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)

What: Public seminar
When: October 08, 2024, 1-3pm
Where: Macquarie University, Wallumattagal Campus, 01 Central Courtyard 204

Guest lecture abstract:

Communicating credibly in refugee status determination: How beliefs about language can affect decision-making

Dr Laura Smith-Khan, School of Law, University of New England

To gain refugee protection, asylum seekers must pass through demanding interview and application procedures to convince migration officials that they and their claims are credible. Communication is an essential, yet highly complex and demanding, element of these processes.

While asylum authorities highlight the many measures they take to ensure procedural fairness, including accommodating cultural and linguistic diversity, a closer look uncovers ongoing challenges.

This presentation shares research findings on language and credibility in Australian asylum procedures, focusing on a 2020 appeal decision from the Federal Court of Australia (FCA) (Smith-Khan, 2023). It draws on sociolinguistic scholarship to critically compare the original decision-maker’s approach with the approach taken by the FCA judge.

In doing so the presentation identifies and challenges problematic beliefs about language on which credibility-based rejections sometimes rely. It argues that the FCA decision provides an example of better practice, demonstrating that approaches reflecting sociolinguistic understandings of language allow for a fairer assessment of credibility.

Reference

Smith-Khan, L. (2023) Incorporating Sociolinguistic Perspectives in Australian Refugee Credibility Assessments: the Case of CRL18. Journal of International Migration & Integration 24 (Suppl 4), 727–743. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12134-022-00937-2

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

Additionally, multilingual crisis communication has been the focus of the research projects conducted by Master of Applied Linguistics students at Macquarie University as part of their “Literacies” unit. We close the year by sharing some of their findings.

In this final post in the series, Claire Livesey shows that children from migrant and refugee families with limited English and limited computer access have been particularly negatively affected by remote learning. She argues that preparing for the needs of vulnerable families during emergencies needs to be incorporated into disaster preparedness.

***

Home-schooling during lockdown is really hard

(Image credit: Glen Carrie via Unsplash)

In mid-March this year, Australian schools began to close in response to the escalating Covid-19 pandemic. By early April, most schools had shifted to online learning, and families were faced with the new challenge of having to teach their kids at home.

For this research project, I recently asked a number of parents what it was like to home-school children during a global pandemic. Along with a few curses and tears, the majority offered the same response: “it’s hard. Really, really hard.”

It’s hard for students, separated from their peers and the comforts of routine. It’s hard for teachers, new to the joys of Zoom and having to adapt an enormous amount of material on the fly. It’s perhaps especially hard for parents and carers who suddenly find themselves thrust into the role of full-time educators.

How much harder, then, must this experience be for those whose first language is not English, now expected to help children with schoolwork delivered entirely through an unfamiliar medium? This has been the situation faced by many migrant families during the Covid-19 crisis (and the focus of a research project by the Language on the Move team for which findings are expected early in the New Year).

Home schooling information and linguistic barriers

For first-generation migrants and refugees, the challenges of home schooling are often compounded by language barriers. According to the 2016 census, the majority of Australian migrants speak a language other than English at home, and 17% of those who speak a language other than English are not proficient in English. This number is even higher for migrants entering Australia under refugee status, with nearly a third found to have low levels of spoken English.

For these families, communicating with schools about distance learning and Covid-19 can be highly problematic. When Australian schools closed in response to the virus, teachers and principals were having to relay changing government guidelines to parents on a daily basis. Official statements from the Department(s) of Education at this time contained complex, technical explanations of Covid safety protocols and changes to schooling procedures. Tasked with passing on this barrage of information, many schools sent out e-mails which were equally long, dense and often indecipherable (see also Tazin Abdullah’s research for the same problem with information overload faced by ELICOS students).

Understanding this type of communication requires a level of English literacy which is unrealistically high for many parents, and particularly so for those from non-English language backgrounds. As a result, many migrant parents have been unable to access ongoing communication from schools and government in regard to safety measures around Covid-19. This is a worrying finding during a crisis where, as Ingrid Piller has pointed out, every individual needs to have access to timely health information to ensure the safety of the community as a whole. A prediction borne out by the recent finding of the Victorian government that people born outside Australia were over-represented among Covid-19 infections by 20%.

Teaching in an unfamiliar language

Home schooling lessons present yet another linguistic hurdle for migrant families. Officially, parents in Australia were not expected to “teach” their children during lockdown home schooling, but rather to “guide, aid and facilitate” their learning. In reality, however, many of the materials being sent home by schools look very much like lesson plans, and require much more than casual supervision to implement.

Home schooling lessons have proven to be confusing and at times overwhelming for many migrant parents. Even with high levels of English proficiency, helping children with subjects such as maths can be a challenge due to the highly specific vocabulary required. For the 17% of Australian migrants who aren’t proficient in English, explaining complex concepts in an unfamiliar language poses an even greater challenge. Parents report feeling helpless at the prospect of having to decipher material at a primary or high school level, while they themselves are in the process of learning English.

(Image credit: Kelly Sikkema via Unsplash)

A lack of access to previously available translation services has compounded this problem. Despite considerable efforts by many schools to provide interpreters and translated materials, lockdown restrictions have made it difficult to give families the support they need. Refugee agencies also report that they are stretched to capacity due to current demand for interpreters. Many parents from refugee backgrounds have limited literacy skills in their own languages, and access to support services is particularly important to meet the demands of home learning.

Additional home schooling challenges for migrant families

A rapid research study by the University of Tasmania found that Australian children from culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) backgrounds are at risk of long-term disadvantage from home schooling. The report shows significant disparity in levels of access to basic schooling equipment and services, with many vulnerable families lacking the physical space and resources to support home learning.

Of particular concern is the finding that many vulnerable Australian families still lack basic access to computers and reliable internet service. This includes a large proportion of recently arrived migrant and refugee families, whose access to technology is below the national average. A number of recent media reports highlight this issue, interviewing Australian migrants with no home computers, needing to share mobile phones in order to access online schoolwork.

This has serious implications for migrant families in the current pandemic. Students and parents rely on internet access to engage with schools and services. There has been some government recognition of this ongoing problem, with a ministerial briefing paper acknowledging that: “for many Australian families online home learning is not a practical option without additional resourcing”. Additional equipment such as computers and modems have reportedly been made available by the NSW Department of education, and in April the Victorian government announced a program to subsidise NBN connections for students in need.

Better disaster preparation needed

Digital inequality is an ongoing problem in Australia, and the current pandemic has merely highlighted the fact that many vulnerable groups are being left out of this mode of communication.

For migrant and refugee families, increased access to computers only solves half the problem. Digital literacy training is also necessary for parents to be able to navigate online learning programs, with the majority of home schooling material only accessible through platforms such as Google classroom. Targeted services such as interpreters and teaching assistants need to be made available to parents on a consistent basis, with strategies in place for future lockdowns and periods of home schooling.

Individual schools and community groups have gone to enormous lengths to assist migrant families throughout the pandemic, placing considerable strain on already limited resources and personnel. Responsibility for providing these services needs to be at a government level, however, and specifically targeted at vulnerable communities.

As a matter of national disaster preparedness – given the ongoing nature of the pandemic but also considering other future crises – there is an urgent need to ensure that families of all backgrounds are able to communicate with schools, and to prepare for future home schooling events.

Now is the time to take stock of the lessons learnt from the pandemic and incorporate the needs of migrant families into everyday schooling practices.

In a world where public debates about refugees and asylum seekers often focus on whether they are telling the truth, it should probably come as no surprise that government processes for evaluating asylum claims emphasize assessing applicant credibility.

These credibility assessments have – rightly – attracted ample criticism from scholars across multiple disciplines for many years now. From the earliest critiques, scholarly commentary has acknowledged that the asylum process is a site of intercultural communication and suggested that many of the issues with credibility assessment relate to this. Credibility assessment guidance itself also acknowledges that asylum seekers have different social and cultural backgrounds to those of decision-makers and includes suggestions on how to accommodate these differences.

