been recently thinking about the construction of meaning in the context of multilingual legal reasoning. Jan Engberg, you may have had on this podcast before. He’s based out of Aarhus and he specializes in knowledge, communication, and the construction of meaning and has been doing some really interesting work recently about the construction of meaning in the context of comparative law and how we can’t–, we can’t get inside each other’s heads and fully understand what somebody is trying to communicate. And yet we manage to communicate. And yet global systems of law exist.

I’ve been working on the European Court of Justice for over 20 years, and haha! And I will always love it, and I don’t think I’ll ever move, you know, fully away from looking at it. It’s such an interesting institution. It works in 24 languages, you know. But I would like to do some work on other international courts. Thinking particularly of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, or the African Court of Peoples and Human Rights. Also the Strasbourg court, the European Court of Human Rights. I’m just at that sort of hunch stage. Because, you know, if you look at work that has been done in linguistics and work that has been done in translation studies and knowledge communication, that shows that there’s no inherent meaning in language. And yet– so law is this linguistic construct. And yet courts, international courts in particular, are very fond of saying, ‘well, according to the inherent meaning of this concept’ or, ‘according to the inherent meaning of this treaty’. But if other fields have established firmly that there is no inherent meaning in language then how can there be an inherent meaning in law? And so I’m interested in exploring that, but this is really at the very early stages. So, I’m hoping that in 2025 I can do a bit more thinking about that.

Alexandra: That sounds fascinating, Karen. I can’t wait to hear on that, but I feel we can wait. You know, there’s such a pressure in academia to do things quickly, like, it’s great to actually make the time and take the time to think about something enormous.

Karen: I’m not a, yeah. I have to say, I don’t do things terribly quickly. But again, I think that comes from a place of privilege. I’ve got a Chair, you know I have that space now if I need to, to take time to think about these things, so I’m aware of that.

Alexandra: Oh, but you know we’re grateful that you do have that space ‘cause we’re interested in what you’re producing. Maybe we’ll do another interview at some future point.

Karen: Absolutely. Yeah, any time.

Alexandra: What I’ll do I’ll put in the show notes things that Karen and I have spoken about, if you’ve enjoyed the show, it really does help us if you subscribe to our channel, or if you leave a 5 star review on the podcast app that you use or indeed just recommend the language on the move, podcast to your friends, your colleagues, your students, and we’ll speak to you next time.

In this video, I discuss the example of bilingual signage in Nanning City, China. I ask who recognises the Zhuang language that’s found on some public signage there, and some of the varied responses which people – even Zhuang speakers – have had to it. Then I explain what this case study can tell us about multilingual signage policies more generally, and about language policy research. I hope this helps you teach Linguistics, or learn Linguistics, or even do your own ‘linguistic landscape’ research!

Related resources:

Grey, A. (2022). ‘How Standard Zhuang has Met with Market Forces’. Chapter 8 in Nicola McLelland and Hui Zhao (eds) Language Standardization and Language Variation in Multilingual Contexts: Asian Perspectives (#171, Multilingual Matters series). De Gruyter, pp163-182. (Full text available)

Grey, A. (2024) ‘Using A Lived Linguistic Landscape Approach for Socio-Legal Insight’, Frontiers of Socio-Legal Studies’ Methodological Musings Blog, Oxford Centre for Socio-Legal Studies.

‘Language rights in a changing China: Brynn Quick in Conversation with Alexandra Grey’ Language on the Move Podcast, New Books Network (1 January 2025)

Transcript:

Alex and Kristen in the studio, 2024

[Opening screen shows text: Making Zhuang Language Visible, by Alexandra Grey and Kristen Martin, 2024.]

[Narrated by Alexandra Grey:] In 2004, the local government in Nanning, a city in South China, began adding the Zhuang language to street-name signage to preserve Zhuang cultural heritage. The Zhuang language, which originated thousands of years ago in this region, had largely been overshadowed by Putonghua, a standard form of Mandarin Chinese and the official language of China.

However, the public response to this initiative, including from Zhuang speakers, was not as positive as intended. In this video, I will share insights from my research in the 2010s on Zhuang language policy, including a case study of its implementation and reception in Nanning.

China officially recognises the minority group called the Zhuangzu, who have traditionally lived in south-central China, particularly in the Guangxi Zhuangzu Autonomous Region, where Nanning is the capital. There are millions of Zhuang speakers, but China has such a large national population that these Zhuang speakers constitute only a small minority.

The Zhuang language can hardly be read even by Zhuang speakers themselves. This is due to the inaccessibility of the Zhuang script; most people do not have access to formal or even informal ways of learning to read Zhuang. This has significant implications for the region’s linguistic landscape.

My research aimed to understand the impact of local language policy. I met with 63 Zhuang community leaders and Zhuang speakers for interviews, including interviews in which we walked and talked through the linguistic landscapes. I also found and analysed laws and policies about Zhuang language, from the national constitution down to local regulations. One important set of regulations were interim provisions introduced in 2004 and formalised in 2013 through which the local government added Zhuang script to street signs in Nanning.

This script these street names used was a Romanised version of Zhuang using the Latin alphabet, and it was always accompanied by Putonghua in both Chinese characters and its own alphabetic, Romanised form. The Zhuang script, which uses letters identical to English and also identical to Romanised Putonghua except for the additional letter ‘V’, was never displayed alone and was always in smaller font on the street name signs. In some cases, the signs contained additional information about nearby streets, but only in Putonghua.

In the broader linguistic landscape, these Zhuang street names were a visual whisper. Most public writing in Nanning is in Putonghua, with occasional English. Only a few public institutions, like the regional museum and library, have prominent bilingual signage that includes Zhuang. Otherwise, Zhuang is absent from common public texts such as road directions, commercial signage, transport maps, and safety notices.

From the community’s perspective, this new bilingual signage caused confusion. Newspaper reports from 2009 indicated Zhuang language was mistaken for misspelled Putonghua, leading to complaints. In my interviews, even some Zhuang speakers had been unaware of any Zhuang script in their environment, often mistaking it for English or Putonghua until it was pointed out to them, or until they started learning to read Zhuang as young adults, if they had that opportunity. Some were not aware that the Zhuang language could be written at all:

[Interview excerpt in Chinese dubbed in English by Kristen Martin]

A university student interviewee: Because it is Pinyin script, no one pays it any regard, they can’t read it. In the recent past, people even thought it was English or [Putonghua] Pinyin, something of that nature, but it is not Pinyin, so they could not conceive of it being Zhuang script. 

Interviewer: Right. 

Another university student interviewee: To look at, it looks the same as English, I think.

In my article, I argue that the invisibility of the Zhuang script is partly because people need to learn to read it, even if they speak Zhuang. My research, which includes reports and census data in addition to the interviews, shows that access to learning Zhuang literacy is very low. Additionally, people are not accustomed to seeing Zhuang as a public language, or as a written language.

Why is this the case? Besides its limited presence in public spaces, Zhuang is also largely absent from educational settings and from the media. There was an irregular newspaper in Zhuang and a bilingual magazine in print when I began my study, but by the late 2010s, that magazine was only printed in Putonghua. This lack of exposure to written Zhuang in everyday life affects the recognition of written Zhuang, even when it is displayed in Nanning today.

Two key themes emerged from my participants’ reactions to Zhuang in the linguistic landscape. Some Zhuang people appreciated the Government’s effort to include and preserve their cultural heritage, but they doubted the policy’s effectiveness; since they couldn’t read the script themselves, they wondered how anyone else would learn anything about Zhuang language or culture from these bilingual signs. Others viewed the policy as tokenistic. They highlighted the lack of accessibility to the Zhuang script and the frequent errors in its display.

[Interview excerpt in Chinese dubbed in English by Kristen Martin]

Interviewer: But I’ve heard it’s often written wrongly.  

A community leader interviewee: That’s right, it’s often written wrong but no matter how erroneously those sorts of things are written there is no-one who can pick that out, because Guangxi people have no opportunity to receive a Zhuang script education; who can read and understand?

Another point of dissatisfaction was that the way Zhuang has been standardised, which has made it more similar to Han Chinese – more similar to Putonghua – which felt like a reminder of the marginalisation of Zhuang speaking people in Nanning.

[Interview excerpt in Chinese dubbed in English by Kristen Martin]

Another student interviewee: This Zhuang writing, frankly, this grammar is in my view a really erroneous usage. It’s completely Hanified Zhuang language. Our Zhuang script must have as its goal opposing that, Guangxi’s so-called Standard Zhuang, which is not endorsed. It doesn’t stick to the grammar of our mother tongue, so we feel relatively disgusted.

For these readers, the bilingual Zhuang street names in the landscape were a visual reminder of other aspects of Zhuang language policy that they felt did not adequately support the language.

[Interview excerpt in Chinese dubbed in English by Kristen Martin]

Interviewer: So, when you see those signs, what do you think?

A community leader interviewee: It’s simply a joke, to use Chinese it’s “to hang up a sheep’s head and sell it as dog meat”, so it’s on the façade, but in their hearts there is no respect.

These perspectives suggest that efforts to include minority languages in public spaces can be perceived as futile or even offensive if the community cannot engage with the script. The Zhuang case study highlights the importance of accessibility and education, not only display, when policies are aiming to support minority languages, but it also highlights the importance of policy responding to the habits and expectations about that language which people will have already developed from childhood onwards from the way they experience the language being absent or devalued in all sorts of places and activities. People bring those habits and expectations and value structures with them into the linguistic landscape.

Broadening our perspective from Nanning to consider the policies for marginalised or minority languages in general, this case study challenges two common assumptions about display policies.

First, there’s the assumption that displaying a minority language increases its visibility in the linguistic landscape.

[Screen shows text: Is the Zhuang language on display in public actually visible as Zhuang?]

Second, there’s the belief that when a powerful entity, like the government, includes a minority language in public spaces, this symbolises the inclusion and valorisation of the speakers of that language, or more broadly the people who share that linguistic heritage.

[Screen shows text: Does the display of Zhuang language symbolise the inclusion of Zhuang speakers?]

These assumptions are foundational in linguistic landscape research, but this study encourages us to question them. The findings suggest that public display policies need to be integrated with other language policies to be effective. In the case of Zhuang, literacy and script policies undermined the efficacy of Zhuang language displays, making them almost invisible.

[Closing screen shows text:

Making Zhuang Language Visible, produced by Ed Media Team at the University of Technology Sydney, 2024.

Narrated by Dr Alexandra Grey.

Interviews dubbed by Kristen Martin.

Script by Alexandra Grey and Kristen Martin, based on Grey (2021) Full text

Thanks to Dr Laura Smith-Khan for content consultation.

Thanks to Wei Baocheng for singing his translation of the song ‘Gaeu Heux Faex’ into Zhuang, from Qiao Yu and Lei Zhengbang’s 藤缠树. Full rendition at: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WO0-biO5xJI ]

This post is one of the outcomes of a themed session on law and linguistics research held at the ALS Conference on 27 November.

***

Dr Joseph van Buuren

ALS Conference (L-R): Dr Alexandra Grey and Dr Joseph van Buuren, November 2024

Joe van Buuren is currently working as a lecturer in Criminology and Justice studies at RMIT University in Narrm (Melbourne). His work has focused broadly on the ways that discretionary power is exercised by police and courts in the provision, and denial, of interpreter access of language minoritised witnesses and accused people. He is particularly interested in examining how this power can reflect an ideological adherence to ‘English-only’ communication.

More recently, his research has examined the ways that legal judicial discourses operate to deny the racialised dimensions of linguistic discrimination and marginalisation. This denial extends to the law itself, which courts can frame as operating ‘neutrally’ to race, while doing anything but in relation to language. This denialism, sustained judicial narratives of formal equality, contributes to the criminalisation of language minoritised people within the criminal punishment system.

Recent Publication

van Buuren, J. (2024). Justice in English-only. Social and Legal Studies, 33(2), 191–212. https://www.rmit.edu.au/contact/staff-contacts/academic-staff/v/van-buuren-dr-joseph

Dr Dissake Koumassol Midinette Endurence

Dr Dissake Koumassol Midinette Endurence’s research examines language-related challenges in courtroom discourse in the Republic of Cameroon. She utilises Speech Act Theory and Interactional Sociolinguistics to analyse the speech acts of both legal professionals and lay litigants. She demonstrates that the use of exoglossic languages in such a multilingual nation poses serious issues for effective communication in the legal context.

Dr Dissake Koumassol Midinette Endurence

Her current research project, sponsored by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, aims to demonstrate that the implementation of statutory laws from legal systems such as Civil and Common Law does not adequately address the legal needs of African Indigenous communities.

To establish the effectiveness of oral legal traditions in African rural communities, she has also documented, transcribed, translated, and analysed the Tunen language and the legal traditions of the Banen community in Cameroon.

More broadly, her research intends to explain the field of Forensic Linguistics by exploring African oral traditions. She introduces a novel approach to legal linguistic by examining traditional courtroom discourse in native and foreign languages.

Recent Publications

Dissake, K. M. Endurence. (2021). Language and legal proceedings: Analysing courtroom discourse in Cameroon. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Dissake, K. M. Endurence. (2021). Assessing litigant’s language proficiency: The case of the Bafoussam Court of First Instance. Language policy 21. 217-234.

Emma Genovese

Emma Genovese is a PhD Candidate and Quentin Bryce Law Doctoral Scholar at the University of Technology Sydney, Australia. Her PhD research draws from queer and corpus linguistic method to explore the construction of sex, gender, and sexuality in Australian law. Her work is focused upon uncovering the normative and historical underpinnings of legislation, along with emphasising how these constructs negatively impact queer identities.

UNSW Law Journal Launch, Emma Genovese, July 2023

As part of her research, Emma built the Australian Legislative Corpus 2023 (‘ALC23’). The ALC23 includes all available and machine-readable acts, regulations, and rules across the nine major jurisdictions in Australia. It includes in force legislation as at 30 June 2023, and is able to be searched according to a variety of different sub-corpora.

More recently, her research examined cases in Australian criminal courts that referenced, or involved, trans people, in order to critique the language used by judicial officers. She argued that judicial judgments often disregard, dismiss, or deny the experiences of trans people. Her article also demonstrated that the lack of knowledge surrounding trans issues also had implications on the outcome of cases.

Recent publications

Genovese, E. (Forthcoming). Building the Australian Legislative Corpus 2023 – Combatting Issues and Highlighting Applications of General Legislative Corpora. International Journal of Law and Language.

Genovese, E. (2023). The Spectacle of Respectable Equality: Queer Discrimination in Australian Law Post Marriage Equality. UNSW Law Journal 46(2). 650-727.

Genovese, E. (2023). Administering harm: the treatment of trans people in Australian criminal courts. Current Issues in Criminal Justice 36(2). 177-196.

Dr Alexandra Grey

Dr Alexandra Grey combines legal and linguistic research approaches to study how governments respond to linguistic diversity, and how those responses redistribute or entrench hierarchies of power, access to resources and social grouping.

Her early work focused on laws supporting the inclusion of the Zhuang minority language in the ‘linguistic landscapes’ of China, and she has recently updated this work with an analysis of a decision in China that deemed certain regulations about bilingual schooling unconstitutional.

She has also focused on the application of international human rights law about linguistic discrimination. This includes in relation to the need of to engage with linguistic inclusion to fulfill their right to health obligations when communicating about Covid, along with whether a ban on prisoners in Australia communicating in languages other than English was a form of racial discrimination of impinged upon their freedom of expression.

Alexandra is currently working with First Nations colleagues on research about self-determination and the role of governments in Aboriginal language renewal in NSW, Australia, and a related study of the increased use of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages in parliaments across Australia and certain parliamentary rules which restrict this inclusion. She’s especially interested in collaborations on related themes with First Nations scholars in Taiwan, NZ and Canada, and in collaborations about interdisciplinary methods.

Recent publications

Grey, A. (2021). Language Rights in a Changing China: A National Overview and Zhuang Case Study, (Contributions to the Sociology of Language #113) De Gruyter: Boston.

Grey, A. (2021). Language Rights in a Changing China: A National Overview and Zhuang Case Study, Abridged Mandarin Version (translated by Gegentuul Baioud), 1-22. Language on the Move: Sydney.

K Thorpe, L Booker, A Grey, D Rigney, and M Galassi. (2021). The Benefits of Aboriginal Language Use and Revival – Literature Review. UTS Jumbunna Institute of Indigenous Education and Research.

Grey, A. and Smith-Khan, L. (2021). ‘Linguistic diversity as a challenge and an opportunity for improved legal policy’. Griffith Law Review 30(1). 1-17.

Grey, A. (2021). ‘Perceptions of invisible Zhuang minority language in Linguistic Landscapes of the People’s Republic of China and implications for language policy’. Linguistic Landscape 7(3). 259-284

Grey, A. (2022). ‘How Standard Zhuang has Met with Market Forces’, in Nicola McLelland and Hui Zhao (eds) Language Standardization and Language Variation in Multilingual Contexts: Asian Perspectives (#171, Multilingual Matters series). De Gruyter, 163-182.

Grey, A. (2023). Lawful limits on freedom of expression for private communications ‘in public life’. Cambridge International Law Journal 12(2). 328–336.

Grey, A. (2023). Communicative Justice and Covid-19: Australia‘s pandemic response and international guidance. Sydney Law Review 45(1). 1-43

Grey, A. (in print for 2025). ‘The Handbook of Linguistic Human Rights’, Tove Skutnabb-Kangas and Robert Phillipson’ (Skutnabb-Kangas, Tove and Phillipson, Robert (eds). 2023. The Handbook of Linguistic Human Rights. Wiley Blackwell. 712 + viii. Sociolinguistic Studies, issue 19.1.

Dr Stafford Lumsden

Dr Stafford Lumsden is the in-house educational designer at the University of Sydney Law School. He applies his interest in multimodality and social semiotics to the design and development of online learning environments for units in the LLB, JD, and masters programs. Currently, he is part of a team investigating the use of inclusive Socrative approaches in undergraduate law units to increase student engagement and inclusivity among diverse student cohorts. His recent work has focused on the use of semiotic resources other than language in online teacher training, and in September 2024 he presented on the topic at the 22nd International CALL Research Conference hosted by the Waseda University Law School.

Stafford is keen to collaborate with legal education researchers interested in the use of text, video, audio, and non-language semiotic resources in online teaching and learning in law.

Recent Publications

Lumsden, S. (In Press). A multimodal social semiotic approach to TESOL educator professional development. In A. Alm, C. Lai, & Q. Ma (Eds.), Transitions in CALL. Castledown.

Lumsden, S. (2024, September). A multimodal social semiotic approach to TESOL educator professional development. In Proceedings of the International CALL Research Conference (Vol. 2024, pp. 163-168).

Lumsden, S., Djonov, E., and Slatyer, H. (2024). The multimodal community of inquiry: A framework for evaluating online learning environments in higher education in Lim, V.L. and Querol-Julián (Eds.) Designing Learning with Digital Technologies. Perspectives from Multimodality Education. Routledge.

Lumsden, S. (2023). Student Writing Support with Generative Artificial Intelligence. The English Connection 27(3). 7–12.

Dr Kashif Raza

Dr Kashif Raza is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the Faculty of Education, University of British Columbia, Canada. His research focuses on language-in-immigration policies in Canada and their impact on the immigration, settlement, and integration experiences of multilingual skilled immigrants.

At the federal level, he examines how Canada’s points-based immigration system, which incorporates language testing, marginalizes linguistic diversity among the multilingual skilled workforce. Provincially, his work investigates the limited availability of translation and interpretation services in Alberta’s legal system, highlighting a reliance on co-ethnic legal counsel.

This provincial dimension is a key area of interest in his research and he is currently exploring the ways co-ethnic lawyers use their shared linguistic repertoire to support clients with lower English skills and how this mediates multilingual communication in legal procedures.

Recent Publications

Raza, K. (2022). Linguistic outcomes of language accountability and points-based system for multilingual skilled immigrants in Canada: A critical language-in-immigration policy analysis. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 45(7). 2605-2619

Dr Dima Rusho

Dr Dima Rusho’s research examines the language and communication barriers impacting access to the justice system for Indigenous Australians in remote communities. Dima is particularly interested in exploring inequalities of access as a critical social justice issue. Dima has recently completed a project about optimising interpreting and other forms of language support for Indigenous Kriol speakers in circuit courts in two remote communities: Ngukurr and Borroloola.

Rukiya Stein at the Vulnerable Accused in the Justice System Conference in Birmingham, 2023

Dima’s future research will continue to explore the provision of language support for Indigenous language speakers, with a focus on establishing language support models involving advocacy.

Recent Publications

Rusho, D., Bradley, J., and Dickson, G. (Forthcoming). Tailoring language support in legal contexts for Indigenous communities: Insights from Ngukurr and Borroloola. Trends and Issues in crime and criminal justice.

Rusho, D. (2024). Coloniality and Australian Indigenous language interpreting in legal settings. In Ndhlovu, F. & Ndlovu-Gatsheni, S. (Eds), Routledge Handbook of Language and Decolonisation. Routledge.

Rusho, D. (2023). First Nations interpreters cannot be neutral and should not be invisible. Translation and Interpreting, 15(1). 120-134.

Rusho, D. (2022). Cross-currents: Indigenous language interpreting in Australia’s justice system [PhD thesis].

Rukiya Stein

Rukiya Stein is an Accredited Witness Intermediary, an independent communication intermediary and a Certified Speech and Language Pathologist who facilitates communication for vulnerable children and adults when they give evidence in investigative interviews and at court. Her current thesis explores the role of the intermediary on lawyer questioning and the evidence provided by adults with disabilities in the Australian criminal justice process. She is specifically examining the linguistic complexity of cross-examination, intermediary recommendations on the structure and form of questioning and the clarity of evidence.

She is currently an intern at the Judicial Commission of New South Wales. She has provided a number of trainings and workshops to judges, magistrates and lawyers on effective communication in the courtroom, the intermediary role and effect of disability on participation in the justice process.

Recent Publications

Stein, R., and Goodman-Delahunty, J. (Forthcoming) Bridging the Justice Gap: Inequity in Provision of Intermediary Assistance for Adults with Disabilities, Alternative Law Journal.

What about you?

Do you work or research in an area related to multilingualism in courts and tribunals, or another area where language and law intersect? Join the LLIRN!

What other language and law topics would you like to learn about? Have your say on our next “LLIRN About Us” blog post. Let us know in the comments or join the network and send us an email!

Rooted in a Bourdieusian approach to language, power and legal discourse, this is the first major publication to integrate contemporary debates in linguistics about mobility, capitalism and globalization into a study of China’s language policy.

This book came out in May 2021 after almost a decade of Alex’s doctoral and postdoctoral work. Her doctoral dissertation was recognised as the best dissertation on the sociology of language, internationally, through the 2018 Joshua A. Fishman Award.

Some academic work and concepts that are referenced in this episode include Language on the Move posts about Dr. Grey’s and Dr. Laura Smith-Khan’s Law and Linguistics Interdisciplinary Researchers’ Network (LLIRN), “aspiring monolingualism” and the one-nation-one-language ideology.

If you enjoy the show, support us by subscribing to the Language on the Move Podcast on your podcast app of choice, leaving a 5-star review, and recommending the Language on the Move Podcast and our partner the New Books Network to your students, colleagues, and friends.

