Exploring the links between language, everyday citizenship, and community

ABSTRACT

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

KEYWORDS:

• Language
• the everyday
• community
• citizenship
• community-making

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their comments on the earlier version of this article. We would also like to thank Angharad Closs Stephens and Anitta Kynsilehto for sharing their thoughts and engaging with each article collected for this issue thoughtfully. Finally, we would like to thank Peter Nyers for his continuous support throughout the preparation of this special issue.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant agreement no. 946012).

Notes on contributors

Eeva Puumala

Eeva Puumala is a senior researcher at the Tampere Peace Research Institute at Tampere University. Her research focuses on community, coexistence, the body, and political agency. She is particularly interested in the practices through which communities are produced, enacted and their boundaries contested in the context of everyday encounters.

Reiko Shindo

Reiko Shindo is a university lecturer at Tampere University. Her research interests include migrant activism, translation practices, diaspora returnees, mobility and natural disasters, and ageing and migration. She examines these topics through concepts such as home, belonging, community, and translation.