Focusing on communication makes sense, given that the indicators used to measure asylum seekers’ credibility generally relate to communication. These include evaluating asylum seekers on how consistently they communicate across various interactions and written texts (internal consistency), and how well their narrative aligns with officially preferred sources of knowledge relating to their home country and social group. Officials may also refer to the level of detail in their communication, and even to their demeanor, when explaining whether or not they find them credible.

In my doctoral research, I brought a fresh angle to scrutinizing these processes by critically examining the discourses about language, communication and diversity underlying the credibility assessment guidance provided to Australian officials reviewing refugee visa applications, as well as a collection of publicly available decisions. By conducting a critical discourse analysis I uncovered a set of problematic language myths on which these credibility assessments rely.

Language myth #1: Texts are produced by individuals in isolation

The first language myth is that individuals, in this case asylum seekers, can produce (written or spoken) texts alone. This false assumption leads to the idea that it is legitimate and possible to analyse and compare texts attributed to asylum seekers to determine whether their performance demonstrates credibility.

This is highly problematic because texts produced in the process of applying for asylum are closely dictated by legal and procedural requirements. They are also the product of the interaction of a variety of actors, such as the officials who ask questions and determine the conduct and content of interviews, legal advisors who sometimes speak and often write on behalf of their clients and offer them a range of advice on what to say and how. They may even be the products of multiple languages when interpreters are involved.

Language myth #2: A truthful narrator has one single story

The second language myth is that a truthful narrator will recount an event or other information consistently over time, and across different contexts. This false assumption leads to the idea that isolated fragments of text, removed from their original context, can provide evidence of deception.

For example, in my study, one applicant was judged to be lying because he told about an injury he had received to his ‘arm’ in one document and to his ‘shoulder’ in a later interaction. The applicant explained that he did not have access to an interpreter during the preparation of the earlier document and his English was not good enough to distinguish between these two body parts.

Language myth #3: Bilinguals are fully proficient in all their languages

The ‘arm’ vs ‘shoulder’ example brings us to yet another language myth that informs assessments of refugee credibility: officials’ poor understandings of bilingualism. The asylum seeker mentioned above had explained that he used the word ‘arm’ when putting together a statement with a migration lawyer with whom he spoke English, without the assistance of an interpreter, and this is why he had used this more general term rather than the more specific ‘shoulder’.

This claim is easy to accept when we have a nuanced understanding of what it means to be bilingual. Bilinguals usually have different levels of proficiency in their languages. Yet, decision makers usually expect bilinguals to have equal, complete fluency across all their languages. This often leads to the dismissal of explanations related to lack of access to interpreting.

This language myth makes it seem irrelevant whether an applicant communicated through a language they spoke well or not, or whether they had access to interpreting. Conveniently, this language myth provides an easy justification for decreasing public funding for language services.

Language myth #4: The decision maker is outside the interaction

Decision-makers themselves are important co-producers of the refugee narrative and of the official record of the asylum hearing. They ask the questions, and control who can speak and when. They draw on their own experiences and understandings of the world to make sense of asylum seekers’ stories. They also assess any explanations given for credibility-related concerns, drawing on their own beliefs about language in deciding how and whether to give these explanations weight.

Yet, their role in the interaction is routinely erased. Institutional guidance presents the decision-making process as one in which uniformity across different decision-makers is possible, and in which these individuals are able to set aside their “subjective beliefs”. This overlooks the inherently evaluative nature of these processes, discourages critical self-reflection and thus minimizes the decision-maker’s role in constructing asylum seeker credibility.

Language myth #5: Acknowledging intercultural communication ensures fairness

Credibility assessment guidance for refugee visa decision-makers explicitly acknowledges intercultural communication and scope for misunderstandings. However, a vague acknowledgement of intercultural communication may in fact reinforce language myths that entrench existing inequalities and disadvantage minority groups because they are hidden behind the label “intercultural communications”.

The language myths on which credibility assessment guidance is based undermine the fairness of these assessments. Asylum seekers are held responsible for texts whose production are beyond their individual control, variation between decision-makers is under-acknowledged, and the importance of interpreting and legal assistance minimized. Busting these myths challenges the credibility of credibility assessments themselves. To ensure fair processes, these types of assessments should play, at most, a minimal role within refugee decision-making processes. Too much is at stake to rely on inherently unfair assessments, especially in the face of insufficient legal assistance and antagonistic public discourse.

References

Smith-Khan, L. (2020). Why refugee visa credibility assessments lack credibility: A critical discourse analysis, (online, advance).
Smith-Khan, L. (2019a). Communicative resources and credibility in public discourse on refugees. Language in Society, 48(3), 403-427.
Smith-Khan, L. (2019b). Debating credibility: Refugees and rape in the media. Australian Review of Applied Linguistics, 42(1), 4-36.
Smith-Khan, L. (2019c). Migration practitioners’ roles in communicating credible refugee claims. Alternative Law Journal (online, advance).
Smith-Khan, L. (2018). Contesting credibility in Australian refugee visa decision making and public discourse. (Doctor of Philosophy), Macquarie University.
Smith-Khan, L. (2017a). Different in the same way? Language, diversity and refugee credibility. International Journal of Refugee Law, 29(3), 389-416.
Smith-Khan, L. (2017b). Negotiating narratives, accessing asylum: Evaluating language policy as multi-level practice, beliefs and management. Multilingua, 36(1): 31-57.
Smith-Khan, L. (2017c). Telling stories: Credibility and the representation of social actors in Australian asylum appeals. Discourse & Society, 28(5), 512-534.

The project team at a partners meeting in Leeuwarden, Netherlands

Europe recently experienced a dramatic influx of refugees. By the end of 2015, the European Union as a whole had received over 1.2 million first-time asylum claims (IOM, 2015). A small but significant sub-group of these people on the move are highly qualified professionals – doctors, architects, lawyers, teachers, engineers – who often find themselves in low-skilled, minimum-wage jobs for which they are over-qualified. Their skill sets and professional experience often count for little, as host countries in an alarming number of cases fail to utilise the potential of much sought-after qualified personnel. The integration of these highly-skilled individuals into the labour market is crucial in order to avoid their long-term dependency and marginalization, and to create a positive image in the eyes of the public.

Against this backdrop the ‘Critical Skills for Life and Work’ project (2017-2019), funded by the European Union’s flagship research programme Erasmus+, sought to identify and articulate the profession-relevant communicative, interactional and intercultural needs of highly-skilled refugees, which would enable them to find employment in a professional domain for which they are qualified.

The multinational consortium was led by Newcastle University in the UK in partnership with the University of Graz in Austria, Fryske Academy in the Netherlands, and Action Foundation, a Newcastle-based refugee charity.

Trialling workshop in the Netherlands

The team’s ultimate aim was to design and implement effective training tools for enhancing the professional intercultural communicative competence (PICC) of highly-skilled refugees and the language teachers who work with them. The four project partners worked with a number of highly-skilled refugees and migrants, and with teachers across the UK, Austria and the Netherlands to co-create a set of resources that can be useful in a diversity of European contexts. The result was an online toolkit for teachers and learners.

The toolkit was developed as part of a two-stage collaborative process.

In stage one (research stage) the team investigated in detail the lives and experiences of people who had successfully made the transition from refugee status back into the professional sphere. This was done through ethnographic interviews (‘success stories’) which sought to discover exactly how these people had made the transition, what had helped them, what had hindered them, and what they could pass on to others like them by way of advice. Additionally, focus groups were held with learners and teachers in the different locations, to gauge current provision and their needs in relation to developing PICC.

Findings from this stage pointed to the importance of agency, resilience, self-motivation, as well as language and intercultural communication skills.

Structure of the toolkit

In stage two (co-production), the team worked closely with local refugees and volunteer language teachers to develop learning and teaching materials. These were then piloted and trialled through a series of workshops and multiplier events with different target groups, including agencies working with skilled refugees, teaching organisations such as colleges of further and higher education, and relevant employers and employment agencies. The aim was to create a model which can be extended to other contexts.

The final version of the toolkit was launched at the project conference on 21^st June 2019.

The toolkit offers two modules:

Module A: Teaching professional intercultural communicative competence
Module B: Professional intercultural communicative competence for work and life

Each module consists of five parallel units: (1) context & background, (2) finding a job, (3) applying for a job, (4) being interviewed and, (5) starting a job. Each unit includes a set of activities designed for classroom use (for teachers) or for self-study (learners). All activities relate to the development of PICC. Supplementary materials and extension tasks are included at the end of each unit.