Further readings

Grey, A. (2022). ‘How Standard Zhuang has Met with Market Forces’, in Nicola McLelland and Hui Zhao (eds) Language Standardization and Language Variation in Multilingual Contexts: Asian Perspectives (#171, Multilingual Matters series). De Gruyter, pp163-182. https://doi.org/10.21832/9781800411562-011
Grey, A. (2021) Language Rights in a Changing China: A National Overview and Zhuang Case Study, Abridged Mandarin Version (translated by Gegentuul Baioud), pp1-22. Language on the Move: Sydney. http://hdl.handle.net/10453/172165
Grey, A. (2021, published online 2019). ‘Tourist tongues: high-speed rail carries linguistic and cultural urbanisation beyond the city limits in Guangxi, China’, Applied Linguistics Review 12(1). 11-37. DOI: 10.1515/applirev-2019-0099.
Grey, A. and Baioud, G. (2021). ‘Education Reforms Aim to Mold Model Citizens from Preschool in the PRC’. China Brief. 21 (17) 23-29. The Jamestown Foundation: Washington. https://jamestown.org/program/educational-reforms-aim-to-mold-model-citizens-from-preschool-in-the-prc/
Grey, A. and Martin, K. (2024). ‘Making Zhuang Language Visible’ [Video]. UTS. [link TBC] K Thorpe, L Booker, A Grey, D Rigney, and M Galassi (2021) The Benefits of Aboriginal Language Use and Revival – Literature Review. UTS Jumbunna Institute of Indigenous Education and Research. https://www.alt.nsw.gov.au/assets/Uploads/downloads/files/The-Benefits-of-Aboriginal-Language-Use-and-Revival-in-New-South-Wales-Literature-Review.pdf

Transcript (by Brynn Quick; added on February 21, 2025)

Brynn: Welcome to the Language on the Move Podcast, a channel on the New Books Network. My name is Brynn Quick, and I’m a PhD candidate in Linguistics at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. My guest today is Dr. Alexandra Grey.

Alex is a Chancellor’s Research Fellow in the Faculty of Law at University of Technology Sydney in Australia. Alex researches laws about using or not using certain languages and how they impact upon social identities and social justice. For example, what the internationally recognized right to health obliges a government such as Australia’s to do in terms of communicating public health information in languages other than English.

Or, as another example, whether choice of language is part of freedom of expression and whether denying choice of language can be a form of racial discrimination. She is currently researching new legal directions in Australian government support for Aboriginal language renewal. Today we’re going to talk about Alex’s book entitled Language Rights in a Changing China, a National Overview and Zhuang Case Study.

This book came out in May 2021 after almost a decade of Alex’s doctoral and post-doctoral work. Her doctoral dissertation was recognized as the best dissertation on the sociology of language internationally through the 2018 Joshua A. Fishman Award.

Alex, welcome to the show and thank you so much for joining us today.

Dr Grey: Oh, hello Brynn, and I have been looking forward to this for weeks.

Brynn: As have I, I’m really excited to talk to you today. Listeners of this show and readers of the Language on the Move research blog will very obviously recognize your name and might already know a little bit about you. But I’d love for you to start us off by telling us a bit about yourself, how you became a linguist, as well as what led you to wanting to conduct research into language rights in China.

Dr Grey: Look, it’s a bit of a long story and it didn’t feel as linear in the living of it as it might sound in the retelling. So, take heart if you’re working out a pivot in your own career. But I essentially pivoted from law to linguistics.

Over a series of steps. And that was because I had always loved learning languages and learning about languages. And then in my 20s, I started learning Chinese and I found a way to move to China to work in a legal aid centre doing research and training and studying Chinese language part time.

And then I went back to university there full time. And while I was doing this and living in China, I started to learn more about the linguistic diversity in China, which I just really hadn’t realized it. And at the same time, I was also becoming more interested in the Chinese legal system, particularly the way the constitution deals with minority peoples and minority languages.

And I had always hoped one day to do a PhD. And suddenly I was starting to feel like, yes, this is my question. It’s calling to me.

So, I did a bit of asking around and I heard that Professor Ingrid Piller at Macquarie University was a superb supervisor and also quite suited to this topic. So, I met with her and we hit it off. And, you know, the rest is history in that sense.

We’ve been collaborating and working together and become friends over many years now. And so that’s how I got into the doctoral work that we’re talking about today, this law and linguistics sort of combined research that’s focused on China. And then since then, I’ve really tried to expand that more to develop both for myself and then for other people too, this sense of law and linguistics as a research field in itself, not just in my specific project.

And that’s why I do a lot with my former PhD peer and my still close friend, Dr. Laura Smith-Khan. Through the network we set up, the Law and Linguistics Interdisciplinary Researchers Network.

Brynn: That’s really amazing. The fact that you were able to combine law and linguistics, which I think is probably not something that many people would automatically think go together, but those of us in the linguistics field definitely see happening quite a bit. And the need for that to happen, for research around that to happen.

So, with your research that you did in China, you, like I said, you ended up writing an entire book, which is amazing. And the title of your book talks about a Zhuang case study. So, for those who might not be familiar, can you tell us what the Zhuang language is, and why you chose to examine it in regard to language change and globalization in China?

Dr Grey: Certainly. The first reason is that for one person, one book, one PhD, all the languages of China is just too much. And so, I had to do a case study in some sense.

Part of what I was looking at was a national framework and how things work for all languages or for all official minority groups. But then I was really narrowing down. And to choose how to narrow down, I chose this group.

The people are called the Zhuangzu, and the language that is officially associated with them is called Zhuang language. I chose that because there were, on the one hand, reports that there were something like 17 million speakers of Zhuang. By population, the Zhuang people are the biggest of all the official minority groups in China.

So, they, you know, foreign minority, they have a lot of speakers. But on the other hand, there were also reports that the Zhuang, and now I’m quoting, are completely assimilated, or had, you know, lost any distinct linguistic or cultural identity. And I thought, well, that’s confusing and interesting, you know, what’s going on.

And then in addition, the Zhuang people have nominally autonomous jurisdiction over a region in South Central China called Guangxi Zhuangzu Autonomous Region. And from this legal perspective, I thought, oh, that’s interesting. Maybe there’s more power or more ability to govern language in a slightly distinctive way within China for this group.

In terms of the language itself, of course, you know, there’s just infinite variety in the way people speak. And so, when I talk about the Zhuang language, I’m really aware that I and many scholars and many people sort of talk about what is essentially a boundary we’ve put on this group, excluding some other ways of speaking that are related to Zhuang. But what is generally recognized as Zhuang language is part of a family called the TAI, Thai languages, and THAI, Thai language of Thailand, is another of those languages.

It’s also very similar to a language, arguably the same, as a language recognised as a separate language within China, a language of another different official minority group called Buyi language. But it’s essentially a range of dialects, a range of ways of speaking that have been spoken for millennia in that south central region of China, just above Vietnam and slightly to the west of Hong Kong or that sort of area. In terms of why I wanted to do a case study at all and then what else I could see, particularly through the Zhuang case study, I could tell from my preliminary research that there was this very rigid mid-20th century categorization of land into territory and associating that with certain peoples in China.

And then the kinds of legal framework that supported or appeared to support minority languages was related to that. So, it’s a very rigid mid-20th century structure. But then since the mid-20th century, China has gone through just enormous upheaval.

For example, by the time I was doing my research in the 2010s, the urbanization rate was over 50% even in this Guangxi area. The development of the economy, I think everyone knows, took off in the late 20th century. But for the Guangxi sort of area, it was a little bit later and it was really still taking off with some direct government funding in the 2010s and now.

And so, there was this real change in context, both for what was happening within Guangxi, but then also the people who were recognized as Zhuangzi people, who might be Zhuang speakers, they, like everyone else in China, was increasingly mobile, moving to cities, but also moving far away even from South Central China, elsewhere in the country. And so, there was this dispersal of what might have been expected to be a cohesive language group. And then on top of that, while the national language, which is a variety of matter in Chinese called Putonghua, while that had increasingly gained popularity over the 20th century, in the year 2000, a national law was passed that really enhanced or supported the use of Putonghua and its promulgation.

And so with these contextual factors, these changes, I thought it’s really important to use the minority as a window into what’s changing in terms of social organization and social stratification in China. And then the Zhuang seemed a particularly rich and hitherto relatively sort of unresearched group of people or languages.

Brynn: And as someone who I myself do not speak Mandarin, I don’t read it. So, coming at this from this point of ignorance, so pardon me if this is not a wise question, but can the speakers of Zhuang understand Mandarin and vice versa? Are they mutually intelligible or are they not?

Would the speakers of each language have to make a concerted effort to be able to understand the speakers of the other language?

Dr Grey: Good question Brynn. Look, they’re not related languages and so the linguistic view is that they’re mutually unintelligible. I might add that the dialects of Zhuang are also said to be mutually unintelligible to each other.

So, there’s enormous variety within Zhuang. In the mid 20th century, the Chinese government standardised Zhuang language in an attempt to form a hybrid that could be accessed by all sorts of Zhuang speakers. And then also that was for a short period of time taught to incoming government officials who came from a Mandarin speaking background.

What then happened over the latter part of the 20th century is that schooling was rolled out in the medium of Putonghua much more widely throughout the Zhuang speaking regions. And in fact, people had historically probably been multilingual in various Chinese dialects as well as Zhuang dialects in that region. But people started to have more access to and more demand placed upon them to speak standard Chinese, so Putonghua, the national language.

And so, research by people like Professor Zhou Minglang, who’s a real expert on the history of Chinese language policy and now is based at the University of Maryland. He did some work, for instance, showing that throughout the late 20th century and early 21st century, people who were categorized as being part of the Zhuang minority group were increasingly bilingual in Zhuang and Mandarin, and then also shifting towards not even speaking Zhuang at all. So, there’s a real language shift going on there.

Brynn: And is this what you were referring to when you said that in the year 2000, that the Chinese government made like a proclamation about language? Was it about this more trying to go towards this standardized Putonghua, or was it something different?

Dr Grey: It’s about that. It’s particularly carving out exclusive domains or exclusive functions where that standard Mandarin has to be used, certain types of media jobs, for example. It’s also carving out, along with education law, space for bilingual education.

So, there’s a right to Putonghua, and that has to be expressed through access to education, but there is also scope for bilingual schooling, so a language like Zhuang alongside Putonghua. So that national law is both about supporting the national language by creating exclusive domains for its use or obligations on people to use it, but also obligations on institutions like schools to promulgate or to spread Putonghua. And then alongside that, there’s been a lot of policy directed at trying to improve, if you like, the quality of people’s Putonghua, people who think they have learned it or speak it, maybe are still not speaking it in the standardized way.

And so, there’s also been since 2000, a lot of government push to get, if you like, a more universal version of Putonghua spoken and written, in particular, across all of China.

Brynn: And speaking of that idea of standardization, I’ve found it really interesting that toward the beginning of your book, you talk about how the Zhuang language, including, as you said, its dialects, went through this governmental process of written standardization from the 1950s to the 1980s. So, what did this standardization of writing mean for Zhuang? And how was it viewed by the state?

Dr Grey: It was viewed by the state as really important. And this was happening not just to Zhuang initially, but to all the official minority languages in China. And for a brief time also to the majority or the national language, Putonghua, there was a real push to standardize and create alphabetic writing systems to support what was seen as a mass literacy goal.

And this was part of the building of the new nation after to the civil war in the mid 20th century. What happened with Zhuang in particular is there were sort of two phases of standardization. And this happened to oral or spoken Zhuang as well, but we’ll particularly talk about the writing as you asked.

And this was done with the participation of Zhuang people but led by the government. In the 1950s, a writing system was developed that used a mix of Cyrillic letters and the kind of letters that our listeners might be very familiar with from the alphabet we use for English. And it had no diacritic tones.

It used letters to represent letters that looked like numbers in terminal positions to indicate the tone, the numerically ordered tone. I’ve explained that a little bit badly, but it’s a bit confusing.

And then in the 1980s, there was a renewed push towards the standardization of written Zhuang, but at the same time, a push to make it more typable. And so, the Cyrillic letters were dropped and it reduced to just the 26 letters that we also know from the English alphabet. There’s an official auxiliary Romanized script for the standard national version of Chinese as well.

And that uses the same letters, but it doesn’t use V. So, it uses 25 letters and Zhuang uses 26. Now, a few things happened along the way here.

First, there just wasn’t that much teaching of literacy in either of these standard forms of writing Zhuang. And so, people just didn’t learn to use standard Zhuang in this way. And then something I talk about particularly not in the book, but in an open access chapter that people could look up and read for free from 2022 in a book called Language Standardization in Asia edited by McClelland and Zhao.

And in that chapter, I talk about how marketization interacted with standardization of Zhuang. And in particular, something I’m drawing out there is that there ceased to be a visually recognizable or iconic version of the language. And that then also reduced the prospects of using Zhuang in certain more commodified ways as a visual icon, or even just making it recognizable as something distinct from English or Mandarin Chinese when people look at it written in the linguistic landscape.

And so, this standardization process created, as I say in that chapter, an obsolescent form of Zhuang, perhaps not intentionally, but it became increasingly inaccessible to Zhuang speakers. And I should just put there that in the background, historically, Zhuang was not standardized, but it was written by certain people in Zhuang speaking communities who had a sort of social role to be a scribe or to be someone with a literacy practice. And David Holm has written some phenomenal work on this, this really intricate histories of the use of what are called the old Zhuang character script.

So, in particular, if people are interested, he’s got a great book from 2013 on that older writing system.

Brynn: That’s what I was going to say. Was there more of the character-based writing system before this standardized, more Latin-based alphabet that you said was brought in? And it sounds like yes.

Dr Grey: Yes, there was. It just wasn’t widely known either because literacy just wasn’t a widely taught individual practice historically.

Brynn: For anyone, really, in any language context. Yeah.

Dr Grey: Exactly. Exactly. And so, when the government came to interest itself in the standardization of Zhuang, it counted Zhuang as a language with no written script along with certain other minority languages.

And that’s why there was this sort of full tilt effort to create this Romanized or alphabetic way of writing Zhuang.

Brynn: Fascinating that they kind of landed on the Romanized form and they ended up dropping the Cyrillic form. And you said a lot of that was for ease of typing, yeah, in the 1980s?

Dr Grey: That’s my understanding. I mean, there’s some other things to it too, because China was increasingly estranged from the Soviet Union and the Soviet linguists that it had previously worked with. More on that sort of thing can be found in a book by Thomas Mullaney.

He’s got some great work on the history of type and type technology in the Chinese context. In addition to a book I should have mentioned before, he’s got a wonderful book on the initial creation of these minority peoples into official minorities and official languages associated with each and the kinds of divisions or merging together that happened for certain people. And he’s traced back to the diaries and the field notes of the Chinese government’s linguistic ethnographers who went out to do a whole lot of survey work and then early census data from the mid-20th century.

So that’s a wonderful resource to really bring home this idea that people maybe just don’t realize that, you know, are people or a language, neither of these is a natural fact. These are important, but they’re social facts. And we can see in the Chinese context more than in some other contexts, that process of construction.

And one of the reasons we can see that more is the government is more involved using laws and policies and records and documentation in that construction than perhaps in other contexts like other countries.

Brynn: That’s what I find fascinating in your book is that process of construction. And that’s what really comes through in the book. And it was something that I myself hadn’t really thought that much about.

And something else that I learned in reading your book was that Imperial China standardized Mandarin script and then actually banned non-Mandarin scripts in the third century BCE and that there has always been a national narrative around language and its use in China. And you talk about how the China of today has a national constitution that addresses non-standard or minority languages and scripts, like you were talking about with the Zhuang language. So, tell us about what the Chinese Constitution says about language, including these minority languages, and what your research found about how minority language rights are actually interpreted in practice.

Dr Grey: Thanks for that question. And that really gets to the heart of why I did this project. You know, what is in that Constitution and what does it mean in practice?

So, the Constitution in Article 4 gives the recognized minorities, and there are 55 recognized official minority groups in China, the freedom to use and develop their language. And then separately in Article 19, there is also a right to the national standard language, Putonghua. And so, there’s been constitutional reform over the last 70-odd years, but there’s always been some version of that freedom to use and develop minority languages.

And then one of the things that flows from that is a quite intricate and I would argue quite fractured system of authority, different government institutions at the national and the regional and the local level dealing with different aspects of language governance. And then on top of all of that, there is, I would say, a narrative or a preoccupation that sort of cuts against making the most of that freedom. And that is particularly what I call developmentalism, an ideology, a language ideology, but more broadly, an ideology of developmentalism that comes through in the laws and policies about language.

And that positions languages as falling into either less developed or more developed languages, which in itself can be really problematic or stifling for people’s expectations or people’s use or what people do with policy. And then also, increasingly, there is a sense that some languages are no longer useful. They’re not instrumental for particular economic development.

And I mean minority languages. And so, there’s less expectation or less push to, say, teach them in education because it is seen that the work of bringing people together has already been done. And now, that development needs to happen through the medium of Putonghua, or maybe I should say through the embodied citizenship of Putonghua speaking citizens.

And over time, there’s been other narratives as well that go with language. One that sort of waxes and wanes, but probably is ascendant at the moment, is a sense that you have to have allegiance to a language to have allegiance to a nation. And the flip side of that, if you are bilingual, you are inherently underlined.

Some people call this linguistic securitization. In my own data, I didn’t sense that people who were bilingual were identifying as both Zhuang and Chinese. There was a layered identity for them, but not a raptured or conflicting identity necessarily.

The other discourse that’s really prominent in Chinese language policy is poverty alleviation. And the idea that people are very poor and the solution to that is better access to Putonghua. And I don’t talk about this at length in my book, but one, maybe not one, I wonder to what extent that poverty is caused by speaking a language other than Putonghua.

And to what extent coming out of poverty needs to come at the expense of that home language or that traditional language or that minority language.

Brynn: I feel like that’s something that could be said of many different language contexts in many different countries and cultures. And we certainly see it in the English-speaking world as well.

Dr Grey: Enormously in the English-speaking world. This sense that not only is English the ticket to development, but that any other language is actually holding you back and a waste of time.

Brynn: Yeah, exactly. And you mentioned just a couple of minutes ago, the idea of the linguistic landscape. And that brings me to a question that I have about the type of methodology that you used while you were conducting this research that would later become the book.

So, you described this as a lived linguistic landscape methods. Now, listeners of this show will have heard previous episodes where we talk about linguistic landscape studies. But can you tell us what the difference is between sort of your standard linguistic landscape study and a lived linguistic landscape methodology?

And then how did you use it in this research?

Dr Grey: I’m really proud of this aspect of the book. And the difference basically, Brynn, is putting the people back in. I think particularly when we’re talking about languages, sometimes we forget we’re talking about speakers of languages or notional inheritors to quote some other scholars, people associated with a language suffer the disempowerment or the marginalization or the advancement or whatever that comes with the use of certain languages.

And so in the lived linguistic landscape approach, or starting from this basis, which I think is there right from the origin of linguistic landscape studies, and that is a sense that not only does the built environment offer data for research about language, what language is on display, particularly written, but also maybe audio or other forms of recorded language, but that there’s a power to that. So, the initial point of departure is that the emplacement of language in this way creates a sense of normativity of what language is in place or what language is out of place in a particular physical context or in the sort of practices or discourses associated with that place. And I wanted to take that further.

And so, I brought in people, if you like, or the lived aspect in a couple of ways. First, I did walk and talk interviews with participants through various linguistic landscapes in the study to get their sense of how they interacted, what they remembered, what was important to them. When we did occasionally see Zhuang in the landscape, for example, they could tell me when they first learned to recognize it as Zhuang, how they learned to read, or what it meant to them.

Was it, for some people, it’s actually very offensive because they didn’t like the way it was written. These sort of things, these sort of more subjective or perceptual data came from walking through but also living in the landscapes in a more ethnographic where I spent a lot of time in these places. And then I took that another layer up, if you like, in what I call my Linguascaping Through Law layer.

And that’s to look at what law does to give agency or to not permit agency to certain kinds of actors, both to be authors in the public space, but also to be regulators of language in the public space. And then another aspect I added in there, there had already been quite a bit of research at this point on what was called the Semiotic Landscape, looking beyond just linguistic data in the landscape to other meaning making. But I focused that Semiotic Landscape data a little bit more on how we saw or didn’t see people doing Zhuang language or people being Zhuang speakers represented in the landscape.

And I found that they weren’t. They were representations of Zhuang culture in certain kinds of landscapes using motifs associated with Zhuang history and musical practice and weaving, textiles, that sort of thing, costumes. But there wasn’t a representation of being a Zhuang speaker, of practicing Zhuang language that wasn’t represented semiotically in the environment.

And to a large extent, it wasn’t linguistically represented either. And then the laws that intervened or shaped the linguistic landscape were not doing a lot to support individual language use in the landscape. They were allowing and at times mandating the government to use standardized Zhuang in certain naming practices or certain kind of signage.

And that’s, you know, that’s not nothing, but it’s a very particular kind of authorship. It’s a very particular kind of discourse that it participates in.

Brynn: And you conducted this research into language rights in China, but talking to you, I’m kind of hearing a lot that reminds me of even here in Australia, how English is positioned, how speakers of minority languages are positioned, the linguistic landscapes that we might see around Sydney, for example, in other languages.

So, I’m curious as to whether or not you saw or you see parallels between how the Chinese state treats language and how language is treated by the Australian government here in Australia. So, what similarities or differences do you see between these two nations’ policies around language?

Dr Grey: Yeah, I see these resonances too, Brynn. And, you know, for that reason, I urge all listeners, even if you work in other contexts, if you work in North America or Europe, go and read my book. You know, it’s not another planet.

It says something about language policy in general, this book. But in terms of Australia specifically, that’s where we now both live. That’s where I focus my current research.

I’m constantly seeing some parallels. You know, the first parallel is, of course, there is enormous linguistic diversity. And we might think of it as both old and new.

There were languages in Australia that have been spoken for millennia, likewise in China. And then there’s also linguistic diversity that’s come more recently through the migration or the sort of reorganisation of where people live. There are also some really similar current policy concerns.

In China, there’s a lot of investment and policy towards building what’s called a cybermuseum of languages that’s going to gather all sorts of resources about minority languages in a digital form. Australia is not quite as far along in that, but the same idea is actually underway at the national level, as I understand it. Another thing that’s really similar in both is the way linguistic diversity is transformed in the urban environment.

It doesn’t entirely go away, but it becomes marginalised or stratified, I would say, in the sense of how language is used in the built environment of this city, and what it does or doesn’t say about the sociolinguistic order in that city. I actually am trying to steer some current research of mine further towards lived linguistic landscape work in Australia, because I think there is an interesting overlap there. In terms of what’s different, look, in Australia, the politics of indigeneity are much more developed, much more important in the local context.

I would say also that demands from indigenous people, and in Australia, we particularly think of both Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander groups, demands from those groups for access to their linguistic resources and control over language policy, I think is stronger here, particularly in recent years. When I first started this research, something I thought was different is that Australia is a nation that doesn’t really concern itself with language as a national or constitutional issue. Whereas China, as you pointed out in an earlier question, has for a very long time.

