On language and citizenship

Our module aims at exploring the various dimensions of language involved in the experiences of citizenship,, especially from the perspective of migration and the lived experience of migrants across the world. We will draw from an understanding of 'citizenship' as it has been inspird by Isin (2008) and expanded in studies of language and society by Milani (2015). Instead of starting from a perspective which is mostly produced out of the dominant institutions,, we will engage on the exercise of understanding what 'citizenship' means from the perspective of those that find themselves 'on the move'. This entails moving across many dimensions of social life - first, the institutional  dimension (status), second, the lived experience of relocation and reterritorialization as being experienced by people on the move, with very situated cultural, personal, linguistic and embodied dispositions resulting from previous socialization (habitus); c) the dimension of agency and creativity, as people and institutions find creative ways of overpassing  tensions, obstacles and constraints, eventually subverting the dominant order of things. 

We will then explore the angle of "language" that mediates these three kinds of citizenship experience. To do this we draw on a discursive understanding of "language" and "languages" as modes of talking/writing, thinking and being which are situated in radically local practices.