The units are self-standing to allow teachers and learners to choose units and activities depending on their own specific needs and circumstances.

From a linguistic perspective, the toolkit is built around the assumption that refugee and migrant professionals will have some linguistic capital. The primary aim of the toolkit is to develop PICC, as opposed to linguistic proficiency in any specific ‘target language’. Using all their plurilingual resources, learners might engage with input in one language and generate meaning in contextually appropriate ways.

The toolkit is available to download for free on the project website (http://cslw.eu/). Relevant sections of the toolkit have been translated and localised into German and Dutch, and the team are hoping to provide further translations and different language versions in due course.

Follow our updates on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/cslwproject/ or find us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/critical-skills-for-life-and-work/

Reference

IOM (2015). Global migration trend factsheet. Retrieved from http://gmdac.iom.int/global-migration-trends-factsheet

Manus Hospital often treats refugees (Image credit: ABC News, Natalie Whiting)

A growing body of literature across multiple disciplines attests to the importance of credibility in the bureaucratic processes for assessing refugee claims. This includes in my own research, exploring the experiences asylum seekers have in these processes, the published reasons of decision-makers and the guidelines aimed at managing their assessments.

However, this focus on whether we should believe people who seek asylum is also popular in media reporting and political discourse. For instance, Australian Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton recently commented that some refugees on Nauru who had fallen pregnant as a result of rape were “trying it on” by seeking medical transfer to Australia via new “medevac” legislation.

This comment is not exceptional but rather part of an ongoing commentary on similar cases. The 2015 “debate” involving “Abyan” (a pseudonym), a Somali refugee living in Nauru, was an earlier case that attracted heavy media coverage, and formed the basis of a case study included in my doctoral research and recently published in the Australian Review of Applied Linguistics and Language in Society.

Abyan was living in the small island nation of Nauru as part of the Australian government’s policy to exclude boat arrivals from being able to seek asylum in Australia. As part of this regime, she had been detained in a detention centre, had her refugee status claim assessed and was then relocated to open accommodation on the island. She approached medical services when she became unwell and when they discovered she was pregnant, she reported that she had been raped. After some delay, Australian authorities arranged for her to be transferred to Australia to access adequate medical assistance and potentially have a termination. After less than a week in Australia, the authorities returned her to Nauru via chartered jet, without her having had the termination, presumably to avoid legal action to prevent her removal.

The ministerial statement

These events and their repercussions were highly reported in the media. My analysis of a corpus of Australian journal articles from this period found that most reporting centred on what was presented as a “debate”, with the then Immigration Minister, Peter Dutton, and Abyan as the two main participants. Their competing versions of the events often drew on two key documents: a media release from the Minister and a handwritten note from Abyan that was circulated by Australian advocates. Whose version of events readers should believe seemed closely tied to determining who could be considered the most credible speaker.

However, the way this reporting presented these and other key actors was problematic. By presenting Abyan primarily as a speaker and decision-maker the reporting gave the impression that she was somehow an equal individual debate participant, pitted against the Immigration Minister. This was aptly demonstrated by reporting reframing Abyan’s statement as her claiming that the Immigration Minister had lied, for instance by suggesting she said that his “description of events – backed by Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull – were false”.

I was troubled by the impression that was created by this “debate” as it appeared to ignore serious structural inequality and individual differences between the two supposed key participants. Could Abyan really have had an equal opportunity to present her side of events and be believed? This led me to more closely examine how communicative resources impact the way different social actors are able to communicate and present credible identities to their audience. In this analysis, I argued that far from being equal participants, the Immigration Minister and Abyan had unequal communicative resources on four different levels.

Abyan’s statement

First, they had different linguistic resources at their disposal to present an argument or version of reality that would be convincing and believable to their audience. I noted, for example, how the Minister’s press release used agent-free passive structures that backgrounded government or individual responsibility for Abyan’s movements to and from Nauru, thus distancing her traumatic experiences from government policy. These structures were largely replicated across the media reporting, suggesting their influence on the broader public discourse. In comparison, Abyan’s handwritten note entailed a series of reasonably basic structures sharing her experiences. English is not Abyan’s first language, and reporting suggests that her ability in English may be even more limited than the language in the note, meaning it may have been composed by somebody assisting her. This obviously limits the linguistic choices she had to engage in the “debate”.

Inextricably intertwined with their linguistic resources are the two actors’ identity resources: the way their language is heard and evaluated depends on how their audience perceives their speech and which version of events is accepted as truth. While the Immigration Minister and/or his policies may not be well liked by all Australians, he has a verifiable identity in the form of his name and history, and titles that mark him as an institutional insider: he is a Member of Parliament and Hon. (honourable). Abyan, on the other hand, is relatively anonymous: the public knows very little about her other than her age, gender and nationality. The elements of her experiences that are known do not necessarily lend support to her credibility: as both a refugee and as a woman who has experienced sexual violence, she falls into identity categories that are known to systematically attract discussion about their credibility.

The two also had obvious different material resources. The Minister’s communication was shared digitally, on an official institutional website with a stable URL, with government header, conventional font and formatting. This contrasts with Abyan’s handwritten note that appears on a page torn from a journal, dated 25^th December, and photographed sitting on a wooden table top. While the document resembles the genre of an asylum application statement, setting out her experience, this ironically may index a contested version of events, given that such applications attract credibility assessment, and its deviation from the expected norms of typed and printed forms may further harm its reception.

Finally and crucially, the difference in resources between the two speakers in most obvious when we consider the respective platform resources they have from which they can communicate. The Immigration Minister has ample opportunities to directly communicate with the broader community and media, through a number of means. A count of the larger corpus collected for this project identified at least eighteen occasions over a one-month period in which the Immigration Minister and his senior colleagues, including the Prime Minister, publicly commented on the case, including in radio and television interviews, official press statements and in Parliament.

Abyan’s platform is very different. The public have access to one handwritten note, provided to the media by Australian lawyers. For Abyan and other refugees and asylum seekers in Nauru and Manus Island (PNG) due to Australian policy, this very policy greatly limits the access they have to the Australian media and vice versa. The Government of Nauru has implemented changes to its visa regime to almost universally restrict Australian media from travelling to Nauru in recent years. The Australian Government has also legislated to limit those professionals who do have the opportunity to interact with refugees from being able to speak out publicly about their treatment, with penalties of up to two years’ imprisonment for breaches.

Behrouz Boochani received the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for his book about his experiences in Australian offshore refugee detention (Image Credit: ABC News)

This final point perhaps most vividly demonstrates the way in which those with power to control the dominant discourse seek to preserve this control. In this case, explicit legal and policy measures are implemented to control how journalists can access information about refugees and the refugees’ own ability to speak out via the media. This restricts challenges to the government’s preferred version of events – not only in the specific case of Abyan, but also in how this and other experiences contribute to the broader ongoing discourse on refugees and refugee-related policy.

However, discourse and its creation are never static. Those who have access to social media either directly or with the assistance of language brokers present a challenge to these types of efforts to control the dominant discourse. For example, an increasing number of refugees and asylum seekers self-advocate through platforms like Twitter, such as in the recent case of Saudi refugee, Rahaf Mohammed, who successfully attracted international attention and support when she was stranded in Thailand on her way to seek asylum in Australia. For some, having access to technology has also facilitated publishing in traditional media. This is the case for Behrouz Boochani, an Iranian refugee in Papua New Guinea, who frequently comments in the media regarding refugee rights, and wrote and published a book sharing his experiences, via messages written by smartphone, and has now been awarded one of Australia’s most prestigious literary prizes.

Still, even as potential platforms change, looking closely at the full range of communicative resources of individual actors helps uncover inequalities: not everyone has access to social media, or has the specific linguistic and communicative skills needed to advocate within a particular area, to a particular audience. The rise of social-media-based self-advocacy therefore presents an opportunity for a closer examination of the ways in which communicative resources are harnessed through non-traditional platforms, whose resources are most valuable in these areas and the implications this has for challenging dominant discourses.