But I think that is changing actually in Australia. There is a move towards national language policy in Australia again. And of course, there’s still that de facto policy of English as the national language, or I think it’s Francis Holt has used the phrase aspirational monolingualism in the North American context.

I think we can see that here and in China. Of course, when you stop to think about Australia, the Australian government and the state governments have involved themselves in language policy and laws about language, actually since the early days of colonisation, but usually in a more obstructive or oppressive way than we might choose to focus on today. But that history of language is a really important part of shaping, you know, what we might call civic engineering, shaping the populace, shaping also the national identity.

That’s really important in both China and Australia. And the tension between a multicultural national identity and the practice of multilingualism is something in both contexts.

Brynn: And that’s what I see quite a bit of in my own research as well. And I think it is worth going back to what you were saying about that one nation, one language ideology, that idea of, well, allegiance to a country is going to necessitate allegiance to a certain language or certain dialect. And I think we absolutely see that here in Australia as well, especially with certain political groups, certain people who have certain ideologies about languages, and what that says about our allegiance to a country too.

Dr Grey: Believe me, Brynn, and I would add to that to what I call a zero-sum mentality. You know, it’s very easy for people in China, in Australia, many other places to argue, well, we need everyone to speak the same language. We need to support that through policy and schools and rules so that we can get things done, so that it’s cohesive to govern, so that the economy runs well.

You know, I’m not necessarily saying that that is wrong, but in addition to that, people can have more than one language, and many people around the world still do, and historically people have been very multilingual, and we tend to forget that you can have a lingua franca and something else, and then when we remember it, often we talk about it in this zero-sum. Well, if you have another language, that’s, you know, that’s reducing your ability in that lingua franca. It’s undermining your accent or the time you can spend learning to read or, you know, whatever.

It’s somehow a deficit that’s holding back your participation in that lingua franca community, and in doing so, you’re, you know, you’re robbing us all of a sort of a chance for prosperity. It’s, you know, it’s a very loaded kind of zero-sum thinking, and it doesn’t need to be that way. And a lot of the, you know, the interviewees in this podcast series have spoken about that, usually in reference to English rather than Mandarin.

But this idea that it can be, you know, lingua franca and, and that can be really beneficial for you and your community and your nation.

Brynn: Exactly. I agree. And I want to know what’s next for you.

Are you continuing this work into China? You mentioned that you wanted to maybe do a lived linguistic landscape in Australia. Do you have any projects that you’re working on now?

Where are you headed now?

Dr Grey: Yeah, look, everything’s happening slowly because good research takes time. But this year, I’ve, so this is 2024 when we’re recording. I’ve just had an article accepted in the Melbourne Asia Review and I’ve also just with my wonderful research assistant, Kristin Martin, produced a little video that will be online soon and both of those are about the Chinese context.

The video is particularly drawing out some ideas to do with language display policy and who that assists or whose aspirations that represents and the short article, which will be freely available online, that’s updating Chinese language policy to look particularly at the use of constitutional law mechanisms in recent years and how that is adding to the infrastructure in support of Putonghua. But other than those things, I’m now going to park my focus on China because I’m really, really interested in what I’m doing in my new project or relatively new project and it needs all of my attention.

I’m working with Kristin who I just mentioned and a couple of other colleagues here from the UTS Jumbunna Institute and a scholar from Sydney Uni who are all indigenous people from the eastern part of Australia and together we’re doing a project that’s really examining the role of the state and in particular the use of government resources like laws in Aboriginal language renewal with a focus on this eastern, southeastern part of Australia.

One of the big questions we have there or the motivation for the study is how is this push for sovereignty or how is this principle of self-determination able to sit with the renewed interest of governments in Australia in Aboriginal language renewal?

Brynn: Wow, that sounds amazing. I can’t wait to hear more about that. Alex, thank you so much for coming on and chatting with me today and I highly recommend this book to everyone.

Dr Grey: Brynn, it’s just a delight to talk about all these years of research and thinking.

Brynn: It makes a big difference when we get to talk about our work, doesn’t it?

Thank you so much and thank you for listening everyone. If you liked our chat today, please subscribe to the Language on the Move Podcast. Leave a five-star review on your podcast app of choice and recommend the Language on the Move Podcast and our partner, the New Books Network, to your students, colleagues and friends. Till next time.

Screenshot of passenger being placed under suspicion on “Border Security”

Anyone who has ever travelled to or from Australia will agree that the last thing you want after getting off a long-haul flight is any further barriers between you and the outside world, a shower, and a bed.  However, given the ever-increasing securitization of borders across the global north, international travellers must first succeed in convincing border officials that they do not pose any type of threat to the nation.

This may be much easier for some people than others. In a recent study, we examined the various aspects of individuals’ language, identity and behaviour that are made salient by border officials in their work, when deciding whether particular people are suspicious or can be trusted. To explore this question, we collected and analysed 108 encounters between border officials and travellers arriving at Australian airports, filmed, produced and broadcast as part of the long-running, popular television series, Border Security: Australia’s Front Line.

In our new article, we show how in these encounters, border officials carry out evaluations of travellers’ credibility, much like those used in other migration processes, such as the assessment of asylum claims.  We find that different individuals are unequally positioned to construct a trustworthy identity based on the way they speak, their social capital, their (perceived or actual) nationality or ethnic origin, their knowledge, and material factors, like the clothes they wear, the money they have, or the other items in their possession.

Officer: (to camera) “This gentleman has arrived on an Italian passport. Speaking to him our officers realized that he’s not a native Italian speaker. The question is now what is his nationality.”

Screenshot of passenger being placed under suspicion on “Border Security”

These factors are made salient in ways that are unreliable and inconsistent, and we critically examine and denaturalize the problematic assumptions underlying them. For example, in the encounter above, Italian citizenship, a political/legal status, is imagined to involve specific social and linguistic experiences and practices, being born and raised in an Italian speaking context, to the exclusion of others, such as migration and naturalization.

In each case, we also compare how border officials are in a stronger position to mobilize the same categories of resources to construct identities for themselves that are trustworthy and credible.

This, we argue, is due largely to the privileged position they have on two different levels, both in terms of how they can control the discourse within their interactions with individual travellers, but also at the level of the television show, in how discourse about these interactions is produced and disseminated.

At the level of the encounters, officials obviously have a very specific role to play: they are the ones who decide who to stop, how to question them, what technologies to use, and, ultimately, how they interpret what they see and hear.

Officer: When we commenced our interview, I specifically stated to you that pursuant to Section 234 of the Migration Act, you’re required to provide me with truthful information. Can you demonstrate to me conclusively that you did work on that farm? I’ll give you this opportunity again, Declan, I’m a pretty fair sort of a guy.

Screenshot of passenger being placed under suspicion on “Border Security”

Not only this, but officers wield power over travellers in terms of the outcomes of these encounters: they may issue fines or warnings, cancel people’s visas and have them deported, or refer them for police investigation. This power undoubtedly influences the way travellers interact with them, and their perceived and actual levels of discursive agency.

However, the inequality does not end there: the television show itself produces discourse about traveller credibility, both in relation to the individuals who appear in the various encounters, but also in terms of the general messages that come from the combination of such interactions. At this level, we identify a range of discursive strategies, including giving the floor to officials to explain to camera the reasons for their suspicions and final decisions, and the use of an omniscient narrator who plays a similar role.

Such is the level of discursive inequality that, for instance, two friends returning to Australia after an overseas trip and going through passport control separately – as required for non-family groups – can become a “hidden” fact to be uncovered and construed as suspicious.

Narrator: Officers have just discovered what seems like a strange coincidence. A passenger at another bench has virtually IDENTICAL travel movements. […] Officers now suspect that these two passengers may in fact know each other.

Screenshot of passenger being placed under suspicion on “Border Security”

This adds another layer of credibility to officials’ border work: along with the show’s narrator, they have a chance to explicitly describe their reasoning processes and the accommodations they offer travellers, to perform procedural fairness for the viewing public.

At the same time, it also provides an additional opportunity to teach the viewing audience to suspect certain types of people and problematize certain attributes or behaviour. We learn, for instance, that people who hold an Italian passport should speak Italian natively, and that not doing so is cause for suspicion.

We learn that travellers from particular countries or ethnicities should be treated with a higher level of suspicion and that their behaviour or explanations require closer scrutiny. The two friends mentioned above weren’t just travelling together – they were travelling to countries in South-East Asia and are themselves of Asian ethnicity. These facts contributed to framing their trip together and their behaviour in the airport as suspicious, where these may otherwise appear completely innocuous.

This is apparent in the individual encounters themselves and how they are narrated, but this is also the case cumulatively, across the television show as a whole: non-white, non-Australian people and those who don’t speak English as a first language are overrepresented as travellers in the show, and can be contrasted with border officials who are predominately white, and “Australian-accented” English speakers (as we discuss in another article).

Screenshot of passenger being placed under suspicion on “Border Security”

Detection of wrongdoing is also overrepresented: in 61 percent of the encounters in our collection, there was a “guilty” outcome: people are detected, fined, have food or goods confiscated, or are arrested or deported. We can imagine that this is vastly disproportionate with the percentage of “wrongdoers” detected in reality. The combined effect of this is that viewers are taught that there is a high level of wrongdoing, meriting a high level of suspicion, and that this needs to be directed primarily at society’s linguistic and racial “others”.

These findings have implications beyond the television show itself: such discourses of suspicion have the potential to encourage viewers to take on personal responsibility for everyday bordering in their own social contexts. They also help to reinforce and garner trust in border policy, procedures and practices, even as it has moved towards criminalizing asylum seekers and other migrants and adopting a “culture of suspicion”.

References

Piller, I., Securing the border of English and Whiteness. Language on the Move, 8 November 2021, https://www.languageonthemove.com/securing-the-borders-of-english-and-whiteness/
Piller, I., Torsh, H., & Smith-Khan, L. Securing the borders of English and Whiteness. Ethnicities. 2023; 23:5, 706-725. https://doi.org/10.1177/14687968211052610
Smith-Khan, L., Five language myths about refugee credibility. Language on the Move, 6 May 2020, https://www.languageonthemove.com/five-language-myths-about-refugee-credibility/
Smith-Khan, L., Piller, I., Torsh, H. Trust at the border: identifying risk and assessing credibility on reality television. Journal of Law and Society. 2024; 51:4 513–538. https://doi.org/10.1111/jols.12505

Anthea’s new book is being launched at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, on the 20^th of November, with hybrid attendance options available. Event information and free registration are via this link: Judging Refugees: Narrative and Oral Testimony in Refugee Status Determination Tickets, Wed 20/11/2024 at 5:30 pm | Eventbrite

If you enjoy the show, support us by subscribing to the Language on the Move Podcast on your podcast app of choice, leaving a 5-star review, and recommending the Language on the Move Podcast and our partner the New Books Network to your students, colleagues, and friends.

Transcript

Laura Smith-Khan: Welcome to the Language on the Move podcast, a channel on the New Books Network. My name is Dr. Laura Smith-Khan and I’m a senior lecturer in law at the University of New England, Australia.

My guest today is Dr. Anthea Vogl, who is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of Technology Sydney. Her research takes a critical interdisciplinary approach to the regulation of migrants and non-citizens, and she researches and teaches across refugee and migration law, administrative law and legal theory. She is currently co-leading an Australian Research Council Discovery Project grant on private refugee sponsorship in Australia and a national grant examining the health requirement imposed on non-citizens under Australian migration law.

Today we are going to talk about Anthea’s new book, Judging Refugees: Narrative and Oral Testimony in Refugee Status Determination, which is published by Cambridge University Press as part of their series, entitled Cambridge Asylum and Migration Studies.

I’ve read the book, of course, and recently reviewed it for the International Journal of Refugee Law. And, as I say in that review, I particularly appreciated how the book explores the “multiple ways narrative performance is implicated in (both) the conduct and the evaluation of refugee hearings”, and I described the book as “the most substantial and persuasive account to date of the impossible narrative demands placed on people seeking asylum.”

So on that note, Anthea. Congratulations on the book, welcome to the show, and thanks so much for joining us today.

Anthea Vogl: Thanks, Laura. It’s a real pleasure to be here, and thanks for that lovely introduction.

Laura Smith-Khan: My pleasure! To start, I’d like you to introduce the book for us, and perhaps you can explain a little more what it’s about.

Anthea Vogl: So the book really is about what we call refugee status determination. And for listeners who don’t exist in a legal framing, that’s really how the law comes to understand whether or not someone is going to be granted refugee status and believed to be the refugee, as they claim to be according to a particular legal definition.

That is the focus of the book that that question of what we do around refugee status determination at its most general. But the book is fundamentally about what happens when we put refugee status determination into practice, and there has been a lot of work done on refugee status determination. And we can talk in a minute about how, why, it’s such a difficult process, but a lot of the work that has been done on refugee status determination hasn’t necessarily had access to or been able to examine what is called the oral hearing, as part of that process.

A fundamental step in the refugee status determination process is where an asylum seeker comes before a decision maker to explain his or her claim. It’s really difficult to access those hearings. It’s really difficult, because of another thing that the book tries to do, which is to set refugee status determination within the broader context of the regulation of the border, and in particular, the incredibly violent and sometimes lethal means states have used to prevent refugees not from just getting to the border, but getting to that place where States are obligated to assess someone’s right to refugee status within their particular country or territory.

In looking at refugee status determination and the oral hearing, what the book tried to do was access some of those spaces that have been so hard to get into and ask, what happens when an applicant comes before a person empowered by the state to assess and judge their story? And how do those oral exchanges ultimately inform and determine that final decision that sometimes we have access to from the public records of refugee status determination bodies. Sometimes we don’t have access to that decision. And what is the relationship between those two things at a really prosaic level? You know, I was really interested in what is happening in the hearings, and then, more legally, I was interested in the relationship between the evidence that comes out in those hearings and what is finally decided. And at a critical level, a long standing critical engagement with the very premise of refugee law and the idea of border regulation, and only letting certain people cross borders on certain terms.

I was interested in the ways in which state written narratives about refugees, and who is an authentic refugee, and who deserves our protection, influences the kind of stories that are told in those hearings.

Laura Smith-Khan: Yeah, thank you so much. There are so many layers to this. And I really admire how well that you bring all those different threads and those different layers together in the book.

And personally, I can attest to how difficult it can be to access this type of research data – incredibly difficult to get permission to sit in and observe these types of hearings or be able to record them or to access recordings of them. So congratulations even on that first crucial step, especially in Australian context.

And it’s also worth pointing out that in a number of countries the hearings aren’t even usually recorded as an official procedural step, so recordings may not ever exist for hearings as well, and that raises a lot of questions about the accountability of those processes, too.

Anthea Vogl: Yeah. And tracking those gaps, I think is something that is a real challenge for researchers and I think it relates back to the secrecy and control that states seek to maintain over refugee issues and refugee law and practice. And actually, it’s a lot of your work, Laura, that I think has really nicely pointed out that even though – and this is a big part of the book, too, and a really nice intersection between our work – even though it’s the refugee who’s ultimately attributed with the testimony that they bring before decision makers, and they’re considered to be the author or the speaker, and then they are judged on that basis, your work has shown really carefully how actually, there are so many different voices, and so many different people who contribute to that particular testimony. And I’m thinking of your work and Katrijn Maryns’ work, and Marie Jacob’s work too.

And yet the refugee’s held responsible for that testimony in the end, and we have no way of tracing some of those processes, and how that comes about for a range of reasons, but also because it’s so hard to access the data.

Laura Smith-Khan: Yeah. And I think that’s where your work really comes in to provide a really good evidence base of what is going on behind the scenes, and also how you can have, on the one hand, these ideas of giving refugees a voice, or that, they’re “telling their story”, and that’s put forward as maybe increasing the legitimacy and fairness of the process. But what your book does so well is actually pulls apart what is happening, what is expected, and actually demonstrates so clearly how the demands or the expectations of a certain type of narrative, are controlled by the decision maker, ultimately, both within the hearing, and then also afterwards by the fact that they are the ones that take what has happened in the hearing and reframe it in their decision on both those levels the narrative is never really under the control of the asylum seeker. And that’s just such a great contribution to demonstrate that across all these different examples across Canada and Australia.

But I think maybe we should step back and give a little bit more overview of what the process looks like for someone if they’re seeking protection as a refugee in a country in the global north.

Anthea Vogl: Yeah, great. There’s a lot we could say about the content of refugee law and how it operates. But I think it might be useful to focus on the procedure for the purposes of the podcast.

Very briefly, there’s a definition in international refugee law, and it’s often imported into states that have become signatories to the Refugee Convention. Refugees have to prove that they face a well founded fear of persecution on one of five grounds, race, religion, ethnicity, and political opinion and particular social group.

What’s interesting there is that sense that the refugee has to give an account of their own fear on the basis of a particular ground, and that fear has to be both judged to be true on a subjective level, in that the refugee has to themselves have that well-founded fear, but it has to be objectively true, so it has to accord with a legal and evidence-based assessment of whether or not that person has or would have experienced, something to give rise to a fear in their country of origin.

As listeners, as you start to think through who refugees are and how they come before a decision making body in a global north state, what will probably spring into your mind is that people don’t necessarily come with access to the kinds of things that the law takes to be convincing and compelling in terms of forms of evidence. So someone’s fleeing their home state, and they are seeking to prove that their home state has persecuted them or harmed them, or people in their home state have persecuted or harmed them. The chance of being able to access those records, or having indeed left with written or documentary evidence of that having happened, is really slim.

Even where people leave with the most basic forms of documentary evidence which would help their claim. So really simple things, like even identity documents, even those identity documents are not necessarily the kinds of evidence, or they’re not in a category of what we talk about as probative evidence. We can’t even see prove that those written documents are authentic and true. And so there’s already this massive barrier to making a claim.

And in many ways the refugee status determination process and how it works both seeks to respond to that challenge – I think if we read in good faith the setting up of the refugee status determination process, it talks about having to give applicants the benefit of the doubt, because they don’t have other forms of evidence to build their claim for the purpose of the book. Why, that’s really important is because where we’re left is with both written and oral testimony, as the absolute foundation of how most refugees will make a claim before a court.

Sometimes there are other witnesses or people that someone might be able to call. That happens rarely, and sometimes people have had access to really good records, to substantiate their claim interestingly with social media and the digitization of some forms of evidence that’s like added a whole other interesting element to evidence that might be available. But to really summarize what happens, both at the first and sometimes second level of decision making. So before things are reviewed by courts, an asylum seeker comes before a decision maker. He or she or they may or may not have access to legal assistance, and both Canada and Australia are good examples. Without generalizing too much, even in the hearings, those who have access to a lawyer and a lawyer present, it really is the applicant giving testimony to the decision maker and the decision maker questioning and interrogating that evidence for most of the hearing.

And then, very importantly, the other person in the hearing, in almost all cases, is the interpreter. Keeping in mind another core challenge of refugee status determination, which you are, of course, very familiar with Laura, and will probably be of central relevance to listeners is that that the whole process happens across the applicant’s own language and the language of the host country, which are very rarely the same language, but sometimes they are. In all of the hearings that were included in the book, in both Australia and Canada, there was an interpreter present. In one of the hearings one of the applicants was confident with English, and the interpreter dipped in and out, but otherwise the interpreter was also the third voice in the hearing.

Laura Smith-Khan: Yeah, so you’ve got this really strong reliance on both written oral testimony, and very specific requirements in terms of the written testimony in terms of application forms, filling out a lot of different types of information. And there’s some great scholarship around how those different forms of testimony can also then be used to find inconsistencies. And these types of things come up in credibility assessment, too.

Anthea Vogl: Yeah, and it’s probably worth saying that one of those taken for granted bits of knowledge within refugee status determination and refugee law is that the claim is assessed on the basis of the substance of the claim. So it is assessed in terms of what is being told, and whether the decision maker finds those things to be plausible and true are a key part of that, and whether or not they accord with the legal framework, and also does your claim fit into what the law has said in your country, of where you’re seeking asylum a refugee is, or how it defines refugee.

But a key part of all refugee status determination, precisely because often of this absence of other evidence, is the credibility of the applicant and their evidence. So the applicant themselves, and the credibility of the story that’s being told, or the evidence being given, and credibility assessment in most countries turns on three main criteria: the idea of consistency and coherence that you just referred to and that’s consistency and coherence across multiple tellings. So you have to make sure that you are telling the same story again and again and again, which again, listeners can think about how difficult that is even just in the ordinary course of their own lives, not in an adjudicative setting.

The second criterion is plausibility, so is the story being told plausible. And then a third criterion that comes up is demeanour which has been really roundly criticized in a lot of jurisdictions, and I don’t necessarily address too much in the book, because I wanted to reinforce the ways in which, of all the criteria that have all been criticized, it’s the one, I think, with even less credibility than the other criteria.

But that credibility assessment is a key part of the claim, and it’s almost like a compulsory part of a lot of work on refugee status determination, that as scholars, we all know that decision making turns on the credibility of the applicant, much more so than it does on the legal and factual elements of the claim.

Laura Smith-Khan: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I think the demeanour one is quite interesting in the sense that. There is a stronger consensus that it’s not something that should be relied on. But then, maybe it still is, and it’s not explicitly mentioned, or in my own research, I found at least that it’s mentioned when it’s relied on positively. So for, you know, “there are some inconsistencies here, but this person in general seems, you know, authentic” and blah blah, So it can be used in somebody’s favour, and then maybe not mentioned when it goes against them, something along those lines.

But yes, absolutely, the different types of what have been called indicators of credibility. And it really is such a foundational and crucial part of the refugee status determination process

And it’s so important in how your analysis, looking at these different narrative demands, really brings out how credibility or incredibility can be produced through unrealistic expectations of this particular type of narrative, and also the way that the decision maker controls the hearing in such a way that it makes it really difficult for the person seeking asylum to actually perform as they’re required to perform. So I’m really looking forward into drilling down a little bit more into that process.

I’d really like to just briefly talk again about your data that you have. So we’ve already mentioned that you had access to hearings. But could you just explain to us exactly what type of data you collected, where, when and the challenges, you might have faced with that.

Anthea Vogl: Yeah, for sure. Essentially, the method at the core of the book was, what is maybe a bit counterintuitively called participant observation of hearings which, some listeners might be familiar with, but I mean, to just to encapsulate it, it was sitting in refugee hearings as they took place, without actively participating in them, beyond making my presence known and seeking permission to be in those spaces.

Interestingly, and relevant to our discussion earlier. All of my access to those spaces came by the refugee applicants themselves. And there was more hostility from the Australian refugee decision making space than the Canadian refugee decision making space in relation to my presence, even though under the relevant statute in Australia, the refugee applicant has the right to allow people into their own hearing, the tribunal, some way into the research, overrode that.

They also have the right to control who is and isn’t in the hearing. It’s a little bit legally grey. But it wasn’t a point I was going to pursue, obviously, in the really delicate and stressful context of someone having their claim assessed, when the Department said, “No, thank you. We don’t want you in the hearing anymore.”

That’s when I started to work with some audio transcripts and recordings of particular hearings in the Australian context. In the Canadian context, both through refugee applicants and through the UNHCR, I attended the hearings.

It’s important to note, I think, for the book, it’s work that came out of my doctoral project, and the hearings really have not, even though the last hearing that I attended was 2015, which doesn’t make it current data. And it’s not current work of mine, but it’s something I really wanted to come back to in terms of publishing and thinking about it. The one thing in thinking that through and thinking about. What does it mean that these hearings don’t continue on into the present day?

I tracked the history of the oral hearing itself. And what has happened to the oral hearing in both jurisdictions. And I guess one of the things that I came to in doing that was that there’s been a lot of reform around refugee status determination processing. And I argued primarily to make it faster and more efficient in ways that disadvantage the applicant.

But really what hasn’t changed. So those changes have happened around the oral hearing and the oral hearing has remained. This central fulcrum on which the whole process turns, and I would say, unfortunately, there’s even more pressure on the applicant getting their claim right in the oral hearing, because timelines have been shorter in the lead up to it, and appeal and review rights have gotten even more attenuated and limited.

So what that ended up as was 15 hearings across both jurisdictions along with the case files for the applicants. And, importantly, the decisions. Coming back to that earlier point, that really interesting question of what was said in the hearing? How did stories and language come up, and how are they assessed and tested? And then what did the decision makers say about what happened in the hearing? There were some really interesting gaps to follow through and comparisons to make.

So it was the hearings themselves, being in the hearings and observing them. And then the case files. And I really used that material to conduct pretty deeply qualitative assessment of what was going on in the hearings. And again, you know, you’re always thinking through methods and trying to be critical about your approach.

At the start, I was hoping to maybe look at one particular ground, or one particular kind of claim or claimant. But really some of those challenges of accessing the hearing influenced this final decision to look across claims and across claimants and across countries of origin.

And the other thing was, I guess what I was looking at was this sense of what was going on in the oral exchange, and the structure and procedure of the hearing so that helped make those things more comparable.

But I would like to really acknowledge work that I think has been really critical looking at particular kinds of claimants. So, LGBTIQ claimants, people making claims on the basis of gendered persecution, particularly women, particular political opinions coming out of particular countries of origin. I think that work’s been really important. I look at some stock stories and assumptions in the hearing and the way narrative works more generally, and they really drill down into the ways in which global north states require particularly racialised people to tell particular stories about themselves when they are, for example, a woman facing harm, or a queer person who hasn’t been able to live safely on the basis of sexuality.

Laura Smith-Khan: Yeah, I think I think that’s what’s so great about this quite broad and quite large collection of scholarship, as you say, is that everyone has had different kinds of access to different types of data and different conceptual frameworks as well and different methodologies, but actually so much of it complements each other so well. So we have that ability to draw on that scholarship, and then see how it applies to our particular context, our particular data in such really valuable ways.

And such a great reflection as well, on how, in the one sense, you could potentially-  See, your data is amazing, and I’m very jealous of it. But in terms of the small number of hearings that you got to observe. On the one hand, you could see it as like a gap or a lost opportunity to, as you say, drill down and look at a specific type of claim across a really large number of cases. But, on the other hand, it creates this really fantastic opportunity to look at that bigger picture across those particular hearings, and see what they have in common, or the patterns that you can see emerging from it.

And you’ve also done such fantastic conceptual thinking. And I really think, yeah, as you say, you acknowledge that this has come from your PhD research, which was a number of years ago. But I’m very grateful that you went ahead and did the book, because I think it’s a great contribution. But I also assume, based on my own experience of how my understanding of my research has changed over time, I assume that maybe your development of the concepts or the theories that you’d like to apply to this data has changed over time. Because I think that’s also a really important contribution in the book. The way that you bring in a number of different areas, a number of different theoretical frameworks, and use them to analyze your data.

Anthea Vogl: Yeah, that’s such a nice way of thinking about it. And it makes me reflect on the ways in which sometimes, yeah, your analysis can be latent, or you start with an idea, and the more you come back to your work. I think for me that sense of reading the hearing contextually and refusing to just individualise what was going on in the hearing, both in relation to the decision makers actually, and the applicants.

So not understanding that the decision makers have a lot of responsibility for how the hearing works, and your work has looked at this, too, Laura, the really limited ways in which credibility is actually governed, or how we define the credibility criteria themselves, how we understand them, and then how they are implemented and the responsibility the decision maker has leaves for some pretty big, capacious, billowy spaces of legal regulation.

But having said that, yes, coming back to the book, that sense of some of the structural forces at play, both in terms of narrative and language and in terms of the politicization of the hearings that has really continued in a pretty relentless way was important.

But yeah, I guess, as you say, in thinking about, you know the data that you have, and coming back to it, I’m wondering, you know, of its relevance. Some of the law and language work in this space, I guess it’s simpatico in particular ways, because you look at one hearing, and you can look at a paragraph within a hearing and really break down what is happening between, say, an interpreter and an applicant and a decision maker, and there’s so much going on at the level of understanding that even if the hearings were perfectly structured and the fairest possible versions of themselves, there would still be these incredible linguistic, cultural, and adjudicative or contextual barriers to understanding and communicating in that space.

Laura Smith-Khan: Yeah, absolutely. There are so many opportunities to look at the data on so many different levels and make sense of it in so many different ways. And, as you said, also contextualizing the hearings within their political and historical context as well. And I really enjoyed that chapter as well where you gave this overview of that exact thing across both Australia and Canada, and mapped some of the parallels, and also noted some of the differences. And also this really ironic or interesting tension, or seemingly contradictory pattern that emerges between, on the one hand, really, you bigoted, discriminatory, hateful political discussion about people seeking asylum on the one hand, and needing to control and stop their entry and deter them and punish them. And, on the other hand, at the same time, this development of what seems to be oh, we need to make the processes more fair, and you know, set them out in a bit more detail and have really good procedures. And there’s that weird tension, because those things are happening similar like simultaneously, it’s really quite interesting. So then you’re left with these processes that look very rigorous, trying to make sure that everyone’s accommodated, and we can communicate across language, barriers and all these things. But, on the other hand, it’s all happening against this really horrible kind of political discourse in the broader public space.

Anthea Vogl: Yeah, and trying, yes you say, there’s a real tension, and I think you know the book very much I guess aims to be a critical theoretical take on what’s going on in the hearings and what’s demanded of refugee applicants as testimony givers. But you know, as an advocate, and someone really committed to refugee justice on the ground I wanted to make really clear that we can’t lose sight of in the context is as it is a commitment to as fair a process as possible. Even if I’m you know, pretty directly critical of procedural fairness or improving credibility standards in this context as fixing the process. I don’t think it will, but the hearing itself and access to legal assistance and access to interpreters, you know, these are really fundamentally important things.

And when people had no ability to put their claims. So, looking at that history, you know, it comes from a complete, almost completely discretionary determination of people’s claims into what was a reform around individual rights to fair hearings both in Australia and Canada, and the right to be heard as a form of administrative justice and natural justice.

You know, I think, given the context, those things are really very important. But then, you see the way in which that individualizing feeds back into this broader narrative of authentic and inauthentic refugees, reinforces, and indeed generates and creates stories of genuine and credible asylum seekers as against bogus and unbelievable and incredible asylum seekers. And the person who bears the responsibility for that, you know, is sometimes, is the asylum seeker at the center of this assessment process regardless sometimes. Not always. You know there are some. There are concessions made, and I think, importantly, really important, research. Looking at the challenges, particular kinds of applicants facing, speaking their claims and narrating their claims.

But you know, generally, it’s the applicant that bears the responsibility of navigating that system and putting forward a claim that it is deemed to be credible. I think it’s important as scholars and thinkers that we don’t become inured or numb, or we stop forgetting how shocking that is. You know that, regardless of what an applicant has been through, or what testimony that they’re giving, their testimony must meet these particular standards of evidence giving, which I guess the book tries to draw on this the amazing literature at the intersection of law and psychology, which has said these are just, entirely unreasonable expectations to have of people’s language, and what the human memory can and can’t do generally. Just, you know, regardless of what might have happened to one person as an individual, but particularly in the context of anyone who suffered major violence, harm and trauma. And what that does to language.

Laura Smith-Khan: Absolutely. And that, yeah, we then still expect these individual people to be able to perform in these very, very specific ways.

Okay. So I think I would like to ask you a little bit in more detail now, because I’ve been hinting at this. What exactly is demanded, what types of different narratives or expectations did you find.

Anthea Vogl: Yeah. One thing that I that motivated the project and led to, I guess a series of findings was a bit of curiosity around what we mean when we talk about narrative in law and narrative studies and law and literature. So these bodies of work were really helpful, and I think particularly law and storytelling, which has come out of critical race theory and really looked at, you know, who gets to tell stories before the law who gets to judge them, and which ones are credible. For the refugee hearings and the book, I think drilling down into the specific narrative demands made of refugees, and the construction of narrative really informed the findings of the book.

Because it’s one thing to say, yeah. People, we demand stories. We demand people tell stories. But what does that mean? And why is it a problem, I think, for refugee applicants?

There are a couple of things. One, very significantly was that idea of a really Western narrative form which is temporarily located, even if it might not be chronological, that it’s sequenced in a way that is explicable. And that there’s a sense of most narrative studies talking one way or another about causation or connection between events and an accounting of that causation. So you can’t say, you know, “I went to the shop today, and tomorrow I brush my teeth.” That doesn’t make a narrative, because you’re meant to, you know, account for why you’re telling these things in a particular way, in a particular order, and someone might say that was out of order, because you should brush your teeth first.

So that sense of refugees being able to account for the connection between events in their lives and account for them in a way that – and this is a narrative, that coming from Western and Anglo European narrative studies – where there’s a real sense of not only being able to explain causality between events that happened to you, but that they should all come together in a sense of what’s sometimes called moral closure, a moral lesson or meaning. So a story has to have a particular meaning, and that that has to make sense. So that comes back to that credibility standard of plausibility. So it’s only plausible if you can sequence it, account for connections between events, and then provide some form of moral meaning or moral closure.

And this is the work of Marita Eastmond and a range of other really great critical non legal scholars often talking about refugee status determination. That’s not how things happen to people, and seeing that play out in the hearings was really apparent, making things make sense in a particular way, accounting for connections between events.

And then the other really important part of narrative studies as it connects to the work that I did, and what I saw in the hearings, was an accounting, a demand for refugees to account for themselves, like to understand themselves, and be able to really clearly explain how and why they did things, and to do that in a way that denied ambivalence, denied confusion, denied the impact of the circumstances that they were in that might have led to arbitrary decision, making or decision making that I can’t account for.

And then really, I wanted to say shockingly, but it was more infuriating, listening to decision makers wanting refugees to also account for other actors in their story. So you can imagine.

Laura Smith-Khan: Oh, my God! Yes.

Anthea Vogl: Yeah, it’s so. You know, this is where you start to see how literature helps us understand why this is a problem.

Work has been done on this in a more legal framing. But the idea that the applicant would have to account for the decisions of their persecutors. So if a persecutor let them, if someone was let out of jail, even though they were then you know they were then free of their captors. But then, say, re-imprisoned. If that didn’t make sense to the decision maker, the refugee had to account for why a state jailer might let someone free from arbitrary detention.

And again, the need to do that with clarity and certainty in order to reassure a decision maker in a sense of what might or might not be consistent or plausible, was really disturbing. And then I connected that to a narrative voice, or a particular version of the coming of age novel, or what gets called the Bildungsroman in German, because that’s where it’s said to come from. Which is the formation novel, which is like an all-knowing narrator. So if you did just.

Laura Smith-Khan: Omniscient.

Anthea Vogl: Yeah, exactly. So. It’s like the refugee applicant, in the hearings I observed, didn’t just have to tell a story that ended in this moral closure of becoming a refugee and a resolution to seek confidently seek refugee status. But along the way had to account for sometimes really minute aspects of the story that they themselves were part of, or that they were subject to as a narrator, in order to make the claim credible to a decision maker.

So to summarize that, I think, looking at the elements of narrative a little bit more theoretically, or looking at narrative structure, and then asking how they informed, or how they came up in the hearings, was a useful way to come back to a broader politics of storytelling and how it was operating in the hearing.

And I really appreciated, when you said earlier, you know, we assume that this right to tell one’s story is something that is a positive development and that, you know, being able to – and yes, storytelling itself has been cast as a really important part of, I think, campaigns for political justice, and I think that is true.

But there’s also a disciplining function of telling particular stories and people are disciplined into being certain kinds of subjects before the law, and it’s really clear the kinds of subjects refugees have to be in order to fit within the storytelling frame that decision makers accepted as true.

Laura Smith-Khan: Yeah, I when I was reading those parts of the book, I was – you know, waving my hands around and screaming almost. And I really appreciated like, because they resonated a lot with me, things that I’ve observed myself in work contexts.

But the theoretical frameworks that you had to work with from narrative studies and law and literature really helped name or you know, account for what’s happening there and why it’s so problematic. And it’s this, expectation, as you said, that we have somebody who not only has to account for themselves and explain why every single choice that they’ve made along the way is completely rational and well informed, and not emotional, or needs to be more emotional, or, you know, whatever the expectations are, but also that they have to account for every single other person who’s part of “their story” along the way, including sometimes even they’re persecutors.

Of course they can’t get inside the head of other people, and people do irrational things all the time. Or you know, there are motivations that we don’t understand informing why they make the choices that they do.

Anthea Vogl: Yeah.

Laura Smith-Khan: Yeah, just so problematic too.

Anthea Vogl: Yeah. And I think you know, what was really apparent was when that wasn’t. It happened in so many of the hearings that there were a couple of hearings that I point to where it’s like. Oh, no! There was a space for the applicant to express what happened without having to take responsibility for imbuing that with plausibility, sense, rationality, as you say, and like moral meaning.

And that burden of having to do that was was so conspicuous in its absence. Because you started to say, Oh, this is this could look significantly different. I think it wouldn’t solve all the problems or the fact that we still don’t have great indicia. We don’t have great ways to tell, to determine with any degree of certainty what truth is in these contexts.

But yeah, as you say, when it was there, it was just such a barrier to being able to just provide the evidence that was required of the applicants as they were coming before decision makers.

Laura Smith-Khan: Yeah, and something that a lot of the literature talks about especially in the Australian context, and perhaps also in the Canadian context, the idea that theoretically this is supposed to be an inquisitorial process where the decision maker is responsible for, you know, searching around for evidence and helping to produce the evidence. But in reality, at least in these particular contexts, it does seem quite adversarial. Right? That’s maybe a reflection of our particular legal systems.

Anthea Vogl: Yeah. And I think again, yeah, narrative theory was helpful in thinking through the different reasons we tell stories and the different settings that we tell them in, and how that will inflect the story that’s being told, what can be said, what can’t be said, how we might imagine an audience receives our testimony or testimony more generally.

And I think one of the things that became apparent in thinking through this idea of a narrative occasion is that it’s not easy to tell one’s story to begin with. But if there is a context in which a decision maker is also impeding your ability to meet these narrative standards. Then I guess that’s when for me the argument about credibility and decision making spaces as gatekeeping comes together because one of the findings and I think this has come through in other people’s work because it’s clear in decisions.

So a lot of work in the credibility space has also looked at the written reasons and written decisions. But people that I observed, the hearings that I observed, applicants were asked to tell the story and to meet some of these standards that we’ve just spoken about. And then the hearing itself did all of these things to just make that actually impossible. So even if the applicant could meet those demands the behaviour of a decision maker, the norms-

And so again, not necessarily bringing this home to individual decision makers because I didn’t- it wasn’t an ethnography of decision making. I didn’t have a quantitative number of, it wasn’t a quantitative study of how decision makers behave.

But the norms, as you say, around how the hearing is conducted was not to open up a space where someone could present narrative on their own terms, and then be judged on the on the terms of the decision maker and hearing it was instead, I guess what I observed was fragmentation decision makers interjecting themselves into applicant’s stories and actually asking exactly the kinds of questions that even the very limited guidance, legal guidance, or usually policy guidance, on credibility that exists, asking those kinds of questions. So the guidance that we have generally says it’s not uncommon for people to forget dates. It’s not uncommon for memory to be interrupted by traumatic events. And so that’s all there.

And yet, you know, decision makers really pushing for “did this”, not just “did this happen before or after this other thing?” But you know, “when did this happen? What year was it? You earlier said it was early in the year. Now you’re saying it was October. Why are you doing that?” So really interrogating and looking for moments where the credibility criteria wasn’t being met against the credibility guidance, such as it is, that exists.

So yeah, that that sense of the inquisitorial hearing was absolutely, apart from, I would say two of the hearings that I observed, just really absent from the hearings that were part of the study.

Laura Smith-Khan: Yeah. So even where there are guidelines with very specific advice, the fact that they just seem to be routinely overlooked or ignored is yeah, very, quite concerning yeah. And you’ve touched on another really important chapter in your book in terms of the conduct of the hearing and the fact that we have this idea of applicants having the space, and the floor, I guess, in communication to be able to just say things, tell their story. But what that actually looks like in terms of the hearing structure can be very different.

And I think you talked about the difference between Canada and Australia as well in terms of the order of the hearing.

Anthea Vogl: Yeah, I mean, it’s interesting. There was a similar kind of unpredictability around how the hearings went. So I guess that was another finding. And I must say, I attended hearings first in the context of, before coming to research, in the context of refugee advocacy.

And I really did, I think it’s not naive to think that if you have a hearing where a refugee believes that his or her or their story is being assessed that they will be able to tell their story. I mean, I look back on it, and I think it’s naive. It feels a bit naive, but, as you say, it’s like, well, here’s the space. It’s an open space, tell your story. It’s not how it works.

Sometimes the Canadian hearings, even though they were, they sometimes they made much clearer that they were just going to interrogate aspects that the decision maker found implausible, or the aspects of the decision maker was concerned to get more information about. And that was done more predictably. So, even though it wasn’t this open space for storytelling on one level, that benefited applicants because they were told what was coming at them

In the Australian hearings, a little bit about how the hearing is introduced, or how the decision maker sets up the hearing, when the applicant walks in and begins the hearing and it was, it was still- You know, an applicant would still be forgiven for thinking they’re about to be able to tell their story, and to do that in something of a chronological way. What we sometimes would call just for shorthand, and maybe even non lawyers know this, the idea of evidence in chief. So you get to tell your story before someone tests it. That really didn’t happen in any of the hearings that I observed.

And so the that sense of being able to create coherence and create plausibility was denied to the applicant, even though you know a lot of work on law and language and credibility in the hearings and Law and Psych has pointed out, it’s, you know there are barriers to doing that, in any event.

Laura Smith-Khan: Yeah, I think it’s probably worth just as a slight aside to explain to listeners who aren’t familiar with the setting that in the Australian context that the hearings that you were observing were a second hearing. So there’d already been an application process, and there’d already been an interview with the Immigration Department, and that hadn’t gone well, and the particular person had been, you know, rejected. They had their claims rejected. And then, after that, the second stage hearing was with a review body that looks at the whole claim afresh. So they aren’t supposed to just look at the first decision, and see whether that was done correctly, but actually look afresh at any fresh claims, or you know what’s happened since then, and the whole claim. So on the one hand, there could potentially be the expectation that they’re just reviewing the existing record. But ideally they would give the applicants a complete fresh chance to share their story, as it were.

Anthea Vogl: Yeah, yeah, that’s always. I teach a refugee law clinic. And it’s always so difficult to explain to students that this process is meant to be fresh review of the original decision, so just a rehearing of the decision as it was first made. And of course that’s not what happens in the hearings, and as advocates you’re always you’re already, and the book talks a little bit about and there’s been great work done by Jesse Hambly and Nick Gill and others about the role of lawyers, and also a lot of the law and language schools, too. Great recent piece by Katrijn Maryns and Marie Jacobs about the role of lawyers and their politics.

But I think, what really comes through when you’re looking at the way in which the hearings operate, and what the applicant can and can’t say is that there’s no version where there’s an ability to clearly articulate your story on your own terms. And so you then, you’re just fed back into this process where the decision maker is picking up on things that he or she has already observed as a problem with your narrative.

Laura Smith-Khan: Yep. Starting from that point of problem or distrust.

Anthea Vogl: Yeah.

Laura Smith-Khan: To somehow work from that back footed position, which is, yeah, a whole different challenge.

Yes. Wow. So yeah, I think it was valuable to read about your reflections in terms of you know. What does all this mean for our ability to make an impact? And you know, what is it? Does this lead us to any kind of suggested reform? Or you know, what does this all mean, especially when we’re looking at that broader question of structural unfairness, that really comes out so clearly in the book.

Do you have any hope?

Anthea Vogl: I mean, look. One thing, that without being a prescription of reforms to fix the process which the book just, you know, is really open about that. That’s not. That would be that would come out of, or that some of these observations would hope to inform that maybe accepting that some of the broader political challenges, or that the reforms have to take place in light of attention to the idea that there’s some, if we have in Australia, and you know Canada does its own share of this increasingly with the US-Canada border.

If we have a regime that’s willing to exert such brutal violence on people seeking to cross the borders and make an asylum claim, what does it mean, then, to demand, or how do we understand that alongside, is a real question. I think a very sincere and genuine quest of many scholars, advocates, lawyers, decision makers to make this process fair and equitable.

I think that they’re the two really hard things to hold within the frame together. I mean that, having been said, I do think the interdisciplinary work that has been done on the problems with the process. And I am not just saying this because we’re conducting a law and language podcast you know the work that has been done by law and language, and like law and, the intersection of law and language attending to what goes on in the hearing, and how decisions are made.

The other interdisciplinary, that big body of interdisciplinary work, looking at the intersection between law and psychology, and trying to really understand how these incredibly unfair and incorrect, you know, just blatantly incorrect inferences are drawn in the hearings, gives me hope.

Because I don’t think, you know –  I think there is a gap between the politics and also the will of decision makers and decision making bodies to make good decisions. That having been said, you know, I think that site of interdisciplinary knowledge is crucial for understanding legal processes here. I don’t think we get very far with a legal analysis of refugee decision making.

So in that kind of sense of grounding reforms, I think it’s really important. And the other thing that I do think, and I try and talk about this at the end of the book, if we are stuck with this process, if we, and I know a lot of things are on the horizon, including AI and Automated decision making, which will require us as researchers and advocates interested in justice for good decision making and refugee justice, we’ll have to engage with those things.

But I think if the hearing is in its current form, working hard to preserve the quality of the procedure and people’s access to good legal advice and proper interpreters and proper timelines before and after the hearing is part of the struggle in the interim.

I think there’s really good work. I do think the critical work which has just really come at credibility as lacking. I mean your own work. But really, the critical cultural studies work about the problems with all of these stereotypes that exist within credibility assessment.

Even at the level of international NGOs, maybe not yet government, there is a real consensus that credibility is dysfunctional, like the credibility assessment process is not working, and I do hope that they will work on that, that there will be an ability to really think of something. I don’t think that will solve the problems, but it affords a little bit more justice in these testimonial spaces and spaces of decision making.

Laura Smith-Khan: Yeah, for sure. While ever we’re working within the existing system, it is really heartening to see, I think, at least at an individual level, lawyers and also decision makers being quite receptive to that type of interdisciplinary research.

Anthea Vogl: Interest.