References

Smith-Khan, L. (2018). Contesting credibility in Australian refugee visa decision making and public discourse. (Doctor of Philosophy), Macquarie University.
Smith-Khan, L. (2016). Crucial communication: language management in Australian asylum interviews. Language on the Move
Smith-Khan, L. (2019a). Communicative resources and credibility in public discourse on refugees. Language in Society, 48(3), 403-427.
Smith-Khan, L. (2019b). Debating credibility: Refugees and rape in the media. Australian Review of Applied Linguistics, 42(1), 4-36.

Professor Katrijn Maryns explains the linguistic transformations that turn “undocumented migrants” into “genuine” or “bogus refugees”

Language is the inescapable medium through which we live our lives. Access to social goods such as education, employment or community participation occurs through the medium of a particular language. However, all too often we take language for granted and its social role is obscured. One context that exemplifies both the power of language and its invisibility is the asylum determination procedure.

The asylum determination procedure is designed to distinguish between “genuine” refugees – migrants who should be granted asylum because of a well-founded fear of persecution in their home countries – and economic migrants.

Katrijn Maryns, Professor of Translation, Interpretation and Communication at Ghent University, illuminated the linguistic challenges inherent in the Belgian asylum determination procedure during her recent visit to Sydney, where she attended the inaugural “Language and Law” symposium at Sydney University (organized by Alexandra Grey and Laura Smith-Khan) and delivered the first Lecture in Linguistic Diversity of 2019 at Macquarie University. Professor Maryns showed that the determination that distinguishes between “genuine” refugees and economic migrants is essentially a linguistic process. Language is central to producing the asylum seeker’s story in interview with an asylum officer; and the officer’s report of the asylum seeker’s story ultimately forms the basis for the decision.

In this process, meaning is transformed from one language to another, from one person to another, and from the spoken interview to the written report. These multiple transformations are highly complex but their complexity is obscured in the definite binary outcome of acceptance or rejection.

Asylum seekers are mostly talked about in numbers. Sociolinguistic ethnography illuminates the processes behind the numbers (Image credit: Europarl)

So much can go wrong, as Case 1, an excerpt from the asylum interview of a soft-spoken young woman from Sudan illustrates. The woman (in the excerpt represented as “AS” for “asylum seeker”) explained that a man had aided her escape from Juba by stating “one man .. carry me . help me …” (l. 20). The Belgian asylum officer (“AO”) misheard “carry me” as “Karimi” and her report – which entered the file and became the version of record of the asylum seeker’s story – stated “A man named Karimi helped me.”

Although the final written report (in Dutch) is written in the first person – as if it were the authentic voice of the asylum seeker – it is obviously highly mediated and undergoes a series of linguistic transformations to arrive at its final form.

Could the “carry me – Karimi” misunderstandings have been avoided if an interpreter had been used? Maybe.

However, before the question of interpreter use can even be entertained, a determination of the asylum seeker’s language must be made by the asylum officer. Asylum seekers often have complex linguistic repertoires that are not easily summed up under one single language name. The complexity of the linguistic repertoires of people on the move clashes with the monolingual assumptions of a neat match between national origin and a named language that typically guides European asylum procedures.

Case 1 (Source: Katrijn Maryns, Guest lecture, Macquarie University, 02-04-2019)

This clash between factual complexity of linguistic repertoires and the bureaucratic drive to simplify means that even something as seemingly simple as determining the language in which an interview should be conducted is not simple at all. For instance, in another example (Case 2), Professor Maryns introduced us to a Belgian asylum officer, who was keen to get the interview done in English.

Given that English is the official language of Sierra Leone, the country of origin of the asylum seeker she was interviewing, this does not seem like such an unreasonable idea. It only becomes unreasonable when one knows that proficiency in English in Sierra Leone, as in many other postcolonial countries with English as an official language, is closely tied to formal education. The asylum seeker tried to explain that much to the officer when she said “I no go to school” (l. 4).

In a testament to the power differential inherent in the interview situation, the officer waves away that objection and makes the asylum seeker “sign” (indicate by cross or circle) that she’s happy to conduct the interview in English.

The asylum interview is a high stakes situation: for asylum seekers, matters of life and death may ride on it. Most of the time, all they have to succeed in this effort is their story: they must tell a credible story, in a plausible linguistic form, in a plausible genre, and of a plausible content. However, what is plausible to the European asylum bureaucracy may be vastly different from the story an asylum seeker can tell with the resources at her or his disposal.

Case 2 (Source: Katrijn Maryns, Keynote lecture, Sydney University, 01-04-2019)

In short, the asylum interview places extremely high linguistic demands on the asylum seeker while severely curtailing the possibilities for the production of a credible story.

Further reading

• Maryns, K. (2005). Monolingual language ideologies and code choice in the Belgian asylum procedure. Language & Communication, 25(3), 299-314.
• Maryns, K. (2006). The Asylum Speaker: Language in the Belgian Asylum Procedure. Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing.
• Maryns, K. (2013a). Disclosure and (re)performance of gender‐based evidence in an interpreter‐mediated asylum interview. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 17(5), 661-686.
• Maryns, K. (2013b). Procedures without borders: The language-ideological anchorage of legal-administrative procedures in translocal institutional settings. Language in Society, 42(1), 71-92.
• Maryns, K. (2015). The use of English as ad hoc institutional standard in the Belgian asylum interview. Applied Linguistics, 38(5), 737-758.

Related content

• Forgotten and invisible? The legal protection of refugees with disabilities
• Are we all different in the same way?
• Telling stories? Credibility in asylum interviews
• Crucial communication: language management in Australian asylum interviews
• Don’t know what “jurisdictional error” means? Some people’s future depends on it

Language in asylum determinations (Image Credit: moz.de)

We’ll be kicking off the 2019 Lectures in Linguistic Diversity series at Macquarie University with a guest lecture by Katrijn Maryns, Ghent University, Belgium, exploring language and vulnerability.

When: Tuesday, April 02, 2:00-3:30pm

Where: Australian Hearing Hub Room 1.602

What: Language and vulnerability: reflections on the management of linguistic diversity in the asylum determination procedure

Abstract: In response to the increasing numbers of migrants and refugees crossing into Europe since 2015, significant efforts have been made at EU level to manage its asylum and migration systems more efficiently. While EU policy is relatively cognisant of the technical-legal and medical-psychological complexities of the procedure, the discursive, multilingual challenges specific to the asylum process remain underexposed. When it comes to the determination of refugee status, it is particularly surprising and worrying how little attention is paid to the role of language in what are essentially discourse-based procedures, where spoken and written discourse form the main input for the representation and the assessment of asylum cases (Barsky, 1994; Pöllabauer 2004, Inghilleri 2005; Maryns 2006, Tipton 2008; Blommaert 2010, Smith-Khan 2017). In my presentation, I aim to explore two areas of tension in the discursive management of asylum cases: (a) the tension between the often very rigorous conditions for submission, representation and assessment of asylum applications on the one hand and the unreasonably high linguistic demands set by the asylum authorities on the other; and (b) the unclear and to some extent even conflicting roles attributed to language, either as a meaning-making tool (for the representation of asylum seekers’ accounts), as a categorisation tool (for the legal classification of asylum cases according to the Convention criteria of refugee status) or as a verification tool (for the evaluation of the veracity and credibility of asylum seekers’ accounts). Drawing on linguistic-ethnographic data from the Belgian asylum context, I will discuss some of the implications of these conflicting linguistic demands for the construction and evaluation of asylum identities. Specifically, I will focus on the multilingual ‘management’ of asylum cases. I will use data examples in which several multilingual strategies are being used, including lingua franca use and interpreter mediation. These examples will demonstrate how an ignorance of linguistic variation at different levels exacerbates linguistic vulnerabilities and inequalities in the course of the asylum process.

Finally, I will reflect on our position as academics in this domain, i.e. the challenges of being heard as language researchers in a setting where language is generally not given priority.