Laura Smith-Khan: And I guess we just all have, you know, a kind of quite hefty duty and responsibility to communicate it to them in ways they are going to take it on and use it productively within the problematic context in which we we’re all doing our work.

Anthea Vogl: Yeah, I mean, yeah. So true. I mean, sometimes I catch myself. I’m not pessimistic. But I’m kind of you know, I think it’s important to always think politically and contextually. And you know, I was like, I just don’t think, you know, coming to a pretty negative conclusion. But like, yeah, towards the end of the book.

Anthea Vogl: Gregor Noll recently also wrote something, so a scholar of credibility and refugee assessment for a long time, reflecting on whether or not we can make RSD work in the context of the current credibility standards, and I think the work of Jane Herlihy, who has also engaged with this.

And you know that there’s just a really clear no, you know, there’s not a reformist agenda. I don’t think that works around the credibility assessment, the current credibility criteria, as they’re currently expressed. And then what that looks like in these hearings. So even though I don’t mean to be, I was like, “am I being too pessimistic?” You know “is it too much of a harsh conclusion?” But I think that kind of consensus, and then the receptiveness of at least trying to think of other ways, to approach testimony is hugely important. Unless we really take seriously the problem of individualized status determination which I don’t think states will be doing away with anytime soon.

Laura Smith-Khan: Yes, absolutely. I think I personally felt that you did a really good job of very explicitly, you know, drawing a line, really making it clear that you know it’s not just enough to walk away from reading this book and say, “Oh, well, you know, we can just tweak this little bit, or just avoid doing that particular thing, or requiring this, or don’t interrupt,” or you know these little things that we can check off the list, and then everything’s going to be fine, not enough. And we can’t accept that as good enough. And I think that’s a really powerful and important statement to walk away from with this book.

I thought it was really well expressed. And yeah, it is very easy to just fall into cynicism when you’re working in this space, but also to be able to say specifically, you know, these are the things that I’m identifying in this work. This is what other people are identifying. This is what we can say within this system, but to acknowledge that the system is fundamentally flawed within itself, and while ever it exists, as it is, there’s a limit to achieving the ultimate goal of, you know truly fair processes and affording everyone protection when they need it. Yeah, hopefully, that’s not too glum.

Anthea Vogl: No. And I think, yeah, I’m reminded of yeah, of Hilary Evans Cameron’s work, who’s worked in this space. And you know, she really reinforces that in the search for truth that our focus should be on – the state’s focuses on the danger of a false positive, you know, giving someone status when they “shouldn’t” have been given status because they didn’t have a real claim. And you know, like shifting the focus to actually, a false negative. You know? How do we actually attend to the ways in which decision making that should be the focus of our concerns, given what refugee law regulates and what’s at stake in these decisions.

Laura Smith-Khan: Absolutely. I find that argument, I’ve heard that one from her as well, so persuasive that it’s much more important to protect against or avoid false negatives, you know rejections that shouldn’t have been rejections rather occasionally, you know, “letting someone in” who, you know, doesn’t “deserve our protection”. And I’ve spoken with lawyers as well, who make a parallel between this particular setting and credibility and the criminal law. You know, we give people the benefit of the doubt. We assume someone is innocent until proven guilty rather than the other way around, and the stakes are just as high or arguably higher in this particular setting. So why not try something similar here? Yeah.

If we can address the larger socio-political context in which all of it…Yeah, to to be worked on today and in the future.

Anthea Vogl: That small problem. Yeah.

Laura Smith-Khan: Thanks so much for speaking with me today, Anthea, and congratulations once again on this really incredible contribution that you’ve made to this very important scholarship. I understand that you have a book launch which is coming up fairly soon. Could you share the details with us?

Anthea Vogl: Yeah, so the book came out earlier this year. But these things take more time than you anticipate. So on the 20th of November here. I’m currently, I should have said, I’m so sorry I should have said I’m here in Gadigal land, on Gadigal Land, in Sydney. We are having a book launch at the Centre for International Law and the Centre for Criminology, Law and Justice at UNSW. And the UNSW Kaldor Centre would have the details and the registration link. So I’m really looking forward to that. I’m grateful to those centres for launching the book, and it’ll be just an hour discussion at 5.30 in a few weeks from now.

Laura Smith-Khan: Yeah, it’s not too far away, I think hopefully, we will have this podcast up and published before then, so we can publicize it. And I’ll be able to include a link to the invitation.

Anthea Vogl: Amazing. That’d be great. And it is also a hybrid for people who are listening from places other than Sydney, it’s a hybrid event. So there’s an online attendance option.

Laura Smith-Khan: Fantastic. Thank you so much. Thanks again.

Anthea Vogl: Thank you. Thanks for such wonderful questions, Laura, and you are absolutely the best person for engaging with the book. So it’s been really a pleasure to speak to you about it.

Laura Smith-Khan: So wonderful to read it, and thanks for taking the time to discuss it with us, and thanks everyone for listening. If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe to our channel, leave a 5-star review on your podcast app of choice and recommend the Language on the Move podcast and our partner, the New Books Network to your students, colleagues, and friends. Till next time!

References

Berg, Laurie & Millbank, Jenni (2009). Constructing the Personal Narratives of Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Asylum Claimants. Journal of Refugee Studies, vol. 22, no. 2, pp. 195-223.

Eastmond, Marita (2007). Stories as Lived Experience: Narratives in Forced Migration Research. Journal of Refugee Studies, vol 20, no. 2, pp. 248-264.

Evans Cameron, Hilary (2018). Refugee Law’s Fact-Finding Crisis: Truth, Risk and the Wrong Mistake (Cambridge University Press).

Hambly, Jessica & Gill, Nick (2020). Law and Speed: Asylum Appeals and the Techniques and Consequences of Legal Quickening. Journal of Law and Society, vol. 47, no. 1, pp. 3-28.

Herlihy, Jane & Turner, Stuart W (2009). The Psychology of Seeking Protection. International Journal of Refugee Law, vol. 21, pp. 171-192.

Jacobs, Marie & Maryns, Katrijn (2022). Managing Narratives, Managing Identities: Language and Credibility in Legal Consultations with Asylum Seekers. Language in Society, vol 51, no. 3, pp. 375-402.

Noll, Gregor (2021). Credibility, Reliability, and Evidential Assessment, in C Costello, M Foster & J McAdam (eds), The Oxford Handbook of International Refugee Law (Oxford University Press), ch. 33.

Smith-Khan, Laura (2019). Why Refugee Visa Credibility Assessments Lack Credibility: A Critical Discourse Analysis. Griffith Law Review, vol 28, no. 4, pp 406-430.

Vogl, Anthea (2024). Judging Refugees: Narrative and Oral Testimony in Refugee Status Determination (Cambridge University Press)

We discuss discursive management in the context of police first responders and domestic violence victims, focusing on Kate’s research in her 2024 paper ‘“Can I Have a Look?”: The Discursive Management of Victims’ Personal Space During Police First Response Call-Outs to Domestic Abuse Incidents’.

Using body cam footage from police call outs for domestic violence incidents, this paper focuses on how the interaction between police and domestic violence victims is managed. The interaction analysis reveals the impact of the context – in this case, the victims’ personal space – which police must enter in order to perform their role and responsibilities as first responders.

If you enjoy the show, support us by subscribing to the Language on the Move Podcast on your podcast app of choice, leaving a 5-star review, and recommending the Language on the Move Podcast and our partner the New Books Network to your students, colleagues, and friends.

Reference

Steel, K. (2024). “Can I Have a Look?”: The Discursive Management of Victims’ Personal Space During Police First Response Call-Outs to Domestic Abuse Incidents. International Journal for the Semiotics of Law – Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique, 37(2), 547-572. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-023-10050-x

For related content, see our “Language and Law” category.

Transcript (coming soon)

A lack of legal literacy can affect migrants – and indeed anyone – across all aspects of social life. This can include everything from signing a contract with an electricity provider, through earning a living, to having a safe and dignified marriage.

Legal professionals suggest that recent migrants may be special targets of a range of scams and exploitation because they are more likely to lack legal literacy, may lack information about available assistance, or may not be capable of accessing those services even when they do know about them.

However, this is not due simply to a lack of inclination to learn about the law. Rather, the development of legal literacy is dependent on the accessibility of information and education. For those with limited or no English, this naturally requires the provision of resources in other languages and accessible formats, in locations where their target audiences can find them.

While the various government and non-government bodies tasked with providing information about the law have already taken a range of measures to make their resources more accessible to non-English speakers and readers, barriers persist. These barriers can even influence the form of exploitation people face. For example, a lawyer I interviewed in my most recent project shared the story of a man who had migrated to Australia in the late 1990s and became trapped in a highly exploitative work arrangement:

you see the signs from the very beginning. Like, he didn’t have an accountant, he’ll use [his employer’s] accountant. And that accountant played around with his papers. They put him in a house on top of the shop. They denied him English lessons. So, till this day, I speak to him in Arabic, even though my Arabic’s not perfect.

In this scenario, it was only when the man’s workplace injuries became so severe that he insisted on seeing a doctor that he was eventually able to learn about his rights and access legal assistance. Among other measures, his exploiters intentionally limited his English language acquisition opportunities as a form of abusive control, to prevent him learning of his rights and seeking help.

This only reinforces the importance of providing resources in a range of languages, and clearly demonstrates the inappropriateness of claims that individual migrants are responsible for learning English as a prerequisite to accessing full inclusion in society and protection of the law.

Unfortunately, his case is far from being an exception. News reports uncover myriad examples, from international students underpaid with justifications that their limited English meant they weren’t good enough for minimum wage, to asylum seekers threatened with deportation if they didn’t comply with forced labour arrangements.

The complex and interconnected barriers recent migrants, especially those with temporary visas, often face means holistic responses are needed for them to access their rights. However ultimately, seeking justice still hinges on them first having knowledge about what those rights are and the processes and resources available to have them enforced. This is not possible unless relevant information is available in a language and format accessible to them.

The landing page

While service providers and regulatory bodies appear aware of this issue and have taken steps to address it, less is known about how accessible the resources and mechanisms are in practice (Victoria Law Foundation 2016). Further, beyond these formal offerings, less still is known about how migrants with limited English actually learn about Australian law and how it applies in their lives.

The Legal Aid bodies in each Australian state are tasked with providing a range of legal services. This includes providing free legal assistance and advice to some individuals, based on need. However another of their statutory functions is what is commonly called Community Legal Education and Information (CLEI) (e.g. Legal Aid Commission Act 1979 (NSW), section 10(2)(j),(k),(m)). This means that they are required to develop and disseminate informational resources and training to help increase the community’s legal literacy.

This is considered a crucial component to ensuring the whole community, and particularly recent migrants and those with limited or no English, can access justice, but we do not yet have a comprehensive picture of what is currently on offer, nor how well it works for these particular groups. Therefore, the peak body of the Australian legal profession has called for research to address the gaps in evidence to ensure migrants’ linguistic and other forms of diversity are understood and incorporated into efforts to improve community legal literacy (Law Council of Australia 2018).

The internet is a popular starting point for individuals looking for all types of information and existing studies on multilingual communications on the websites for government schools and multiple government service providers suggest that much work remains done to ensure that multilingual government communications are both complete and accessible for their target audiences. Therefore, in May, to start exploring the legal literacy resources available for non-English speakers, I undertook a pilot audit of Legal Aid NSW’s website.

The website

Information about Apprehended Violence Orders in Spanish

Legal Aid NSW offers a range of CLEI, with varying accessibility for non-English speakers and readers. As someone with English literacy, the landing page immediately presents me with a promising ‘My problem is about’ section. This part of the website helpfully guides readers step-by-step, in accessible plain language and appealing format, across a wide range of legal issues, e.g. ‘My job’, ‘Disasters’, ‘My rights as’ and ‘Visas and immigration’. Another section provides lay definitions of legal terms. These reflect an evident broader commitment to enhancing the accessibility of the site as a whole. However, these two sections are only available in English. Similarly, face-to-face and online legal education courses are advertised, but all current offerings appear to be in English only.

Another section provides a large collection of resources, like posters and pamphlets, organized across various topics, providing information about legal issues and available services. Some are provided in languages other than English (LOTEs). However, again, non-English speakers have significantly less access. Of the total 233 resources identified, only 40 are available in more than one language. Even then, most only include a few common LOTEs, e.g. Arabic (37), Chinese (36), Vietnamese (29), Dari/Farsi (16). Further, LOTEs are included inconsistently, e.g. Women’s Domestic Violence Court Advocacy information is offered in 13 languages, including several not used in any other resource. In contrast, all resources in the Disasters, Covid-19, Prisoners, and Young People topics are in English only. All resources are written texts (some with images), meaning only those with literacy can access them, a barrier for some refugees, for example, even in their first language (see e.g. Ba Akhlagh & Mehana 2024). Finally, when LOTE versions exist, it appears they cannot be located without English language literacy: the search function seems to operate only with English key words, and the resources are sorted and labelled in English.

One section of the website is more broadly navigable in many LOTEs. The ‘Ways to get help’ section provides information on how to access legal assistance and is available in 31 languages.  However again, there are inconsistencies between languages, e.g. the Spanish version largely replicates the original, with a full overview and four subsections covering contacts, legal advice, help at court, and applying for legal aid. In contrast, others, like Italian and Pashto, have no overview and only two subsections. Others have only an overview and no subsections. Some links lead readers back to English-only content, and website navigation menus remain in English even when on LOTE pages.

Where to from here?

Existing reviews and scholarship emphasise intersectional considerations when examining and addressing barriers to justice. For example, providing multilingual resources in written form only will not reach people who lack literacy or have low or no vision. Telephone information services and audio resources may be inaccessible for migrants who are deaf or hard of hearing (Smith-Khan 2022). Living in a regional area decreases access to language supports more readily available in urban centres, increasing the importance of LOTE resources. Similarly, not all LOTES are equal: speakers of ‘emerging’ community languages (e.g. recently arrived refugee communities) often have less language support, and issues with correctly identifying and categorising minority dialects and languages can lead to unsuitable translation and interpreting (Victorian Law Foundation 2016, pp 8-9; Tillman 2023).

Spanish word search

These considerations must inform the design and prioritization of resources in particular languages. For instance, while it seems logical to offer resources in commonly spoken LOTEs, speakers of these languages often have a higher level of English proficiency than speakers of emerging languages, who may often also face additional vulnerabilities (Grey & Severin 2021, 2022).

This brief pilot has obviously only uncovered what is publicly available via a website: qualitative research is needed to understand how service providers like Legal Aid NSW develop their resources and how legal, policy, and practical considerations influence their choices. At the same time, research could also provide insight into migrants’ decision-making. By better understanding how recent arrivals and people with limited English find out about the law, research could provide valuable evidence to policymakers and service providers to continue to make community legal literacy efforts more universally accessible.

References

Ba Akhlagh, S & Mehana, M. ‘Challenges and opportunities in designing culturally appropriate resources to support refugee families’ (2024) 8(1) Linking Research to the Practice of Education 2.
Grey, A & Severin A, ‘An audit of NSW legislation and policy on the government’s public communications in languages other than English’ (2021) 30(1) Griffith Law Review 122.
——— ‘Building towards best practice for governments’ public communication in LOTEs’ (2022)31(1) Griffith Law Review 25
Smith-Khan, L. ‘Inclusive processes for refugees with disabilities’ in Rioux et al(eds), Handbook of Disability (Springer Nature, 2022)
Tillman, M ‘Ezidi refugees in Armidale say gap in language […]service impacts health care (2023) ABC https://tinyurl.com/2vz3x8s9
Victoria Law Foundation, Legal information in languages other than English (2016) https://tinyurl.com/3nr5vndb

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Laura Smith-Khan and Alex Grey

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Dr Jinhyun Cho

Dr Jinhyun Cho has investigated interplays between monolingualism and multilingual practices in courtrooms, with a focus on interpreters. Focusing on linguistic, institutional and cultural hierarchies in Australian legal spaces, Dr Jinhyun Cho’s work has revealed how power differentials influence the choices that legal interpreters make in the course of interpreting and drawn attention to the need for legal professionals to enhance their awareness of interpreting through the formalisation of multilingualism within university-level studies of law. She is based at Macquarie University in Australia.

Her 2024 collaborative work on the Khmer Rouge Tribunal (the ECCC) represents her broad interdisciplinary approach which brings together interpreting, sociolinguistics and law.

Recent publications

Killean, R., Grey, R., Cho, J., & Stern, L. (2024). Translating atrocity at the Khmer Rouge Tribunal. New Mandala.
Cho, J. (2021). Intercultural communication in interpreting: Power and choices. Routledge.
Cho, J. (2021). ‘That’s not how we speak’: interpreting monolingual ideologies in courtrooms. Griffith Law Review, 30(1), 50-70.

Research project team (L-R): Dr Julie Lim, Professor Ludmila Stern, Professor Sandra Hale, Associate Professor Melanie Schwartz and Professor Stephen Doherty, April 2024

Professor Sandra Hale

In addition to her role in the project led by Ludmila Stern described below, Sandra Hale and another team at the University of New South Wales in Australia (Prof Jane Goodman-Delahunty, Dr Natalie Martschuk and Dr Susan Brandon) have been working since 2020 on a project funded by the United States’ Federal Bureau of Investigation entitled ‘Remote simultaneous interpreting in investigative interviews: The effect of language and interpreter training on deception detection, interpreting accuracy and witness credibility’. Keep an eye out for publications coming out of this project soon.

Recent publications

Hale, S., Martschuk, N., Goodman-Delahunty, J. & Lim, J. (30 Apr 2024): Juror perceptions in bilingual interpreted trials, Perspectives: Studies in Translation Theory and Practice.
Hale, S., Lim, J., Martschuk, N., & Goodman-Delahunty, J. (2023). Note-taking in court interpreting: Interpreter perceptions and practices in a simulated trial. The International Journal for Translation & Interpreting Research, pp.1-21.
Hale, S., Goodman-Delahunty, J., Martschuk, N., & Lim, J. (2022). Does interpreter location make a difference? A study of remote vs face-to-face interpreting in simulated police interviews. Interpreting:  International Journal of Research and Practice in Interpreting, 24(2), pp.221-253.

Michael Jones

Michael Jones has been involved with the interpreting and translation profession for over 40 years and has worked as a NAATI accredited translator and interpreter between English and Italian, French, Portuguese and Spanish (NAATI is Australia’s National Accreditation Authority for Translators and Interpreters). He likes to call himself a language nerd. He has always been fascinated with languages since growing up in Sydney near two of the old migrant camps of the 1960s. He studied Linguistics at Sydney University in the 1970s.

As a lawyer specialising in immigration and citizenship law, Michael Jones also works extensively with interpreters and translators in courts, tribunals and other professional settings, and is happy to share his experiences and observations with others studying the field.

Dr Rachel Killean and Dr Rosemary Grey

In 2023, University of Sydney Law School researchers Rachel Killean and Rosemary Grey launched a new project ‘Translating Atrocity: Bridging language barriers in Cambodia’s war crimes tribunal.’ The project focuses on challenges of interpretation and translation arising in the United Nations-backed Extraordinary Chambers in the Court of Cambodia (ECCC) which works across the Khmer, English and French languages. Drawing on their original interviews with translators and interpreters who worked at the court, Rachel Killean and Rosemary Grey are identifying Khmer terms that have been difficult to translate into English and French and vice-versa; examining how translation challenges have been addressed; and assessing how translators and interpreters have affected the tribunal’s capacity to assess evidence and communicate effectively with the public. The findings have potential value for the functioning of other international tribunals, including the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

Members of the public arriving at the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia to hear its main judgment (Image credit: Rosemary Grey, Phnom Penh, 2018

Rachel Killean and Rosemary Grey hope to continue collaborations with translation studies scholars, as well as interpreters/translators working in international criminal justice.

Recent publications

Killean, R., Grey, R. (2023). Interpretation and Translation in Atrocity Trials: Insights from the Khmer Rouge Tribunal. Cambridge International Law Journal, 12(2), 211-234.
Grey, R. (2022). Translating Gender Diversity in International Criminal Law: An Impossible but Necessary Goal. Australian Feminist Law Journal, 47(2), 163-186.
Killean, R., Grey, R., Cho, J. and Stern. L., ‘Translating atrocity at the Khmer Rouge Tribunal‘, New Mandala, 17 January 2024.
Grey, R. and Stern, L., ‘“Kadago’ in the Courtroom: Language Disputes in Atrocity Trials‘, Opinio Juris, 31 January 2024:

Dr Lucy Xin LIU

Dr Lucy Liu Xin’s research centres on the accuracy of Mandarin-English court interpreting and its implications for due process. She is particularly interested in exploring the interface between interpreting and pragmatics in legal settings. Her recent work explores the multimodal aspects of court interpreting, such as examining multimodal turn-taking strategies of court interpreters and utilizing acoustic tools for the analysis of courtroom discourse. She is based at Dalian University of Technology in China.

Recent publications

Liu, X., & Wang, C. (2023). How Does Interpreter’s Intonation Affect the Pragmatics of Courtroom Questions? A Case Study of Chinese-English Court Interpreting. In J. Zhao, D. Li, & V. L. C. Lei (Eds.), New Advances in Legal Translation and Interpreting (pp. 137-162). Singapore: Springer.
Liu, X. (2020). Pragmalinguistic challenges for trainee interpreters in achieving accuracy: An analysis of questions and their translation in five cross-examinations. Interpreting, 22(1), 87-116.
Stern, L., & Liu, X. (2020). Interpreting Studies. In S. Laviosa & M. González Davies (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Education (pp. 226-244). Oxfordshire: Routledge.
Stern, L., & Liu, X. (2019). Ensuring interpreting quality in legal and courtroom settings: Australian Language Service Providers’ perspectives on their role. The Journal of Specialised Translation(32), 90-120.
Stern, L., & Liu, X. (2019). See you in court: How do Australian institutions train legal interpreters? The Interpreter and Translator Trainer, 13(4), 361-389.

Dr Laura Smith-Khan

Laura Smith-Khan’s work explores how multilingualism is managed in and conceptualized by tribunals and courts in the context of assessing credibility in asylum applications in Australia. This was one focus of her doctoral research and has continued to be an area of interest in her more recent work.

She has also examined how migration lawyers and agents play a role in mediating multilingual communication in migration procedures, both at the initial application stage and at the tribunal, when an appeal is necessary. This work has led her to travel to Belgium in 2023 to spend time at Ghent University as a visiting scholar, and where she continues to have an external affiliation with UGhent’s Centre for the Social Study of Migration and Refugees. She has presented her research to judges and other decision-makers from Australia and internationally and it has also been cited in EU Agency for Asylum guidance on credibility and evidence assessment.

Recent publications

Smith-Khan, L. (forthcoming). Incredible language and refugee legal processes: Challenging asylum credibility assessments, in J Setter et al (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Language and Prejudice.
Maryns, K., Smith-Khan, L. & Jacobs, M. (2023). Multilingualism in asylum and migration procedures, in McKinney et al (eds), Routledge Handbook of Multilingualism, 2^nd ed, Ch. 26.
Smith-Khan, L. (2023). Incorporating sociolinguistic perspectives in Australian refugee credibility assessments: The case of CRL18. Journal of International Migration and Integration, 24, 727-743 (invited contribution for special issue).
Smith-Khan, L. (2021). ‘I Try Not to Be Dominant, but I’m a Lawyer!’: Advisor Resources, Context and Refugee Credibility. Journal of Refugee Studies, 34(4), 3710-3733.
Smith-Khan, L. (2019). Why refugee visa credibility assessments lack credibility: A critical discourse analysis, Griffith Law Review, 28(4), 406-430.