Katrijn Maryns (PhD in Linguistics) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Translation, Interpreting and Communication at Ghent University (Belgium), where she teaches multilingualism and interpreting courses. She is a member of the Research Centre for Multilingual Practices and Language Learning in Society (MULTIPLES) and the Centre for the Social Study of Migration and Refugees (CESSMIR). Her linguistic-ethnographic research examines the role of discourse, multilingualism and linguistic inequality in institutional contexts of globalisation, with a particular focus on asylum and migration. She is the author of The asylum speaker: Language in the Belgian asylum procedure (Routledge 2006), editor (with Philipp Angermeyer) of the book series Translation, Interpreting and Social Justice in a Globalised World (Multilingual Matters), and she has published in various international peer-reviewed journals (Applied Linguistics, Language in Society, Journal of Sociolinguistics, Language & Communication).

References

Barsky, R. (1994) Constructing a productive other: Discourse theory and the convention refugee hearing. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Blommaert, J. (2010) The sociolinguistics of globalization, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Inghilleri, M. (2005) Mediating Zones of Uncertainty: interpreter agency, the interpreting habitus and political asylum adjudication, The Translator, 11 (1), 69-85.

Maryns, K. (2006) The Asylum Speaker: Language in the Belgian Asylum Procedure. London: Routledge.

Pöllabauer, S. (2004) Interpreting in asylum hearings: Issues of Role, Responsibility and Power, Interpreting 6, 2: 143-180.

Tipton, R. (2008) Reflexivity and the social construction of identity in interpreter-mediated asylum interviews, The Translator 14 (1), 1‒19.

Smith-Khan, L. (2017) Different in the same way? Language, diversity, and refugee credibility. International Journal of Refugee Law, 29(3), 389–416.

Reports of and debates resulting from previous Lectures in Linguistic Diversity:

• Are bilinguals better language learners?
• What do migrant parents expect from schools?
• Bilingual children refusing to speak the home language
• How can we change language habits?

The theme of #LIW2018 is “Find yourself in a Library”. The book I read in the category “a memoir of an adult migrant and language learner” describes exactly that: a refugee in search of his past and his future. The public library is one place where this refugee finds solace:

It has become my habit to gather together a small store of provisions, some biscuits, chocolate, an apple or two, and repair each morning to the reading room of the Public Library. There I lose myself in long dead time and not rouse until the shrill, too early summons of the closing bell. This way of living is extremely economical. […] I have discovered that a moderate hunger increases both sensibility and concentration. It is not a new idea. Since the times of the monkish visionaries fasting has been the essential preliminary to revelation. The library is my monastery. (Natonek, 1943, p. 124)

The author, Hans Natonek (1892-1963), was a refugee from the Nazis and the public library he refers to is in Manhattan. Hans Natonek arrived in New York in 1941 after having been on the run for almost a decade. One of the foremost literary critics of Weimar Germany and a well-known social critic and author, Natonek had fled Germany for his native Prague in 1934. As the Nazis conquered more and more of Europe, he had to flee again; first to Paris, then Marseille, which became a trap for many refugees as the Vichy regime handed them back to the Nazis. Natonek escaped and managed to cross the Pyrenees into Spain and was finally granted a US visa in Lisbon.

Hans Natonek and Anne Grünwald in Arizona, 1950s (Source: Arts in exile)

By the time Natonek arrived in New York shortly before his 50^th birthday, the loss of his previous existence and the long years of constant danger and insecurity had taken their toll: “Flight softens the morale. To escape is to arrive nowhere. Escape is a negative, a fallacious rescue. Every fighter knows that. We are all fighters.” (p. 68)

In his memoir In search of myself published in 1943, Natonek asks what his refugee status means for his identity: he considers himself cut off both from his past and his future. His former language and identity have become meaningless and he feels disconnected from the language and identity options valued in his new environment.

For a writer, professional identity and language are inextricably linked and both have been taken from him: “A writer! Am I still one in point of actual fact? Tell me, then. What is a writer without a language and without a past? He is a mechanical absurdity, a piano without strings.” (p. 17)

Natonek tries hard to reinvent himself in English, even as he bemoans the difficulty of doing so at the age of 50.

I love my own mother tongue, but I recognize with sadness that separated from the soil in which it roots it must wither. It cannot be artificially maintained. The mother language does not transport nor grow nor bloom under alien skies. It is, at best, no more than a memory to be used on occasion to recall a friendship or another life. (p. 158)

Unfortunately, Natonek discovers that the growth of his English is in no way proportionate to the withering away of his native German and his beloved French. In fact, despite all his strenuous efforts to improve his English, he had to write In search of myself in German and leave the translation to his publisher.

It is not only the loss of German that throws Natonek out of balance. It is also the loss of prestige and professional standing. In America Natonek discovers a thoroughly materialistic culture that has no patience for intellectual pursuits. While he tries hard to adapt, he cannot get himself to accept the prevailing “jobism” as he calls it. He feels that everyone expects him to move on, find a job, make money and be happy; but Natonek insists on his right to grieve for his lost life and for his home engulfed by disaster.

They are unanimous in exhorting us to bend every effort toward the rapid adaptation of the American point of view. Waste no time in dalliance, they advise. Get busy. Forget the past. Embrace the new. It is the only way to demonstrate a decent gratitude. I am not exactly clear why I so stubbornly oppose this theory of rapid adaptation linked to the theme of gratitude for rescue and asylum. My soul rebels against it as a child rebels against forced feeding. An approach to living, a point of view on life, cannot be changed as abruptly as a lantern slide. I am not one of those worms which may be cut in two and go on living. Life flows like a blood stream from the past, through the present, into the future, and what a man is, is the result of what he has been. (p. 95)

In America, Natonek finds, work that is not profitable counts for nothing. While he is refused a small loan that would enable him to concentrate on finishing his book manuscript, he is offered a loan to start a small business. Bitterly, he scoffs: “Apparently there were too few beauty parlors, too many books.” (p. 157)

Some healing ultimately comes from books and he rediscovers a part of himself when he finds that the New York Public Library actually holds copies of the books he had published before having had to flee Germany. Even more astonishing to him, the library also holds a copy of a book written by his grandfather:

Beyond the handful of my own poor records I saw a single card. It bore my grandfather’s name. It was as though he spoke to me in love and confidence from out the past. (pp. 125f)

In search of myself is a moving account of the refugee experience. Its poignant message of loss and destruction but also the healing power of ideas is as important today as it was in 1943.

Given how topical the search for language and identity is in our time, I would wish the book a new generation of readers. Unfortunately, the book has been out of print for a long time. No copy is held in any Australian library and none seems to be on sale even in the vast world of e-commerce.

I had resigned myself to not being able to get my hands on the book when I discovered that Google had apparently digitized the book in 2007. So, I asked Macquarie University Library to trace the digital version for me. Amazingly, they got me an actual copy through interlibrary loan instead.

Being able to hold this wartime copy (“There are many more words on each page than would be desirable in normal times; margins have been reduced and no space has been wasted between chapters.”) in my hands has been a privilege I am grateful for. And that is another reason why #LIW2018 matters and why we all need to appreciate and support our libraries – for ourselves and all the other seekers who find solace there. #findyourself

Further reading

Reading challenge

• In search of a language and an identity
• One orientalism or many orientalisms?
• Why are you not citing any African female expert?
• The devil’s handwriting
• Globalization between crime and piety
• Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2018

Libraries

• Getting published while foreign
• Are we killing the joy of reading?
• Serendipity, Cyberspace, and the Tactility of Documents
• Bitter gifts: migrants’ exclusive inclusion
• Multiculturalism alive and well in Austria
• Herder: an explainer for linguists
• Barbarous multilingual devil worshippers

Unpublished manuscripts from the estate of Hans Natonek (Source: Arts in exile)

On International Women’s Day I explored why female academics publish less than their male peers. Academic journal submissions by female economics researchers face greater scrutiny and take longer to get published, as a study by Erin Hengel has found. Successful women learn to anticipate greater scrutiny than their male peers and eventually write better; a quality improvement that comes at the expense of quantity.

The data for Hengel’s study come from published journal articles and that constitutes a limitation because publication is the exception rather than the rule: the majority of submissions – both for academic and non-academic publication – are rejected.

Systematic knowledge of rejected authorship is extremely scarce. Rejection is ostensibly based on the quality of a manuscript; but it is reasonable to assume that the identity of the author also plays a role and that female, non-white or working-class authors are more likely to have their manuscripts rejected.