Professor Ludmila Stern

Professor Ludmila Stern is leading a team including Professor Sandra Hale, Professor Stephen Doherty and Associate Professor Melanie Schwartz from the University of New South Wales in Australia and a number of partner organizations on the project, Access to justice in interpreted proceedings: The role of Judicial Officers, funded by an Australian Research Council Linkage Grant.

The research team is examining the ways judicial officers can improve courtroom communication and prevent miscommunication and error, particularly in criminal cases where speakers of ‘new and emerging’ and First Nations languages are involved, and where interpreters receive limited or no specialised training. Using an interdisciplinary approach that involves court observations, interviews with judicial officers and interpreters, and discourse analysis of court transcripts, the project aims to generate new knowledge about the variations in judicial officers’ communications practice when working with interpreters, and their impact on the effective transmission of information in the courtroom.

Having initially started in two international courts, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia / International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals and the International Criminal Court, the project then focused on the way judges and magistrates work in interpreted proceedings in Australia courts, with field work now completed in the Australian jurisdictions of New South Wales, Victoria, Tasmania, Queensland, Western Australia and the Northern Territory.

Dr Xiaoyu Zhao

Dr Xiaoyu Zhao recently completed her PhD on interpreting studies at the University of New South Wales in Australia. Her PhD project investigated the impact of court-specific factors on Simultaneous Interpreting performance and explains these factors’ effects using Cognitive Load Theory. Her research has provided empirical evidence that enhances the understanding of the impact of task-, environment-, and interpreter-related factors on Simultaneous Interpreting performance in the court context. Additionally, it offers insights into interpreter training and professional practices that align with both national and international standards aimed at improving interpreters’ working conditions.

Dr Xiaoyu Zhao is currently working as an adjunct lecturer at Monash University in Australia and as a research fellow at the Monash Suzhou Research Institute in China. Her current research projects include a corpus analysis of interpreted texts in court settings and court interpreting pedagogy.

Recent publications

Zhao, X. (2023). A multidimensional investigation of cognitive load and performance over time during simultaneous interpreting between English and Mandarin Chinese [Doctoral dissertation, UNSW Syndey]. UNSWorks.

What about you?

Do you work or research in an area related to multilingualism in courts and tribunals, or another area where language and law intersect? Join the LLIRN!

What other language and law topics would you like to learn about? Have your say on our next “LLIRN About Us” blog post. Let us know in the comments or join the network and send us an email!

Upcoming Events

Multilingualism in courts and tribunals is the focus of two presentations scheduled within a themed session at the upcoming Australian Linguistic Society Conference (26-29 November at ANU). The session’s overall theme is ‘Law-and-Linguistics Research: Language, Diversity and Inclusion in Law’, and includes:

• Joseph van Buuren presenting new research on Australian criminal appeal judgements where applicants claim they have been denied rights or procedural fairness on the basis of language difference;
• Helen Fraser promoting inclusivity and justice in the use of language as forensic evidence by analysing the origins of linguistic ideologies and misconceptions in the law.

NSW Police (Image credit: Edwina Pickles, SMH)

Editor’s note: The Language on the Move team closely collaborates with the Law and Linguistics Interdisciplinary Researchers’ Network (LLIRN). To raise awareness of LLIRN and feature the research of its members, we are starting a new series about exciting new research in specific areas of language and law.

In this first post in the series, LLIRN founders and conveners Dr Alex Grey and Dr Laura Smith-Khan introduce the research of three early career researchers working on language, policing, and criminal justice.

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Alex Grey and Laura Smith-Khan

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The Law and Linguistics Interdisciplinary Researchers’ Network (LLIRN) came into being in 2019, after an initial symposium involving a group of academics and students, mainly from Australian universities, whose research is interested in the various intersections of language and law. One of our key goals of the symposium was to learn more about each other’s work and create new opportunities to collaborate.

Since then, LLIRN has grown and we have organized and run a number of different initiatives, including multiple panels at conferences across both linguistics and law, a special issue that showcased the work of several of our (mainly early career) members, and a lively and growing mailing list.

Fast forward to 2024, our Listserv now includes members from at least 37 different countries, at diverse stages of their careers, working as academics, as language or legal professionals, and/or in policy or decision-making roles. However, as LLIRN convenors, we have felt that we still have much to learn about the members who make up the network, the expertise they have and their goals. This new blog series intends to address this gap: we want to learn (or “LLIRN”) more about each other, and to make our learning public so that others too can learn more about us.

Northern Territory Supreme Court (Image credit: Dietmar Rabich, Wikipedia)

In the first of this new series, we showcase LLIRN members, Alex Bowen, Dr Fabio Ferraz de Almeida, and Dr Kate Steel, who are working in areas related to language, policing, and criminal justice.

Alex Bowen, University of Melbourne, Australia

Alex Bowen’s in-progress PhD looks at communication about criminal law and justice with Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory (NT) of Australia. His earlier research was about how police in the NT explain the right to silence in police interviews, producing the publications listed below.  He has previously practised criminal and commercial law.

Alex Bowen is interested more broadly in police interviewing, language in legal processes, interpreting and translation, how we understand and talk about law and justice interculturally, and how legal language is influenced by monolingual and colonial assumptions. He is interested in discussing these topics, especially with Indigenous scholars and practitioners, and developing interdisciplinary and intercultural resources for training and education. He may be available for peer review related to the above topics.

Recent publications

Bowen, A. (2019). ‘You don’t have to say anything’: Modality and consequences in conversations about the right to silence in the Northern Territory. Australian Journal of Linguistics, 39(3), 347–374.
Bowen, A. (2021). Explaining the right to silence under Anunga: 40 years of a policy about language. Griffith Law Review, 30(1), 18–49.
Bowen, A. (2021). Intercultural translation of vague legal language: The right to silence in the Northern Territory of Australia. Target. International Journal of Translation Studies, 33(2), 308–340.
Bowen, A. (2021). “What you’ve got is a right to silence”: Paraphrasing the right to silence and the meaning of rights. International Journal of Speech Language and the Law, 28(1), 1–29.

Dr Fabio Ferraz de Almeida, University of Lincoln, UK

Dr Fabio Ferraz de Almeida has experience conducting ethnographic and conversation analytic research in police and judicial settings. This has included research on police interviews with suspects in the UK, criminal hearings in Brazil and, more recently, International Criminal Court (ICC) trials, producing the publications listed below. He is currently working on a paper about the role of judges in witness examination at the ICC, focusing particularly on the tensions associated with their dual-role as both referee and truth-finder.  He lectures in Criminology.

International Criminal Court, The Hague (Image Credit: Wikipedia)

Dr Ferraz de Almeida is broadly interested in studying social interactions in any form of police or legal context and welcomes contact from researchers with similar interests.

Recent publications

Ferraz de Almeida, F., & Drew, P. (2020). The fabric of law-in-action: ‘formulating’ the suspect’s account during police interviews in England. International Journal of Speech Language and the Law, 27(1), 35-58.
Ferraz de Almeida, F. (2022). Two ways of spilling drink: The construction of offences as ‘accidental’ in police interviews with suspects. Discourse Studies, 24(2), 187-205.
D’hondt, S., Perez-Leon-Acevedo, J. P., Ferraz de Almeida, F., & Barrett, E. (2022). Evidence about Harm: Dual Status Victim Participant Testimony at the International Criminal Court and the Straitjacketing of Narratives about Suffering. Criminal Law Forum, 33, 191.
D’hondt, S., Pérez-León-Acevedo, J. P., Ferraz de Almeida, F., & Barrett, E. (2024). Trajectories of spirituality: Producing and assessing cultural evidence at the International Criminal Court. Language in Society, 1-22.
Ferraz de Almeida, F. (2024). Counter-Denunciations: How Suspects Blame Victims in Police Interviews for Low-Level Crimes. International Journal for the Semiotics of Law, 37, 119–137.

Dr Kate Steel, University of the West of England (UWE), Bristol, UK

Dr Kate Steel’s PhD (2022) and continuing research explore interactions ‘at the scene’ between police first responders and victims of domestic abuse, producing the publication below. This work draws from police body-worn video footage within one force area in the England & Wales jurisdiction of the United Kingdom. This research responds to the typical simplification of the crucial role of communication at the scene is and its under-emphasis in official procedure for the first response to domestic abuse, at both local and national levels.

Dr Kate Steel is now working with another police force to develop language guidance specific to the policing context of domestic abuse first response.  She lectures in linguistics.

Recent publications

Aldridge, M., & Steel, K. (2022). The role of metaphor in police first response call-outs in cases of suspected domestic abuse. In I. Šeškauskienė (Ed.), Metaphor in Legal Discourse (224-241). Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Available from https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/9900169
Steel, K. (2023) “Can I have a look?”: The discursive management of victims’ personal space during police first response call-outs to domestic abuse incidents. International Journal for the Semiotics of Law 37(2): 547-572.

What about you?

Do you work or research in an area related to criminal justice and language, or another area where language and law intersect? Join the LLIRN!

What other language and law topics would you like to learn about? Have your say on our next LLIRN “What’s new in language and law research?” blog post. Let us know in the comments or join the network and send us an email!

Upcoming events of interest in this area

Dr Fabio Ferraz de Almeida and Dr Kate Steel will both be presenting their research in the coming months, including at the IAFLL European conference in Birmingham. Dr Fabio Ferraz de Almeida will also present at the Forensic Conversations in Criminal Justice Settings Symposium in Loughborough in September.

Can you share about your work and your pro bono global initiative defending language rights?

Irene: Linguistic Justice® is my personal advocacy initiative. It was born during the early pandemic days in 2020 after I quit my job as an interpreter for the New York State Court System. During my time in the system I witnessed first-hand state violence against linguistic minorities who were trying to access justice, particularly how it impacted Indigenous peoples. Founding Linguistic Justice® was my response to that experience; it provided an outlet for my desire to use my skills working with linguistically marginalized communities, instead of enabling state violence against them.

Since then, I have worked hands-on with multiple grassroots organizations in the US looking to implement a language justice approach in their operations. I consult with those organizations to help them remove access barriers, provide meaningful language access, and encourage them to create effective multilingual participatory settings.

On the global front, The Spanish Group Pilot Initiative was my pro bono initiative and my shot at raising awareness of language rights and justice in spaces traditionally dominated by the English language. Rolled out through the Global Coalition for Language Rights (GCLR), it aimed to shine a light on language rights during the Global Language Advocacy Days (GLAD) volunteer initiatives in February 2024, themed “No Justice Without Language Rights”.

The initiative was launched in July 2023 through the Coalition’s social media platforms, and my main aims were two. First, to build a global community by providing participants with quality education and a safe space to share their diverse perspectives. And second, to disseminate our educational content about language rights and justice, in Spanish, from a global platform.

To structure the educational initiative, I developed a 7-month program to facilitate community development and targeted learning. A diverse and talented group of participants spanning seven countries engaged in non-traditional learning methods inspired by my background as a former attorney, my experience as a seasoned linguist, as well as my integration of restorative practice processes for developing social capital.

The overall success of the initiative stands as a testament to the need for serious investment in the advancement of language justice, including through fully funded multilingual community education programs like this one.

Can you share more about the handbook you developed as part of your pro bono initiative?

Irene: To conclude the pilot initiative, I authored and gathered the introductory language rights handbook titled ‘Queremos escuchar tu voz’ (or ‘We want to hear your voice’).

Throughout this resource, the term ‘voice’ is used in a figurative sense to emphasize the significance of individual language preference in shaping our identity and asserting our self-determination. I wanted to underscore that our ‘voice’ represents the power of communicative autonomy of each person: a fundamental aspect of our human dignity.

In a nutshell, this handbook is a call to action to catalyze support for language justice. It aims to tackle the prevalent collective unawareness surrounding language rights, striving to expand consciousness regarding these rights and, consequently, expand our collective capacity to create language justice. It is meant to provide vocabulary for anyone who wants to understand and articulate how people are disadvantaged as users of non-dominant languages.

What are you hoping to achieve with the first edition of this handbook?

Irene: Firstly, I am hoping that the pilot initiative, along with its resulting handbook, inspires future initiatives to foster community development through multilingual education about language rights.

We must acknowledge that people cannot advocate for rights they don’t know they have in the first place. Our language is intertwined with every facet of our lives, and withholding language rights from people profoundly impacts their lives, hindering their access to social structures: information, opportunities, critical services, education and justice. So, supporting communities in understanding their language rights is crucial to nurturing their self-determination and fostering their own advocacy efforts for those rights.

Secondly, I hope it facilitates a shift in perspective, recognizing linguistically marginalized communities as rights-holders.

When linguistically oppressed communities lack the capacity to articulate their experiences, those in power may not fully understand how pervasive language rights violations are. We have unaware people in positions of authority within our systems.

The result? Without understanding language rights and the impact language oppression has on our communities, efforts remain insufficient. Holding systems accountable is crucial, but supporting them with education on this topic is equally important to foster systemic change.

Those in a position of authority within systems—public and private institutions, policymakers, and the language access industry as a whole—need to better understand language rights, and the impact language oppression has in our communities, to be able to shift their perspective: from linguistic discrimination, half-hearted compliance and indifference, to awareness, inclusion and repair.

We must care for both of these needs seriously: from the bottom-up with our communities, and from within our social structures and its systems.

Can you share more about the content of this handbook?

Irene: This introductory resource provides a thorough examination of language rights on a global scale, encompassing their legal foundations in international humanitarian law, as well as the legal framework for language rights in the United States, including relevant jurisprudence.

Among its features are discussions of language rights theory and practice, guidance on filing national origin discrimination complaints before the US Federal government, and community insights aimed at advancing language justice for all people.

Irene Gotera, Linguistic Justice®

By amplifying the voices of the participating community in the pilot initiative, I also share our findings underscoring several key imperatives to create language justice:

• Promoting self-awareness and recognition of one’s own linguistic privileges.
• Fostering collective understanding of language rights.
• Making the resources like this handbook available and accessible to staff members of organizations serving linguistically diverse populations worldwide.
• Engaging in global dialogues on language oppression to cultivate the solidarity necessary to confront it.
• Proactively defending our language rights to enhance awareness of them.
• Urging states worldwide to enact legislation guaranteeing respect for language rights, recognizing that with language rights come corresponding obligations for compliance.

The handbook closes with my perspective on the connection between language rights and justice: to create language justice for all people, we all need to develop and apply a language rights-conscious lens. I’m hopeful that this resource could be a significant catalyst in fostering exactly that. Download it here.

There is no justice without language rights.

Long-time Language-on-the-Move team members and friends Hanna Torsh and Alex Grey got to sit down for a formal interview

Here are Language on the Move we know that linguistic diversity is often seen through a deficit lens. Another way of saying this is that it’s perceived as a problem, particularly by institutions and governments.

So what does good governance in a multilingual city actually look like?

This was the key question of Dr. Alexandra Grey’s keynote speech at the Linguistic Inclusion Today Symposium held at Macquarie University on December 14^th 2023. I was fortunate to interview Dr. Grey the day before her presentation and to ask her the following questions:

1. What was it about the topic of good governance in a multilingual urban environment such as Sydney that sparked your interest? Why is this an important or relevant topic to research today?
2. How did you investigate good governance in multilingual urban environments? What were the main challenges and opportunities when you carried out this research?
3. What did you find out and why does it matter?

In the interview Dr. Grey presented in her clear and engaging way why we should care about this topic, what some of the key challenges of doing this research during the COVID-19 pandemic were, and how this research into linguistic diversity is connected to social justice in a participatory democracy.

Happy listening to this latest episode of Chats in Linguistic Diversity!

Transcript (created by Brynn Quick; added on March 06, 2024)

Dr Torsh: Hello and welcome to this Language on the Move interview. My name is Dr Hanna Torsh, and I’m interviewing Dr Alexandra Grey today as part of our Chats in Linguistic Diversity. I’d like to start by acknowledging that the land on which this interview was carried out is the land of the Wallumattagal people of the Dharug nation whose customs have nurtured this country since the Dreamtime, and I’d like to pay my respects to any indigenous listeners listening today and to acknowledge that this always was and always will be aboriginal land. Dr Alexandra Grey is giving the keynote speech at the symposium held here at Macquarie University hosted by Language on the Move entitled Linguistic Inclusion Today. She’s a chancellor’s research fellow at the University of Technology Sydney, and she’ll be very familiar to many of our readers as she writes frequently about her work which lies at the intersection of law and linguistics. Today Alex is going to be talking about her work on urban multilingualism in Australia, and we started the interview when I asked her why this topic was important to her and how it became something that she noticed.

Dr Grey: Look, Hanna, it’s important not just to me but to researchers who are still researching and were in this space before me who were pointing out the fact that Australia has, in fact, since the time of settlement and particularly in recent times been a very multilingual society with a lot of individuals who speak more than one language and across Australia a great range of languages. From various times over history what those languages are changes – aboriginal languages, Torres Strait Islander languages, migrant languages from different parts of the world and different varieties of English. My own background is in both law and linguistics, so I’m always interested in how governments respond to and represent linguistic diversity. The project I had just come out of was about a really quite legislative approach, you know, a government that saw law as something that should be used in relation to languages and multilingualism, and that was my PhD in China. In the Australian context that’s not really the way things are done, but I was still interested in this underlying reality of multilingualism and thinking, “Well, how does our government do in that situation, and does it do things that could do better, you know? Does governing in a in a good or a better way rely on acknowledging or somehow actually adapting to this linguistic diversity?” And then there was a very particular catalyst. My father was working at a local council in Sydney, and he brought home (because he just knows of my general interest in posters) that they’d made, had designed, had laminated all about when bins were collected and other sort of, you know, services that local governments provide in Mandarin. And I thought to myself, “Ah!”. You know, that’s clearly not the only local council in Australia doing this, but equally not all local councils are doing that, and in the past local councils were not necessarily doing that. What’s driving that sort of decision-making in government? And so I started thinking to myself, “ Well, is that coming just from the grassroots or from pressure people are putting on local government or requests they’re making in that sort of interactive politics, or is it coming from some sort of rule or some sort of rights-based approach that is, if you like, more top-down that’s directing decision-makers to think about linguistic diversity?”. And I proposed a project about essentially that question to Sydney law school. They had a sort of, as it turned out, one-off postgraduate research funding opportunity, and they liked this question too. So I took it up, and I framed it really around that bigger question that I’ve just articulated – what is the framework of rights or rules that might be influencing decision-makers within Australian governments, so at state and federal level, to tailor their approach for a linguistically diverse public? And that’s still a bit of a broad question, so I had to focus on specific jurisdictions, and I focused then also on mass communications from government departments. Of course, there might be other ways that governments respond to that linguistic diversity too, but in a way, thinking back to those local council posters, I was still thinking, “Well, you know, there’s not a lot of documentation or research for investigation going on but clearly they’re changing practices with those mass communications, so let’s have a look.”

Dr Torsh: I’m really interested in what you said about the different approaches between China and Australia, and out of your PhD research what were some of the key differences that you can think about between those two different approaches to multilingualism?

Dr Grey: Look, I can probably say three things, and these are all structural things, and so I will preface them with a caveat that those structures don’t necessarily work the way you might think, or they work differently in different practice. But three structural differences: First of all, there are officially-recognised minority languages in China. Not just one, but many. Secondly, there is a constitutionally right to use and develop minority languages. The Australian constitution says nothing about languages, doesn’t say anything about English either, says nothing about languages at all in terms of recognition of official status or use or language rights. The third difference is that in China, linked to this idea of official minority language and official minority groups, there are counties, cities, prefectures, regions which have nominally, at least, a legal autonomous structure. And that is not unique to China, and it’s not even unique to, if you like, similar countries. It comes out of a Soviet model. For instances, I understand also Spain had developed autonomous regions in the 20^th century. So there was, if you like, a mode of thinking that was not unique to China. But it’s definitely not something that was imported into the Australian context. And there are reasons for that to do with culture and our culture of, if you like, adherence to English as a dominant language, maybe a sense of the need for a unifying language and a unifying ethnicity. But there are also legal structure reasons. Australia is a federation, so each state has a very high level of legal autonomy, if you like, anyway, within a federal structure. And so an autonomous region doesn’t sit well within a federal structure.

Dr Torsh: So interesting. Okay, so, you went about this project looking at these sorts of structural issues in mass communication in multilingual urban Australia. How did you approach it? It’s a huge topic, as you said. So, what sort of approaches did you take to doing that research, and what were some of the challenges that you encountered, and maybe some of the opportunities as well?

Dr Grey: I think the first challenge was my approach, which was a bit chaotic (laughs). I went into the project attempting to gather data, attempting to do lots of things on lots of fronts, and as it turned out I really needed to sort of step back and spend more time doing things slowly and planning. My approach in general was to, first of all, look at legislation on the books. Australia has very good public records of acts of parliament, or what we call legislation, and so along with a research assistant who later became my co-author, Ali Severin, who I know is a teaching colleague of yours, we started assembling legislation and doing an analysis of words using search terms to find laws that dictated a choice of language. And then we had to go through them to find was it in terms of individual interactions, say, mediated by an interpreter, or was it the sort of public communications that I was focusing on? And my plan was to do that jurisdiction by jurisdiction in NSW, the commonwealth, but also say Victoria, Queensland, etc. And at the same time, I wanted to, but these are only two points, I was going to say triangulate, but at least compare (laughs) empirical data that I was to collect of actual public communications practices. So website posters, government announcements, government radio slots, all these sorts of things, and I had gone somewhat down the road of starting to do that when Covid struck, which was, of course, the major challenge. And I clearly remember well sort of pivoting the research because, you know, from my perspective at least, a benefit of Covid for this project is that the government, at the state and federal level, started to take multilingual communications more seriously. It started to be discussed in the news media, and we started just to see a lot of government mass communications about Covid rules, about where to get testing, and then as we rolled into 2021, vaccination campaigns and so forth. So just a time of a lot of mass communications from governments. So once we had sort of adjusted to that scenario and it was safe to at least go out of my house and do some field work, you might recall, Hanna, we did this together on a bitterly cold day in the middle of 2020. We went to a couple of Sydney suburbs that, on the census data, have high rates of multilingual households, and we started recording the signage that we could find, both commercial and government signage in key public spaces and the language that it was in. And so that turned out to be one of the key forms of empirical data that I collected that I collected, and then I also, along with Ali, did research on government mass communications on websites, which we had planned to do anyway and we had already started looking at websites in 2019 across a number of NSW government departments. Again, with Covid I could focus, drill down on a number of NSW and federal government health websites in particular that were really important when we were all sort of locked at home with the internet as the main source of information. So I ended up gathering a whole subset of the empirical data that was just about Covid communications, but I also then continued to do the analysis of legislation. Covid interrupted a lot of things, and so I didn’t end up having the time to do every jurisdiction as I’d hoped. But, with Ali, I ended up doing NSW and the federal jurisdictions, so looking at acts that control choice of language, and then to sort of marry with that Covid-specific data set, I then did an extra limb which I had not originally envisaged, which was to look at international law, and then international organisations’ commentary about a rights-based approach, particularly in regards to the right to health and linguistic non-discrimination in the enjoyment of human rights, and sort of looking at guidance from that space as another supplementary form of, if you like, top-down impetus for decision-makers, whether that guided them and obliged them to make multilingual government communications.