A study of the archives of the US trade publisher Houghton Mifflin sheds light on this question. The researcher, Yuliya Komska, examines the relationship between indicators of foreignness and manuscript rejection during the period of World War II. The period lends itself to this kind of examination as many of the European refugees arriving in the USA during that time were intellectuals and had been writers back home. Most of them failed miserably in their attempts to reestablish their careers in a new country and through a new language, as I previously showed with reference to the Bavarian exile Oskar Maria Graf.

Komska presents some stark figures: during the period under examination Houghton Mifflin received anywhere between 150 and 300 manuscript submissions per month but signed up only one or two of these. In other words, the rejection rate was above 99%. Rejection was for the same reasons that manuscripts get rejected today: they were poorly written, they were dull, they were not timely or they did not fit with the publisher’s list.

However, as the researcher shows, quality had an accent. What does that mean? Komska defines “accented writing” as narrative themes and writing styles that were perceived as unmarketable.

First and foremost among accented writing were indicators of foreignness. A whole body of work that never saw publication were accounts of the anti-Jewish pogroms of the early 20^th century in the Russian empire and of the migration experiences of the refugees these produced. Editors and reviewers routinely denigrated such migration stories as “painfully Jewish, dull, not our book,” “monotonously tragic and so completely unrelieved by anything humorous or un-Jewish” or “a screwball book by a screwball Russian” (quoted in Komska, 2017, p. 285f.).

Writing with a foreign accent was not only the product of the author’s migration experience but also their class background, as Komska shows by comparing the reception of the refugees from Russia in the early 20th century to that of the refugees from the Nazis in the 1930s and 1940s. This new cohort of displaced authors, mostly German-speaking Jews, were more likely to come from bourgeois backgrounds than their Yiddish- and Russian-speaking predecessors of a generation earlier. In response to the submissions of this new group of migrant authors “racist remarks receded” (Komska, 2017, p. 287).

Hans Natonek, for instance, had been one of the foremost literary critics of Weimar Germany and head of the feuilleton of Neue Leipziger Zeitung, a major national newspaper, when he arrived in the USA in 1941 after an almost decade-long odyssey from one European refuge to another. He submitted a memoir of his refugee experience and was described by reviewers as a “nice human being with a good clear intelligence” (quoted in Komska, 2017, p. 288). Even so, he was still rejected by Houghton Mifflin but received a contract for his autobiography In search of myself from another publisher.

In search of myself describes the author’s struggles with reestablishing himself through the medium of the English language in a language that shows no traces of that struggle. The reason for that is that the book is a translation of Natonek’s German original. When migrant manuscripts were favorably considered, translations seem to have been preferred over English-language publications with an accent, i.e. manuscripts that showed traces of late language learning. Describing an author as “not yet at home in the English language” (quoted in Komska, 2017, p. 288) meant rejection.

Refugees’ “broken English” could cancel out even the most extensive cultural capital, as was the case with the Mann family. While Houghton Mifflin did sign on a number of books by Erika and Klaus Mann, they rejected a manuscript by Golo Mann because of its “German overtone” (quoted in Komska, 2017, p. 289).

Incidentally, concerns with accented writing were not restricted to migrant writing but also extended to the presence of dialects and other non-standard forms of English, which were also viewed negatively.

The researcher concludes that “it was accents – wide-ranging, all-pervasive, far-reaching – more than language or languages per se that worried Houghton Mifflin the most” (Komska, 2017, p. 292). This trade press did not so much enforce monolingualism – manuscripts in languages other than English could be translated after all – as it homogenized linguistic, ethnic and class differences into one single “native” white middle-class idiom.

Reference

Komska, Y. (2017). Trade Publisher Archives: Repositories of Monolingualism? Race, Language, and Rejected Refugee Manuscripts in the Age of Total War. Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies, 53(3), 275-296.

Multilingual advice provided by the Administrate Review Tribunal

Countries in the Global North have developed increasingly sophisticated and complex processes to assess the claims of people seeking asylum. One key challenge is that asylum seekers often have little more than their story to offer up to support their claims. This means that deciding whether or not their stories are credible has become a fundamental step in the assessment process.

Yet the settings in which these decisions are made are emotionally charged and government officials and asylum seekers often have very different experiences, cultures and languages. So it is unsurprising that credibility assessment processes have attracted a lot of scrutiny, with scholars from a range of disciplines offering cautions and suggestions for improvement. Many of these revolve around issues related to cultural and linguistic diversity – communicating a story of persecution in a foreign institution is hardly straightforward. It involves transforming a complex and unique life experience into a neatly ordered refugee narrative that meets the expectations of the government department and the individual tasked with making the decision. A large body of research tells us of the many difficulties with communicating through an interpreter in such settings, or using a second or third language, or a language variety different to that spoken by the official. The official may have completely different life experiences or cultural expectations to that of the asylum seeker, which may make their story appear unrealistic or unbelievable. Officials may also look at asylum seekers’ demeanour to assess their honesty, despite the overwhelming body of research warning against the reliability of such assessments.

In Australia, the Immigration Department (currently known as the Department of Immigration and Border Protection) has recognised the challenges created by the cultural and linguistic diversity of those participating in asylum procedures and has taken steps to address these in its guidance documents. In my article, ‘Different in the same way?: Language, diversity and refugee credibility’ (Smith-Khan 2017a), I look closely at the Australian guidelines on credibility assessment in refugee appeals and consider how they incorporate diversity. I argue that while they acknowledge the need to accommodate applicants with different languages and cultures, there are some dangers arising from the discourse developed in this guidance. In fact, the language used in the guidelines frames applicants as different and largely ignores the decision maker’s own difference or subjectivity. Again and again, they remind us of the applicants’ social and cultural background. Their culture becomes an immutable feature of who they are – something which will inevitably influence their behaviour and way of thinking. While on its own, this may seem a reasonable warning, this contrasts with how the decision makers are presented. The guidelines instruct them:

What is capable of being believed is not to be determined according to the Member’s subjective belief or gut feeling about whether an applicant is telling the truth or not. A Member should focus on what is objectively or reasonably believable in the circumstances.

The officials’ neutrality is reinforced by what they are called in the Guidelines. They are referred to as ‘members’ – i.e. institutional and societal insiders (contrasting sharply with asylum seekers who are ‘applicants’, outsiders waiting to be allowed in). Even more frequently though, they are named ‘the Tribunal’. Thus they take on the ultimate neutrality: by taking the name of the institution they represent, we are to believe that any one decision maker is no different from any other. Therefore, unlike the applicants who are tied to their culture and other social attributes, decision makers are expected to be able to attain objectivity (I discuss this in greater detail in another article (Smith-Khan 2017b. See also my blog post here).

This discourse creates difficulties in two different ways. First, because applicants are repeatedly linked to their social and cultural grouping, they are denied individual idiosyncrasies and quirks. They are expected to behave in ways that are standard to the particular groups to which they are assumed to belong. Where their actions or choices clash with the decision maker’s expectations of someone from this group, they may lose their credibility.

Second, the decision makers’ assumed ability to be objective means they are not encouraged to be self-reflexive, especially in regards to how their own background may influence how they decide what is reasonable or expected behaviour in those they are assessing.

The body in charge of processing asylum appeals in Australia, the Administrative Appeals Tribunal (AAT) (which took over from the separate Refugee Review Tribunal (RRT) in 2015), publishes a selection of its (anonymised) decisions online. From these I selected a corpus of decisions that dealt extensively with credibility. From this corpus I identified two decisions in which diversity was a key issue that arose in assessing credibility.

From my analysis, I discovered that the applicants (and their legal advisers) attempted to point to their cultural and linguistic diversity to overcome issues of inconsistency and plausibility raised by the decision makers. They used arguments pointing to sociolinguistic factors to explain inconsistencies in their descriptions of events. For example, an applicant whose claim revolved around his homosexuality explained how he felt uncomfortable sharing details of his sexual encounters in front of a female interpreter from his country of origin. And an Egyptian applicant noted how his choice of words had been affected by the lack of an interpreter when preparing a written statement, meaning he used a general term (‘arm’) instead of a more specific one (‘shoulder’).