Dr Torsh: I’m so interested in the idea that there was this obligation because one of the things that we found, and I remember that too when we were going around and looking at all the signage, it was very interesting and for me it was the first time that really a lot of those language, because I usually read English, were really so salient in communities that we walked around. So, what struck you during that time about some of the examples of governments doing multilingual communication about Covid well or not so well?

Dr Grey: Yeah, two things struck me. First, in article after article in the news you would read, you know, quotes from community organisations, all sorts of sources saying, “Look, there’s a problem with multilingual communications. It’s not reaching us. We’re not being taken account of. This was translated terribly, etc.” And the government response would always say something like, “We’ve produced 700 million pdfs in different languages.” And already in some of the data I had been analysing pre-Covid, I had been seeing with Ali that information in languages other than English might be on websites but very hard to find for various reasons. And we later came to the conclusion that that website architecture had both a monolingual logic and was primarily designed for an English-speaking intermediary to somehow find that material in other languages and share it with the appropriate people. And so that just became more and more clear through Covid, that, you know, there was a problem with the government almost, I won’t say complacently, because they were putting a lot of effort into some of these multilingual communications, but somewhat misunderstanding the uptake or the accessibility of these resources. And so the fact that these resources existed or that the number of these resources was increasing, was not really addressing the problem that people were raising. So that’s something that really struck me. The other thing that struck me, particularly when we did the physical fieldwork together, was not only that you saw that translating into the public space some of these freely-available government posters and so forth were just not appearing in shop fronts, but instead we saw that a lot of local businesses in some areas, and in some areas local councils, were stepping in and producing their own not handwritten, totally ad hoc signs, but you know, designed professional-printed, multiple copies of their own Covid information signage. And to me, that was really interesting that these were the players stepping into this space. Local businesses, often in consortia, and local councils. And I started digging a little deeper, and it’s research that I’d like to pursue a lot more if and when the time presents itself, but local governments seemed to have a better feel for the linguistic needs of the community and be more responsive, but not in all cases. Like, you know, the day we were out and about in Strathfield, in Sydney, Korean, Mandarin clearly present on signs made by the local council. In neighbouring Burwood, just a few kilometres away with equally high rates of multilingual households, and we’re talking over 70% of households in that area in the last census having a language other than English spoken, nothing from the local council at all. Is it a resourcing question? Is it just a blind spot? Is it one particular decision-maker who says yes or no? What is it that leads to these very differential outcomes?

Dr Torsh: Yeah, it’s such a good question, and I think we are seeing since the pandemic more and more awareness of the need for multilingual communication because it literally means the difference between good and bad outcomes, and we saw that during the pandemic, of those communities being, unfortunately, subject to higher rates of disease and death because, in part, of that communication gap.

Dr Grey: That communication gap can definitely cause those sorts of serious health outcomes, but it can also cause the policing, or if you like, higher incidences of getting slapped with a fine. And that’s not because particular communities are more willing to bend the rules or less respectful of the police necessarily. It might also be because the types of information with the specific, really up-to-date rules – those who mainly communicated in English through certain media channels that certain people cannot read or do not have the habit of accessing or perhaps even knowing are there – that is an area that I think we’ve seen even this year a reversal of a huge number of on-the-spot fines given by police. I think there’s more to look into the question of how the differential linguistic reach also led to differential policing.

Dr Torsh: Yeah, so fines that were issued during the Covid pandemic, for international listeners who might not be sure, yes during the periods of lockdown we had on-the-spot fines for all sorts of things, like being out of your house when everything was really shut up to if you were out and you were a non-essential worker, those sorts of things. And we’re seeing those being challenged in the courts and being reversed at the moment.

Dr Grey: So, I mean, that’s an area that, you know, as someone who is in a law school with criminologists, that’s an area of research that occurs to me, but that’s sadly not the research that I have the time and resources to do myself as one person or even, you know, with you or with Ali. But I just wanted to hone in on that point that the differential outcomes of having fewer resources in one language compared to English, they can be quite serious. As you say, health. As I say, policing outcomes. But I also make the point in some of my work that sort of regardless of these grave outcomes, it’s also just about autonomy of individual people being able to make decisions about their own health, their own healthcare, family, and to do that, people should have equal access to information.

Dr Torsh: Absolutely. Absolutely. And I think that’s a really good point. I’m really focused on health at the moment, but of course I think justice and also education but I am not a law person myself, so I often forget about justice. So I think that’s a really important space. So, what else did you find out once you did all this research and put these, I think, three case studies that you did together? What did you find out about multilingual urban communication that we haven’t already covered?

Dr Grey: Well, for the first study, I call it an audit. That’s the one that’s about sort of what legislation controls language of communication. I found, predominantly, that legislation in NSW doesn’t touch on choice of language and it certainly is not providing strong impetus for multilingual communications. It’s not forbidding it either. There are a few what are called government advertising guidelines that say that for various government information campaigns over various spending thresholds, a certain percentage has to be spent on what they call “culturally and linguistically diverse communities”. But it doesn’t go into details as to what kind of language that might entail or who should be involved or what the quality assurance processes are. I’ll come back to that issue in a minute, but that’s sort of what the first case study identified. And I have an inkling that it’s very similar in other Australian jurisdictions, but I didn’t get to complete my audit of these sets of laws. In terms of actual NSW language practices then, it’s probably not a surprise that the second case study found really great variability, but something I haven’t perhaps touched on is just the extent to which the NSW government sometimes uses so many languages. So, we looked at 24 websites of all 10 government departments and then a sample of government agencies. Across these websites there were 64 languages. And so most of those websites, in addition to English, if they were going to use another language would use some of the most frequently spoken languages in Australia, which are also most frequently spoken in NSW – Mandarin, Arabic, Vietnamese – but not always. For instance, I think it was at the time the Taronga Zoo website for the usual pattern, but not Arabic, for no obvious reason to me, you know, a great number of those, I think over half of those in this sample were only in English. Not a really clear pattern necessarily. We’re trying to look at is it public-facing government departments vs others, or various kinds of agencies vs others? But not necessarily. And then some websites, particularly Department of Health at the NSW level, that’s the one that’s creating this enormous list of languages, you know, up into the 60s, but on all those websites the information in English is both more voluminous and more up to date than the information in other languages. And then, you know, this might be sort of suggesting perhaps that there needs to be some more rethinking or some more quality assurance or some more community participation, you know, it suggests that there might be a problem. It doesn’t necessarily conclusively prove it. Then the Covid case study, the one in which I looked at international law and international organisations’ commentary on how those legal obligations should apply, I found there’s a really clear emerging standard, it’s not yet crystallised, it’s a very strong discourse in recent years, about planning for community involvement in at least crisis communications. Maybe more generally. So at least for health crises. Not just, you know, ad hoc, suddenly having to find “Who is our Nepali community, and how do we reach them?”, but in having training to raise the capacity of various members of that community. Of having pre-existing works and links and an idea of what media that group might consume, and a strategic plan as to how language might be used in communicating with that group. And so that’s advanced planning with community input, and that’s really emphasised in a rights-based approach that the international organisations are talking about. And you can understand why that might be something they want to encourage because it does, to my mind, seem to be an approach that might help with the kinds of problems that I’m empirically pointing out in Australia, particularly an absence of materials or very inaccessible materials, very disparate or unequal materials, and a legal framework that doesn’t really guide decision-making in that space. So I have said in my most recent paper that international guidance could be very useful for Australian government in terms of thinking about how to do their public communications better. And by “better” I mean not just reaching people in a way that is more effective, getting information across and getting people to act on it, but also more representative, building up a sense of affiliation or trust or social inclusion.

Dr Torsh: Yeah I think that is such an important point, that last point that you make, that it’s not just about the communication or information. It’s not just about, you know, getting people to get their shots on time and know when to enrol their children in school. But it’s also about including everyone in this imagined community of this country, and acknowledging that it’s not an extra that they are included. It’s not a special favour. It’s not tolerance. It’s genuine inclusion. I think that’s a really important point. And do you think that your next step is going to sort of continue that work? I know now that you are doing this fantastic work at the University of Technology. Is that something you’re going to take into your next project?

Dr Grey: Yes and no. My new project is just really commencing, but for our listeners, just sort of shifting headspace – a lot of the current thinking about indigenous policy and indigenous research really focuses on what we call a self-determination paradigm. You know, allowing people to not just have a say in matters that affect them, but have some level of control. And so my current project is looking at a different kind of inclusion. It’s looking at the space of language renewal, which is a space that Australian governments have, in recent years, made quite unusual steps into, both in terms of sort of policy support and legislative support for aboriginal language renewal. But it raises this sort of potential tension or question of “Is the state including indigenous people sort of in a paradigm or approach that the state itself is dictating, or is there a way of allowing indigenous people to take control of their own language renewal processes that might be different to different communities? And if that approach is taken, what is the role of the state?” So that’s a project that raises some different questions of social inclusion, but it all stems back to these bigger questions of language use in the public space. Things like naming of places according both to indigenous language and indigenous knowledges of place. Something I’m looking at very much at the moment – using indigenous languages in Parliament, which requires in most cases a change of the rules, which are called the standing orders that govern the parliaments themselves. And so again, there I’m looking at both sort of linguistic diversity and inclusion through this lens of political participation and representation.

Dr Torsh: Thank you for listening and thank you, Alex, for being here.

Dr Grey: Absolutely my pleasure. Thanks, Hanna.

Dr Laura Smith-Khan during her keynote at InDialog (Image credit: Dries Cavents, UGhent)

Editor’s Note: Asylum seekers in countries of the Global North need to communicate a credible fear of persecution to assessors who speak a different language, come from a different cultural background, and operate in a different institutional context. To bridge these gaps between asylum seekers and assessors, the work of interpreters is essential, yet widely devalued and erased. Dr Laura Smith-Khan explored these vanishing acts in her keynote lecture at the recent InDialog 4 conference at Ghent University, Belgium. We are privileged to be able to share a version of her talk with our readers.

***

To grant protection to asylum seekers, officials in the global north require them to communicate a fear of persecution. Not only that, they also must believe them. The process of evaluating an asylum claim and an asylum-seeker’s credibility involves multiple forms of communication, and given the transnational nature of seeking asylum, this setting is one with a great deal of linguistic diversity.

Therefore, it should be obvious that interpreting is a common feature in asylum procedures and that interpreters play a crucial role in facilitating the communication of the various participants involved. Yet misconceptions about interpreting can affect participation in interpreter-mediated encounters and can also influence the way asylum communication is evaluated as part of the credibility assessment process.

Existing studies have found that interpreters’ work is sometimes devalued, and interpreters are even made invisible within institutional structures, discourses and practices. This is despite a large body of research about the many roles and impacts interpreters have within the encounters they mediate, both in asylum procedures and beyond.

Below I’ll share some of my own research, focusing on refugee credibility assessment in Australia. I will introduce some key “language ideologies” that operate in asylum procedures. I believe this is important, because “the study of interpreters, their experiences, and the ideologies of voice and language within which they work offers ways to interrogate the contradictions of global capital and its related humanitarian enterprises” (Kunreuther & Rao, 2023, p. 250). So I will explore how these ideologies have an impact on institutional understandings of interpreting, and through this, how they can undermine how asylum seekers’ communication and credibility are assessed.

Seeking asylum in Australia

To provide some context, here is a short overview of the process for seeking asylum in Australia (see Diagram). The procedures differ depending on whether people seeking asylum arrive by boat or with a visa.

First, for people arriving by boat, they have a basic entry interview. And then if the government allows them to, they will later make a protection visa application, along with other asylum seekers who were able to reach Australia by plane, with some other visa, for example as tourists or students.

The protection visa application is assessed by the Immigration Department, and involves completing a long set of complicated application forms and then later participating in a detailed and rigorous interview with the official who is tasked with evaluating the application.

If the application is unsuccessful, a merits review, where the facts of their case are reconsidered, is possible. There are two separate bodies for this: people who arrive by boat have their application reconsidered by the Immigration Assessment Authority, which usually reviews the existing records only, and does not call the applicant for further questions. In contrast, people who arrive with a visa can opt for a review which is carried out by the Administrative Appeals Tribunal and involves attending a further hearing.

If the applicant is successful at the merits review stage, they can seek judicial review. If they continue to be unsuccessful, they can make further appeals up through the Australian Federal court hierarchy. However, what can be considered in a judicial review is quite limited and it is difficult to successfully navigate this process without professional legal assistance, so only a small proportion of cases are appealed there, and even fewer are successful.

In this post, I’ll draw on a mix of data from Australia: published decisions from one of the merits review bodies, the Administrative Appeals Tribunal, a Federal Court decision, and interviews that I conducted with migration lawyers.

Language ideologies and the law

In Anglophone scholarship, the concept of “language ideology” began developing in the late 1970s. It is the idea that everyone has their own “common-sense” beliefs about what good language is and about how communication works or should work. Importantly, scholars emphasize how power structures are implicated in how particular language ideologies are mobilized and prioritized. For example, Ingrid Piller notes that language ideologies “serve to legitimize the social order and therefore they are always interested, multiple and contested” (Piller, 2015, p. 87). Diana Eades concurs, observing that they “can play an important role in the reproduction of inequality (Eades, 2012, p. 474).

This concept has proven useful for examining a variety of legal contexts, when it comes to understanding how testimony and evidence are gathered and assessed. Drawing on a range of existing research, Eades articulated some key language ideologies relevant to legal processes. In summary and for our purposes they are:

• Ideology of inconsistency: A “central strategy” to undermine witness credibility – this involves identifying inconsistency between different tellings of a story.
• Ideology of narrator authorship: The idea that the witness or interviewee produces testimony on their own.
• Ideology of decontextualized fragments: Accepting that it is okay to take single words or phrases out of their original context to examine and test them.
• Ideology of entexualization: Related to the previous ideology, this one involves taking decontextualized testimony, and recontextualizing it somewhere else. In legal and bureaucratic settings, this often involves transforming oral texts into written ones. This transformation is accepted as producing an accurate and official record of institutional encounters.

Here, I’d like to consider more closely these ideologies and explore how they affect understandings of interpreting and interpreters within migration procedures, and in turn, how this can affect policy, practices, and participation within these processes.

A central concern in asylum procedures is determining whether an asylum-seeker’s stories and claims are credible. Much like what Eades found in the criminal law context, one of the key ways refugee credibility is tested relies on the ideology of inconsistency: asylum-seekers are made to tell their story on multiple occasions in multiple ways to try to pick up inconsistencies between each telling.

The three remaining ideologies Eades identifies all help enable the testing of inconsistency. They also all rely on or help to produce a certain understanding of the role of interpreters and interpreting: that interpreting is neutral, and that it puts minority-language participants on an equal footing with other participants, and has no tangible impact on the production of testimony.

As we will see, this means and requires that interpreters and interpreting become almost invisible in the official documents of the asylum decision-making institutions.

Acknowledging the interpreter

I examined a collection of 27 published decisions from the Administrative Appeals Tribunal where credibility is discussed. These are the documents where the Tribunal decision-maker sets out the asylum claim, explains what happened in the hearing, where they ask the asylum seeker questions about their claim. During the hearing, they also raise any concerns that they have and give the asylum seeker the chance to respond. The written decision should include the details of this process and explain the official’s reasoning process for arriving at their decision.

Figure 1

In this corpus of decisions, I found that there is very little mention of interpreters: in four cases there is absolutely no mention of interpreting, nor does the official specify that the decision was conducted in English, so it remains completely unclear what language or languages were involved (see Figure 1).

In the decisions where it was clear that an interpreter was present, more than half only have generic, copy-paste template sort of statements about them, for example “The Tribunal hearing was conducted with the assistance of an interpreter in the Punjabi and English languages.”

While these written decisions often describe the applicant (or asylum seeker) as speaking, saying, claiming, responding etc, interpreters themselves are only infrequently presented as communicating.

In eight cases, including one where the hearing was conducted in English, there is a little more discussion of interpreting, but only because it has been raised as an issue by an applicant or their lawyer. In only two decisions does a decision-maker make what appears to be unsolicited remarks related to an interpreter.

This very minimal inclusion of interpreters in these written decisions contrasts sharply with how asylum applicants are represented. Throughout, they are most often described as communicating, e.g. “the applicant stated this”, “the applicant claimed that” (for more discussion see Smith-Khan, 2017), when of course in actual fact in most cases it would have been an interpreter’s English words that are being written down or summarized. Already in this corpus of decisions, it is evident that the written performance of credibility assessment hinges primarily on presenting how the asylum-seeker communicates, with very little explicit recognition of interpreters’, or indeed other interlocutors’, contributions to the communication.

Raising multilingual communication, challenging authorship

When applicants or lawyers try to challenge this invisibility of interpreting or translation, it can be hard for them to get the decision-makers to accept their arguments.

For example, in one case in this corpus, a decision-maker drew on the ideologies of inconsistency and decontextualized fragments to find an asylum-seeker not credible. She was mainly concerned about the inconsistent use of the words “giving” and “sending” when it came to the part of the applicant’s claim where he talked about sharing information about Christianity with his customers.

In this particular case, it was earlier noted that the applicant, who was Chinese, had professional assistance putting together his application, and that he had prepared a written statement which was “later translated into English” to be included as part of the application. The tribunal hearing was conducted with a Mandarin-English interpreter.

The official reports in her decision:

The Tribunal indicated to the applicant that there appears to be inconsistencies in the evidence, namely that in oral evidence he had said that he was giving the customer some material whereas in writing he has claimed that he was sending the material. The applicant stated that the mistake had been made by the translator. The Tribunal indicated that the inconsistency could raise doubts about the veracity of his claims and his credibility generally, and his general credibility. The Tribunal invited him to comment or respond. The applicant said if there is any doubt he is regretful.

From what is evident from the written decision, the asylum seeker (referred to as an “applicant” as per Tribunal conventions) consistently stated throughout the hearing that he gave and did not send these materials, so the apparent inconsistency is between what appears in the written statement prepared when he initially applied for asylum, and later when interviewed.

Here, along with relying on decontextualized fragments to find an inconsistency, the ideology of narrative authorship is clearly demonstrated. When raising the apparent inconsistency between “sending” and “giving” the tribunal member assigns authorship to the asylum seeker: the applicant said in oral evidence and the applicant claimed in writing. However, in fact, those utterances and words were produced by two others: an interpreter and a translator. When the applicant seeks to respond to this issue – again, communicating with the assistance of an interpreter – he raises this exact point: that it was the translator who produced the English version of the statement and so it must have been a mistake they made.

The tribunal decision-maker mentions this particular inconsistency at multiple points, and the applicant consistently points to the translator. But unfortunately, the tribunal member does not accept this at any point and continues to suggest that this inconsistency undermines the applicant’s credibility.

Written texts as reliable representations

I’ve been discussing these types of issues and ideologies for some time now, and a few years ago I was excited to find an Australian Federal Court review where the original rejection had involved a similar type of inconsistency, and the Federal Court judge rejected the use of decontextualized fragments (Smith-Khan, 2022).

Part of the claim was that the asylum-seeker’s family started running a shop, and that sometime later the shop had been attacked. The apparent inconsistency was that during one interview, the asylum-seeker talked about an attack occurring “a few months” after opening the shop; and at another interview, the asylum-seeker provided two dates that suggested the attack was about six months after the shop opened. The merits review official rejected the case, and at first appeal a judge agreed with their approach.

In a further appeal to the Federal Court of Australia, however, I was very happy to discover that the asylum seeker’s lawyers argued that the judge should look beyond these decontextualized fragments to consider the actual interaction, involving questions and answers, that took place in one of these interviews. Even better, the judge accepted this argument, and throughout his written decision, we find extracts of a transcript of the immigration interview to which he refers to demonstrate this reasoning.

Analysing protection interview discourse

Particularly relevant to our current discussion is this extract of the transcript (see Image). The transcript is reproduced in the court decision (references are to the Immigration Officer (Off) and the asylum seeker (App)).

By looking more closely at the interaction, instead of just those decontextualized fragments, the judge concluded that the original finding of an inconsistency was not logical, and that the answer “a few” could be explained by the way the questions were worded, and because of the official’s interruptions too. He observed that “the question … posed two alternatives. It was not an open question” and the asylum seeker’s “answer was the most accurate of the two alternatives.”

Importantly, the judge also emphasizes that relying on decontextualized words is particularly problematic “in an interview where the [asylum seeker] was unrepresented and which required an interpreter …” (my emphasis).

However even in this exceptionally positive case in which we see an uncommon resistance against these pervasive language ideologies, where the lawyers and judge support the approach of looking more closely at the interaction, we are still not actually looking at the interaction itself. We are looking at an entextualization of a spoken interaction into a written transcript.

And very significantly for our purposes, not only is it a transcription of speech into writing, in doing so, we also see a multilingual interaction, involving Arabic and English, transformed into a monolingual English one. In the process, all of the asylum-seeker’s and interpreter’s Arabic utterances simply no longer exist.

We also see an interaction that actually had at least three speakers – the decision-maker, the asylum-seeker and an interpreter, transformed into one where the interpreter is once again made invisible.  All of the interpreter’s English utterances are textually reassigned to the asylum-seeker, reflecting and reinforcing this ideology of narrative authorship.

This shows that even in very exceptional cases where there is resistance to the problematic language ideologies at play in asylum credibility assessments, these ideologies are so deeply engrained in institutional practices that they persist in ways like this.

Hypothetical transcript with the vanished interpreter contributions in red.

Perhaps the choice of a monolingual transcript was pragmatic in this particular case, since the lawyers’ arguments relied on questioning approach rather than any particular issue with interpreting. However, the fact that they could make this choice suggests that transforming multilingual oral communication into monolingual written texts is an accepted norm in this setting. Further, the choice to attribute the English utterances to the asylum seeker, similar to the Tribunal decision corpus, further erases the interpreter’s contributions.

In this example from Australia, we can see how the choices made in how audio recording of the immigration interview is transcribed involves a transformation process. However, in many other jurisdictions, this can happen through other forms of entextualization. In places where asylum interviews are typically not audio recorded, the immigration official must simultaneously conduct the interview, while also making a written record of what is apparently said (Maréchal, 2022; Wadensjö et al., aop).  Arguably with that arrangement there is even less transparency than in the Australian case, because there will be no audio records to consider when seeking to examine the accuracy of that written record, or to raise issues with the interpreting or any other part of the interaction. However, even in the Australian case, we can see that languages and participants circulate unequally throughout asylum procedures: multilingual interactions become monolingual documents, and interpreters, though very often physically present in interview room, are all but erased on paper.

Structures and practices

If we look beyond the decision-making process, these ideologies also help justify and are reinforced by structural aspects of asylum processes, and again the Australian setting provides a clear example, but these considerations are also relevant elsewhere.