The applicants addressed plausibility concerns in a similar way, pointing to cultural and social factors to explain why their reported actions were not implausible. For example, the homosexual applicant was questioned over his ‘failure to attempt to meet other homosexuals’ for a number of years after arriving in Australia as a student. He explained that he was new in the country, busy with study, had to work to support himself, did not speak English well and was afraid to go out at night, following a spate of attacks on Indian international students.

These types of explanations were mostly dismissed. D’hondt (2009) describes a similar situation in the Belgian criminal justice system. Culture attaches only to the minority participants, yet it is the professionals who retain the power to apply culture in their assessments. He explains:

Categorizing the defendant as a cultural other…prompts the defense attorney to invoke specialist knowledge about the defendant which is not accessible to the defendant him/herself…These attorney-initiated culturizations mobilize common-sense understandings of ‘culture’ (which lack a clearly defined legal status…), without posing a threat to the judiciary’s self-representation as ‘empty’.

In the asylum context, the decision maker is the specialist, entitled to decide what is reasonable behaviour from a person of the applicant’s background. Further, references to accommodating diversity in the Guidelines revolve around issues of communication within the appeal hearing and the applicant’s knowledge, rather than their past behaviour. Although applicants may attempt to mobilize diversity-based arguments to defend themselves, the power remains with the decision maker to determine whether or not to accept such arguments.

The way diversity is constructed in the Guidelines, and then reflected in these decisions demonstrates some of the key concerns put forward in research on intercultural communication. While policy guidelines may seek to sensitize officials to accommodate diversity, such texts may present diversity in such a way as to actually reinforce hierarchical, power asymmetrical structures. Diversity discourse may frame only certain participants as being diverse – e.g. the subjective, culturally and socially influenced applicants vs the objective, neutral decision makers. This can have the effect of ‘othering’ the minority participants and essentializing them into simple categories, while re-entrenching the ‘normal’ and ‘neutral’ status of the mainstream. Difference becomes a fixed and overwhelming attribute that attaches to society’s others and overrides their individuality. This was exemplified in the decision-making in my analysis, most especially in the assessment of the homosexual applicant’s behaviour. It is hard to imagine that a heterosexual person would be misbelieved for their ‘failure’ to date or form a relationship upon arriving in a new country. While the applicant drew on arguments about his social position, cultural and linguistic background, and financial situation, these attributes seemed to be eclipsed by his sexuality. Because this was the key element of his identity for the purpose of the credibility assessment, it seemed that his behaviour was expected to reflect this above all other aspects of who he was. It was the decision maker’s own conceptualization of reasonable behaviour for a young homosexual man against which he was measured – he was expected to actively search out a partner. The plausibility of alternative actions being rejected means that the applicant was denied the privilege of a more complex identity, as an individual with myriad experiences and motivations.

While asylum bodies have come a long way in developing assessment processes, this research demonstrates that challenges remain. Diversity may be acknowledged, but this does not mean that all persons are considered different in the same way. We need to continue to interrogate the way we discuss and present difference and reflect on the effects this has on those who have most to lose in the process.

Related content

• Laura Smith-Khan, Telling stories? Credibility in asylum interviews
• Laura Smith-Khan, Crucial communication: language management in Australian asylum interviews
• Ingrid Piller, The diversity of the other

References

D’hondt S (2009) Others on trial: The construction of cultural otherness in Belgian first instance criminal hearings. Journal of Pragmatics 41: 806-828.
Smith-Khan L (2017a) Different in the same way? Language, diversity and refugee credibility. International Journal of Refugee Law https://doi.org/10.1093/ijrl/eex038
Smith-Khan L (2017b) Telling stories: Credibility and the representation of social actors in Australian asylum appeals. Discourse & Society https://doi.org/10.1177/0957926517710989

After we completed our fieldwork, we were fortunate to obtain additional funding; first, to travel to New York to share our findings at the United Nations; and second, to bring together our findings in the first book to be published on this topic: The Legal Protection of Refugees with Disabilities has just been published.

For me personally, this project was a unique opportunity as a young researcher – I was able to gain invaluable experience designing, coordinating and carrying out fieldwork across six different countries, with a variety of people, in a variety of languages. I learned many valuable lessons which have hopefully helped me grow as a researcher and contributed to my capabilities as a PhD candidate.

But what does this project, which centres around international human rights law, have to do with language or sociolinguistics? While this research is officially within a very different field, I have still identified so many points of crossover, or ways of thinking, that have really helped each of my research fields.

Article 1 of the CRPD states:

Persons with disabilities include those who have long-term physical, mental, intellectual or sensory impairments which in interaction with various barriers may hinder their full and effective participation in society on an equal basis with others.

Laura during fieldwork in Nakivale Refugee Settlement, Uganda, 2013

Instead of placing the focus on the individual, the CRPD, both in Article 1 and throughout the remainder of its provisions, places the onus on societies. It forces us to think about the way our physical, social and legal structures differentially impact the various individuals who come into contact with them. For me, this critical reflection is also key to my growth as a sociolinguistics researcher.

For example, it may be easy to blame migrants for the various challenges they face: not being able to get a high-paying job, or having difficulty at school. But is this really about their individual ‘flaws’, or not trying hard enough, or does it have more to do with the legal, social, political and linguistic structures in our societies, which impact us all differently, advantaging some more than others?

In Chapter 6 of our book, for example, we discuss how a lack of work rights in many displacement settings greatly increased the risk of acquiring a disability, as refugees may be forced into exploitative and unregulated work.

Aside from legal status issues, language barriers played a significant role in access to a range of services – including gaining the knowledge that services existed in the first place. A comparison between the Syrian refugee populations in Turkey and Jordan provides an apt example: most Syrians in Jordan were able to communicate directly with locals, and even those who used Sign Language were more likely to find someone with whom they could communicate – Jordanian and Syrian Sign Language are mutually intelligible, and those literate in Arabic could also use written text to communicate. This obviously facilitated service provision, and access to work and education. By contrast, in Turkey, despite the government making very clear and concerted efforts to assist the Syrians there, language barriers created significant challenges in every aspect of life and access to services.

A refugee-run business in Za’atari Refugee Camp, Jordan, 2014

In places like Malaysia and Indonesia, although there were local disability rights organisations doing important work to advocate for greater inclusion, the invisibility of refugees living in their community, along with language barriers, meant that refugees largely missed out on benefiting from these groups. When we interviewed participants from Myanmar, the interpreters (themselves refugees) explained that they could not even translate ‘human rights’ as it was a completely unfamiliar concept – and we soon gave up asking. This contrasted with the situation in Uganda, where many of the refugees we met with had participated in programmes aimed at improving their rights, and when we spoke with them they were well versed in the ‘language’ of the CRPD and the concepts and rights it promotes.

Prolonged displacement situations are pertinent examples of how these types of linguistic barriers can play out quite differently over time depending on the particular structures in place in the host country. For example, in Malaysia, where young refugees have no access to the education system, their development of literacy and language skills is limited to what is offered by refugee volunteers. These classes are usually conducted in the language of the refugee group, and a range of barriers exist for children with disabilities, given the location of these ‘schools’ – in high-rise apartments, up narrow staircases – and the types of facilities they have – volunteer teachers with limited training, no assistance for those who need extra help, limited access to basic assistive technology like glasses or hearing aids. This understandably limits integration within the host society, and in any future country of resettlement, and the likelihood of being able to participate in the workforce in the future.

In contrast, in Uganda, where refugees are officially welcomed and permitted to settle permanently in the country, refugee children have the right to access local schools, and, in the case of a number of children who were deaf or hard of hearing who we met in camps in the south of the country, they may even be able to access specialised education, where needed.

In each setting, age-based policies that limited specific types of assistance to children (under 18 years) meant that those who had had disruptions due to their experiences as refugees or living through conflict situations may simply age out of opportunities that locals would have been able to access as soon as the need arose, following a ‘normal’ timeline.

It is unsurprising that these different levels of access would lead to different opportunities to participate in the host society, in both the short and long term, and very different experiences of what it means to have a disability. These experiences have reinforced for me the fundamental importance for social justice that we continue to question the way social, political and legal structures – and the beliefs and attitudes that underlie them – can impact on participation for the diverse individuals who make up our communities.