Despite Australia being a world-leader in terms of its professional accreditation for interpreters, poor working conditions for community interpreters suggest that their professional skills are not highly valued. These conditions include being poorly paid and working mainly in insecure freelance roles (Cho, 2023). For legal interpreting many report not even having access to a chair to sit on in court, or a table to take notes, or not being given water to drink, or adequate breaks (Hale & Stern, 2011).

In the asylum system, interpreters are generally only booked for the exact start time of the asylum interview or hearing, and are given very little or no briefing on the application. The government department is effectively the client – they choose and pay the interpreters. The interpreters do not have permanent contracts but work casually, on an ad-hoc basis through external agencies. This set-up understandably has an impact on the power dynamics in the interaction, limiting interpreters’ ability to raise issues about how the officials conduct the sessions, how they ask questions or interrupt the asylum-seekers.

This type of work arrangement is also an environment where interpreters may feel uncomfortable asking for clarifications or sharing doubts. There are also time-related pressures created by room bookings and interpreting assignment booking which limit the duration of interviews or the duration of an individual’s interpreter’s involvement.

The way languages are classified by the interpreting agencies and official interpreter accreditation body can also create challenges: lawyers report having trouble being able to choose the right type of interpreter for their needs, for example not being able to specify a particular variety of Arabic.

Also, while there is effectively a right to interpreting in asylum interviews and hearings, there is no such right beyond the interview room. Some community legal centres have very tight interpreting budgets, and have to sometimes rely on untrained volunteers or family members to help with interpreting, or preference telephone interpreting over face-to-face interpreting because it costs less.

Further, going back to this idea of the asylum seekers being the sole narrators of their testimony, there is no right to legal representation for asylum seekers in Australia. This somehow seems justified in a system where the testimony is ideologically viewed as simply the asylum-seekers’ own.

This is significant for so many reasons: both research and practice both tell us that having legal assistance has a huge impact on how strong an asylum application will be, and whether it will meet very stringent procedural requirements (Ghezelbash et al., 2022; Smith-Khan, 2021). Further though, the lawyers I’ve interviewed often talk about the interaction monitoring role they play in asylum interviews. Being familiar with their client’s case means that they are better placed to pick up any issue that might come up in interpreter mediated encounters and to intervene and advocate on behalf of their client – something that interpreters can’t do due to the limits created by their code of conduct and ethics. Lawyers can also note such issues and use them as grounds for an appeal, putting more pressure on officials to do the best they can to ensure smooth communication (Smith-Khan, 2020).

Having knowledge of institutional processes and challenges, they are also better placed to navigate the bookings processes, to best ensure an appropriate interpreter is chosen. This makes them valuable in terms of addressing some of these structural issues just discussed, yet only the small number of asylum seekers who have access to legal support can benefit from this sort of assistance.

If we adopt this ideology of asylum-seekers producing their refugee narrative all alone, then all of these structural issues are much harder to challenge, and both interpreters’ and lawyers’ contributions to the production of refugee testimony can be denied.

Conclusions

In this post I have introduced some key language ideologies that operate in asylum processes. Through the data I have shared, I have tried to demonstrate how these ideologies affect how asylum claims are assessed and how asylum seekers’ credibility is evaluated. In particular, I have sought to demonstrate how these ideologies operate to render invisible interpreters’ and interpreting’s contributions in asylum communication. This is a key part of the institution’s discursive performance of objectivity and legitimacy that acts to entrench their authority to make these types of decisions: because for them to rely on assessments of asylum-seekers’ communication in the way they do, other participants’ contributions in the co-production of testimony cannot be acknowledged.

To close, I want to leave us with this thoughtful quote in which to find motivation for our work:

As figures who stand at the intersection of global economic and political projects, interpreters enable the movement of people, ideas, and capital across borders. An understanding of the invisible labor of interpreters disturbs the alleged transparency, neutrality, and ease of communication that is so foundational to the authority of institutions of global governance. (Kunreuther & Rao, 2023, p. 250)

This is why I believe that research in this area is so crucial, and that we must all continue to do our part to investigate interpreters’ work and working contexts, and to challenges discourses, rules and practices that devalue them.

References 

Cho, J. (2023). Bilingual workers in a monolingual state: Bilingualism as a non-skill. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism. 10.1080/13670050.2023.2213374
Eades, D. (2012). The social consequences of language ideologies in courtroom cross-examination. Language in Society, 41(4), 471-497.
Ghezelbash, D., Dorostkar, K., & Walsh, S. (2022). A data driven approach to evaluating and improving judicial decision-making: Statistical analysis of the judicial refugee of refugee cases in Australia. UNSW Law Journal, 45(3), 1085-1123.
Hale, S., & Stern, L. (2011). Interpreter quality and working conditions: Comparing Australian and internationa courts of justice. Judicial Officers’ Bulletin, 23(9), 5-8.
Kunreuther, L., & Rao, S. (2023). The Invisible Labor and Ethics of Interpreting. Annual Review of Anthropology, 52. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-052721-091752
Maréchal, M. (2022). Engagements institutionnels. Enjeux glottopolitiques de l’interprétation dans les instances décisionnaires de l’asile en France. Glottopol : Revue de sociolinguistique en ligne, 36. 10.4000/glottopol.1653
Piller, I. (2015). Language Ideologies. In K. Tracy (Ed.), The International Encyclopedia of Language and Social Interaction. 10.1002/9781118611463
Smith-Khan, L. (2017). Telling stories: Credibility and the representation of social actors in Australian asylum appeals. Discourse & Society, 28(5), 512-534.
Smith-Khan, L. (2020). Migration practitioners’ roles in communicating credible refugee claims. Alternative Law Journal, 45(2), 119-124.
Smith-Khan, L. (2021). “I try not to be dominant, but I’m a lawyer!”: Advisor resources, context and refugee credibility. Journal of Refugee Studies, 34(4), 3710-3733. https://doi.org/10.1093/jrs/feaa102
Smith-Khan, L. (2022). Incorporating sociolinguistic perspectives in Australian refugee credibility assessments: The case of CRL18. Journal of International Migration and Integration. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12134-022-00937-2
Wadensjö, C., Rehnberg, H. S., & Nikolaidou, Z. (Ahead of print). Managing a discourse of reporting: the complex composing of an asylum narrative. Multilingua: Journal of Cross-Cultural and Interlanguage Communication. https://doi.org/10.1515/multi-2022-0017

The talk brings together three of my studies, as follows:

Study 1 (Grey and Severin, 2021)

Focus: legislation and policy about the decision-making framework and standards which might underlie multilingual government communications in Australia’s largest state, NSW.

Summary: The NSW government’s public communications are not made within a clear or informed decision-making framework as to choice of language, and do not consistently acknowledge, plan for, or manage the public’s actual linguistic diversity.

We developed a typology of laws about language choices. The most common type (40 of the 91 relevant laws) protects people by requiring that rights, obligations or information are explained to vulnerable types of people in language that they understand. Not being an English-speaker and/or literate in English is not generally recognised as a vulnerability in these laws.

Most of these require that certain government representatives communicate in an understandable way, but the standard is unclear and variously phrased: ‘plain language’, ‘ordinary language’, ‘simple language’, or ‘language likely to be understood’. There is no mention that this language may need to be a language other than English.

Another type of law that we found (merely) acknowledges linguistic diversity. The key example is the Multicultural NSW Act, which contains NSW’s Multicultural Principle that ‘all individuals and institutions should respect and make provision for the culture, language and religion of others within an Australian legal and institutional framework where English is the common language’.

Based on this Multicultural Principle and a few policies that we could locate, we conclude that there is enough of a framework in NSW that the question, how do government language choices differentially affect different language groups? should nowadays be asked when decisions about the NSW Government’s public communications are being made.

Study 2 (Grey and Severin, 2022)

Focus: web communications of 24 departments and agencies of the NSW government.

Summary: The study identifies that the NSW Government makes some effort to publicly communicate in LOTEs but also identifies problems: we found no consistency or predictability across websites in relation to the range of LOTEs used, the amount of LOTE content produced, or the steps by which it could be accessed. The image shows a table of 64 languages other than English which appeared at least once: how many of them, and for what, varied widely across the NSW government’s websites.

Overall, the actual NSW Government website communications practices we analysed did not appear to meet the standard set in the Multicultural NSW Act from which I quoted above, because provisions are not reliably or thoroughly made for non-English dominant speakers and readers.

We argue that the NSW government should not necessarily spend more money on multilingual public communications, although that may help, but rather that it should spend money on multilingual communications in an informed, strategic way, and in a way that is accountable both to policy and to the multilingual public.

Study 3 (Grey, 2023)

Focus: Covid-19 communications from the NSW government and the Australian national government.

Summary: This study finds weaknesses in multilingual Covid communications much like we found in the first two studies about general government communications, and about which I gave a preliminary report on Language on the Move.

In its final form, this study also reviews of the commentary of international organizations as to how to take a human rights-based approach to pandemic communications to fulfill certain international law obligations upon Australia (and other nations). It found expectations are emerging that governments’ multilingual health communications will be not merely partially available, but rather produced without (unreasonable) linguistic discrimination; produced with minority communities’ involvement at preparatory stages; and produced after strategic planning, which bolsters our calls in the prior studies.

The international commentary also stresses that multilingual government communications should be effective, not merely exist. In explaining what more effective multilingual communications could entail, I advocate assessing government communications’ Availability, Accessibility, Acceptability and Adaptability — that is, the ‘Four As’ recognized by the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, crisis communications scholars and applied linguists (for example, Piller, Zhang and Li, 2020).

Recommendations

I conclude the webinar by suggesting ‘3 Rs’ in response to recurrent problems with how government communications reach, and represent, linguistically diverse publics:

1. (further) Research (preferably with government collaboration because important data is not publicly available / governments are best placed to collect it);
2. Redesigning communications and their access routes (for example, redesign the ‘monolingual logic’ of government websites, to use a phrase from Piller, Bruzon and Torsh, 2023); and
3. Rights-based Regulation (to uphold standards and to strategically plan communities’ input).

References

Grey, A. (2023). Communicative Justice and Covid-19: Australia‘s pandemic response and international guidance. Sydney Law Review. 45(1) 1-43
Grey, A., & Severin, A. A. (2021). An audit of NSW legislation and policy on the government’s public communications in languages other than English. Griffith Law Review, 30(1), 122-147. doi:10.1080/10383441.2021.1970873
Grey, A., & Severin, A. A. (2022). Building towards best practice for governments’ public communications in languages other than English: a case study of New South Wales, Australia. Griffith Law Review, 31(1), 25-56. doi:10.1080/10383441.2022.2031526
Piller, I., Bruzon, A. S., & Torsh, H. (2023). Monolingual school websites as barriers to parent engagement. Language and Education, 37(3), 328-345. doi:10.1080/09500782.2021.2010744
Piller, I., Zhang, J., & Li, J. (2020). Linguistic diversity in a time of crisis. Multilingua, 39(5), 503-515. doi:https://doi.org/10.1515/multi-2020-0136

(Image credit: Eurekastreet)

Editor’s note: This article is based on a presentation delivered as part of a plenary panel, ‘Transdisciplinary Approach to Forensic Linguistics’, at the 16^th Biennial Conference of the International Association for Forensic and Legal Linguistics, held at the University of Santo Tomas, Manila.

Questions and comments from our readers and conference participants are welcome.

***

Navigating migration procedures in Australia and other countries of the global north can be very challenging. Australian migration law and procedure are incredibly complex and restrictive, and the rules change constantly – some almost on a daily basis.

Processes are also linguistically demanding: making sense of the law itself and then navigating the application process requires a very high level of proficiency in written, legal English, and strong computer literacy. Depending on the type of application, individuals may also need to attend an interview and discuss personal and sensitive parts of their life in great detail, as a way to prove their credibility.

Intercultural communication is a common feature in this setting, in multiple ways. First, and perhaps most obviously, different participants usually come from different national, ethnic, racial and/or linguistic backgrounds. Second, the immigration department and its officials have their own specific bureaucratic culture that, more often than not, will be unfamiliar and challenging for many visa applicants.

This means that while applicants are allowed to apply for a visa on their own, having professional assistance can often be crucial to a smooth and successful application (Jacobs 2022; Reynolds 2020; Smith-Khan 2021c). In Australia, practicing lawyers can assist with visa applications and first-stage appeals. Non-lawyers may also assist. To be authorised, they must complete a Graduate Diploma in Migration Law, pass external examinations, and then register as a migration agent. Together I call these two groups “migration practitioners”.

Despite their importance, there has been very little research about Australian migration practitioners (van Galen-Dickie 2021). My research on asylum procedures found that official texts also pay little attention to how practitioners shape applicant testimony and mediate institutional communication (Smith-Khan 2020). To find out more, my current project explores practitioners’ beliefs and practices when communicating with and on behalf of their clients. I started by examining relevant law and institutional texts and then conducted qualitative interviews with current practitioners, and students training to become registered migration agents. I also observed student practical activities where they role-played migration agents conducting client consultations.

“Life From A Suitcase” sculpture installed at Pyrmont dedicated to immigrants in Australia (Image credit: Wikipedia)

To better understand how intercultural communication is understood in this context, I follow Ingrid Piller’s (2017) approach to examine who makes language and culture relevant, to whom, in which context, and for which purposes. I identified multiple and conflicting discourses about intercultural communication, which emphasise and understand language and culture in different ways, and reflect on the potential impacts of these divergent understandings.

Difficult work

Current practitioners shared insights into the challenges they face in their day-to-day work, particularly emphasising contextual factors. They pointed to the ever-changing and increasingly restricted visa options as a key difficulty: they must carefully balance different professional goals. They must stay up-to-date with changes to migration law, and emphasise their value to their clients. They must also manage their clients’ expectations and clearly communicate the limits of their power within the system. As visas options become increasingly limited, this can be difficult for clients to accept.

Another key challenge is that the channels through which practitioners and applicants can communicate with the immigration department are increasingly inaccessible. Participants explained how in the past, each visa application was assigned an individual departmental case officer who was identified by name, and had a direct email address and telephone number. If practitioners had a question or update about an application, they could easily contact that person. Now instead there are only general contact details for various sections of the department, limiting applicants’ and practitioners’ access and agency. One participant talked about keeping an Excel sheet with old individual contact details she saved in the past and using this to try to reach out to officials directly. What once was standard practice, that list of contacts is now a treasured and rare resource.

Deviance and deficiency

These challenges intersect with another: that practitioners are more tightly regulated now than ever before, leading to stress and in some cases even fear. My analysis of government discourses goes some way to explaining this. In a recent parliamentary inquiry report, migration practitioners are presented as policy problems: they pose a threat in terms of their competence and ethics. Migrant clients are also problems: in particular, “culturally and linguistically diverse” clients are framed as vulnerable and in need of protecting from practitioners. The report opines that they are “socially, legally and financially vulnerable and are open to exploitation from the actions of unscrupulous, unlawful and unethical registered migration agents.”

Immigration is Bolstering Australia’s Population Growth (Source: Statista)

This institutional discourse zooms in on two groups of actors, presenting particular deficiencies they are said to bring to migration processes. Rather than focusing on the complex legal structures and procedures that exacerbate or even create difficulties and vulnerabilities, this discourse places the spotlight on migration practitioners, justifying tighter regulation. They also make language and culture individually salient for migrants, and present these as individual attributes that apparently create vulnerability (Smith-Khan 2021b).

Testable and valued language skills

Language becomes salient in other ways too, connected with migration practitioners. One rule aimed at controlling and excluding incompetent and unethical practitioners regards English language proficiency. Yet this rule is problematic and potentially discriminatory in its application to different groups (Smith-Khan 2021a), as can be demonstrated with an example of two students in the project.

One student is multilingual and came to Australia as a skilled migrant. He grew up in South India, speaking a family language at home, and a regional language in his community. All of his schooling from the beginning of primary school until the end of university was strictly in English, to the point that the students were punished if they were caught speaking another language even in the playground. He used English during work travel to other parts of India, later when working overseas, and then finally in Australia. Proving his English proficiency through testing was a requirement for his Australian skilled permanent visa. He reports that his migration and travel experiences helped him become aware of different ways of speaking English, and communicating with people from different backgrounds.

Another student is a monolingual English-speaker, born in Australia. He too was educated in English, with fewer opportunities to learn any other languages. He has only worked in Australia. While he speaks fluent English and was friendly and engaging in the role-plays I observed, on various occasions, he used Australian English idioms that his role-play partners did not understand, affecting their interaction.

To become registered migration agents, both individuals must successfully complete the Graduate Diploma and pass two externally-administered written and oral exams. These are specifically designed to evaluate their occupational competencies, including their profession-specific communication skills. However, only the Australian-born candidate is assumed to have sufficient English language proficiency. The other, despite his education and work history, must again sit an IELTS test to fulfil the registration requirements.

Country of birth of Australian residents (2021) (Source: Wikipedia)

Here, language and migration history become salient to who legislators trust as competent and reliable. These rules assume that being multilingual and from a particular country of origin are potential threats to English language proficiency, and further, that ensuring English language proficiency helps ensure competent practice and protect vulnerable clients.

Invisible language work

In contrast to the hypervisibility and importance of English proficiency, other language skills and practices are much less visible in official discourses. Yet in reality, many practitioners use other languages in their day-to-day work. All current practitioners in the study who have English as a second language report using other languages in their work. Some serve almost exclusively clients from the same language background or country of origin, while others have more diverse client groups.

Significantly, the Australian immigration regime is almost completely officially monolingual: law and policy are published in English only, all application paperwork must be completed in English. Applicants must simply manage, regardless of their own linguistic resources, and officials are not expected to know or use other languages in their work. This means that when practitioners use languages other than English, they provide a benefit not only to visa applicants, but also to the department, filling a substantial institution-wide communication gap.

Both monolingual and multilingual practitioners also describe the importance of mobilizing other types of intercultural communication skills in their work. They discuss their awareness and management of linguistic issues when working with interpreters, or when speakers use different varieties of a language. They talk about their strategies to check and address issues with understanding. They also describe strategies like switching between different languages for different parts of their interaction to best suit their clients’ needs, for example providing written advice in English, but supplementing this with an oral explanation using another language. Code choice and switching are also discussed as means of identity performance and rapport building.

Relevant sociocultural knowledge is also valued. Those with a migrant background identify their lived experience and insider knowledge as important assets in interacting with and representing their clients. Practitioners who don’t identify a shared background also value this type of knowledge, but report developing an understanding of their clients’ country of origin, ethnic, linguistic and other social groups.

Navigating different types of interpersonal and power dynamics can also be more challenging and complex than official discourses envisage. For example, one young non-white female practitioner shares her experiences assisting high-powered CEO clients. She must carefully balance her professional duties, with maintaining good relationships with the client companies, who can be very demanding, and satisfying her managers, who closely scrutinize and control every detail of her interactions.

While this diverse range of sociolinguistic resources can influence client-practitioner interactions, and therefore the application process, they are not officially acknowledged or addressed in the way that a “testable” level of English proficiency is. Therefore, I argue that migration practitioners carry out important invisible language work that much of the institutional discourse does not explicitly recognize, and is sometimes even discursively transformed into risk rather than benefit (see also Cho 2023).

Developing counter discourses through education

However, the study also found that practical experience and education can help future practitioners to push back against harmful discourses, and to value their own communication skills.

For example, one student reflected on how the role-plays helped build her confidence. English is her second language and she describes herself as a nervous person when it comes to public speaking. She was hesitant to participate in the project, and kept her laptop camera switched off when participating in her first role-play. She said that it allowed her to pretend “I’m just talking in the dark to myself.” Turning her camera on during the next round of role-plays later in her study was evidence for her that she had become more confident. But her gain in confidence did more than just increase her class participation. At the end of her study, she passed her external oral exam on her first attempt, and even reported having an enjoyable chat with the examiner afterwards.

Significantly, she reports that her formative experience during her study also broadened her career plans. In her first research interview she said that she could not work with asylum-seeker clients, as she didn’t feel equipped to assist people who may have experienced trauma. But by the time she’d graduated and was awaiting her registration, she’d applied for work experience with an organization that specifically assists refugees.

Student participants also shared critical reflections on migration profession registration rules.

For example, they critiqued assessment design, arguing that time-restricted external exams don’t reflect the nature of the real work environment. Others made similar comments about English language tests, questioning why they needed to take them again, and why Academic IELTS was required for migration practice, when the tests were not actually designed to evaluate the skills needed for their work.

Other students developed a sense of the bad reputation that migration agents have amongst some government departments and policy-makers. While some embraced the idea that more stringent entry requirements would help prevent “dodgy” agents, others regarded this more critically. One suggested an ideological link between attitudes towards migrants and migration agents: “I think they see us as unnecessary… Because I think they are very anti-immigration, and I don’t think they really care for anybody helping migrants whatsoever…I just think that the Government’s deliberately making it difficult for people to get into the profession”.

So where does this leave our understanding of intercultural communication in migration law practice?  Undoubtedly, migration practitioners play complex and important roles in assisting people applying for Australian visas, mobilizing a range of sociolinguistic resources in the process. Yet there is a huge variation in how their contributions are viewed, based on diverging ways of making language and culture salient in this setting.

As I’ve argued, on the one hand, official discourses present intercultural communication with a focus on particular individuals: migration practitioners become risks that need managing, and clients are vulnerable to exploitation.

On the other hand, the research uncovers considerable counter discourses from current and future practitioners, who value their own skills and suggest that legal and procedural structures should be the target of greater scrutiny. Happily, my research suggests that students’ learning experiences can help equip them to have confidence in their own professional capabilities and to develop this critical focus on broader context.

Finally, with a recent change of government in Australia, significant reforms have been announced, acknowledging some of the big structural issues within the migration system. This creates a great opportunity for improvements to be made so that migration practitioners and the clients they serve can have a more positive and empowering experience.

References

Cho, J. (2023). Bilingual workers in a monolingual state: Bilingualism as a non-skill. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism (ahead of publication).
Jacobs, M. (2022). The metapragmatics of legal advice communication in the field of immigration law. Pragmatics, 32(4), 537-561.
Piller, I. (2017). Intercultural Communication: A Critical Introduction (2^nd ed), Edinburgh University Press.
Reynolds, J. (2020). Investigating the language-culture nexus in refugee legal advice meetings. Multingua: Journal of cross-cultural and interlanguage communication, 39(4), 395-429
Smith-Khan, L. (2020). Why refugee visa credibility assessments lack credibility: a critical discourse analysis. Griffith Law Review, 28(4), 406-430.
Smith-Khan, L. (2021a). ‘Common language’ and proficiency tests: A critical examination of registration requirements for Australian Registered Migration Agents. Griffith Law Review, 30(1), 97-121.
Smith-Khan, L. (2021b). Deficiencies and loopholes: clashing discourses, problems and solutions in Australian migration advice regulation. Discourse & Society, 32(5), 598-621.
Smith-Khan, L. (2021c). “I try not to be dominant, but I’m a lawyer!”: Advisor resources, context and refugee credibility. Journal of Refugee Studies, 34(4), 3710–3733.
van Galen-Dickie, M. (2021). The Protégé Effect:Learning from the Experience of Graduates in an Online Community of Practice, Doctoral Thesis, University of Southern Queensland.

Video recording of this lecture now available on YouTube (27/12/2023)