Reference

Crock, Mary, Laura Smith-Khan, Ron McCallum, and Ben Saul. 2017. The Legal Protection of Refugees with Disabilities: Forgotten and Invisible? Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar. Access the eBook and read the first chapter for free.

Images copyright of Mary Crock/University of Sydney.

Miriam’s mother arrived as a refugee in New Zealand in 1939. She still remembers the kindness her family was shown.

Like many other Western countries, Australia is currently grappling with the global wave of refugees, together with the threat of terrorism. Although the Australian government has managed a very successful immigration and settlement program since the 1940s, the current conservative government and their supporters in the media, and especially the Minister for Immigration, Peter Dutton, have linked the risk of terrorism with new immigrant and refugee communities. A recent government policy change outlined in a document called ‘Strengthening the Test for Australian Citizenship’ proposes tough new barriers to achieving Australian citizenship, including an English level of IELTS Band 6.

Mr Dutton claims that “The Australian public wants to see an increase in the English language requirement, they want to see people meet Australian laws and Australian values”. However, there has been widespread opposition across the community to the changes in the English language requirement and the opposition Australian Labour Party has decided to oppose them, too.

There is no evidence that introducing more rigorous language testing and raising the bar for citizenship will support the successful integration or English language learning of immigrants or refugees; rather it may achieve the contrary. The language hurdles to citizenship proposed by Mr Dutton are unrealistic and overcoming them will be unachievable for many adults who arrive in Australia under different visa classes.  This policy will inevitably lead to two classes of permanent Australian residents, one of them an underclass without access to the privileges of citizenship.  Is this what the Australian government wants?

It is beyond question that English is the national language of Australia but we also need to recognize that Australia is characterized by high levels of linguistic diversity: Many current Australian citizens (including some indigenous ones) are not proficient or even competent in the national language.

In spite of this, successful contemporary democracies including Australia have flourished because of the contribution of diverse immigrants and, of course, the contributions of their children.

The evidence of Australia’s successful 70-year-old immigration program shows that such a new English language test is not necessary.  Many Australian citizens originating from non-Anglophone countries would never have passed the proposed test and may still not have ‘proficient’ English after many years in Australia. Yet their hard work – and their brain power – have built modern Australia, and this has not been impeded by their less than perfect grasp of English.

They and their children will remember that this government, by imputation, has discounted that contribution.

People with limited English have successfully participated and still do participate in workplaces and communities.  We should not conflate formal education with life skills, as the independent Senator Jacqui Lambie has argued in the Australian parliament. The millions of migrants and refugees who built post-war Australia learnt their English through immersion in communities and workplaces that afforded opportunities for participation and inclusion; as they used to say out at the Ford motor car factory in Broadmeadows in Melbourne: ‘we didn’t learn English but we learnt to speak Ford’.

Rather than making full inclusion in the Australian community provisional on first knowing English, the sociolinguistic evidence shows it is the other way round: newcomers learn English through participation in the Australian workforce and community when and were they are welcomed, appreciated and involved. And Australia does have a proud record in this regard.

Lack of education and the challenges of adult language learning are reasons why many current Australian citizens are not fluent in English after many years living and working here, including those who have attended English language classes.  In spite of this, their dedication to Australia is, or should be, beyond question. Learning a language formally as an adult is a difficult process, as many of us have experienced.  It is particularly difficult if a learner has limited education in his or her own countries, because of poverty, or war, or displacement.

When Prime Minister Turnbull claims that imposing the test is ‘doing people a favour’ he has not understood that when migrants and refugees fail to acquire English, it is not for want of trying. Most are eager to learn English and willingly attend ESL classes. But adult second language learning does not progress at a steady pace from zero to proficient, even when learners have high levels of motivation and convenient tuition available.  Rather, individual learners ‘stabilise’ at different points along the continuum, very often before reaching the kind of ‘proficiency’ measured by level 6 of the proposed test (International English Language Testing System or IELTS).

IELTS Band 6 requires English skills far beyond those required for everyday participation in the wider community; essay writing for example. IELTS (including the ‘general’ IELTS) was designed to test formal ‘school’ English skills, and therefore discriminates against migrants with limited education, such as refugees and humanitarian arrivals. It also discriminates against women who have missed out on basic schooling due to gender discrimination or poverty in their country of origin.

It seems highly likely that many applicants for citizenship would fail the proposed test.  In fact, many Australians  – including citizens by birth – would not succeed in reaching this level yet have sufficient language skills for social engagement and employment. Its validity in the context of citizenship testing is therefore highly questionable.

In effect, the government is proposing that immigrants and refugees from non-English speaking countries demonstrate mastery of English far beyond that required in everyday life and intends to link such a level of English to the assessment of who is a desirable citizen. The implications of the proposed change for our understanding of what is means to be Australian and what kind of country Australia is are highly disturbing.  Multiculturalism, a policy that has served Australia well for two generations, is now apparently no longer an Australian value.

Previous research into media discourses surrounding refugees and asylum seekers has shown that these groups are regularly dehumanised through homogenising discourses, and portrayed as a threat to the host societies (e.g. Baker & McEnery, 2005; Gabrielatos & Baker, 2008; Khosravinik, 2009; Sulaiman-Hill, Thompson, Afsar, & Hodliffe, 2011). Refugee arrivals also are referred to in metaphors comparing refugees to movement of water (flooding, pouring, or streaming over borders; camps or centres overflowing) or pestilence (swarms of refugees), which contribute to an image of these groups not as individuals seeking asylum but as some kind of uncontrolled and unpredictable force of nature.

In New Zealand the general view is that our media report issues surrounding refugees and asylum seekers in a fairly benevolent manner compared with other countries, which may have something to do with New Zealand’s geographical distance from most refugee migration. However, this isn’t to say that underlying ideologies in local media discourses don’t recreate and reinforce taken-for-granted narratives that deny power and self-determination to refugees and asylum seekers.

I explored these discourses in New Zealand’s three most widely-read newspapers, The New Zealand Herald, The Dominion Post, and The Press (Greenbank, 2014). Articles were collected from the months leading up to general elections in 2005, 2008 and 2011. I chose these periods to best capture the recognised patterns of increased attention towards refugees, as this group, and immigration generally, are particularly politicised in the months surrounding national elections.

The themes and attitudes associated with a particular word can be revealed by observing the types of lexical items that it commonly appears with or near it – that word’s ‘aura of meaning’, also known as semantic prosody. Put simply, common collocates of a word can become part of its meaning.

I found that the concepts of refugee and asylum seeker are frequently linked to words associated with politics (e.g. political, policies, nations), foreign countries (e.g. Iraq, Nauru, Palestine, Assyrian) and violence (e.g. terrorism, terrorist, conflict) in these articles, particularly when compared to a general corpus of New Zealand newspaper articles. These kinds of associations together can result in an overall negative semantic prosody of refugees as problematic, non-local victims of violence.

Refugees were also afforded much less voice that non-refugee voices in these articles, in terms of number of words attributed through direct quote or paraphrase. Furthermore, the content of quotes and paraphrases often allowed refugees to express gratitude or helplessness, while the technicalities and practicalities of the situation were left to non-refugee ‘experts’ to describe. For example, in a 2014 article from The New Zealand Herald, an eleven-year-old spokesperson for the family is ascribed the following quote:

“Mum wants to say thank you to all those people and may God bless them”

Following from this, a Public Health Nurse is given the role of explaining what goods were donated to the family, and how they will be helpful:

“They have never had a drier before. They didn’t have a toaster. The curtains are very thin, so warm thermal curtains will be awesome. The trailer of firewood — that’s how they heat the house.”

Refugee ‘issues’ are presented here as matters for ‘experts’ to deal with, while refugee voices were largely confined to affective roles, expressing emotion, gratitude and despair. This kind of limited or selective reporting of voice can be a strategy of ‘othering’ certain groups. Othering of refugees can and does occur in other ways in the articles. This may be done through associations of refugee status with crime, as can be seen in the following two excerpts:

A 22-year-old Syrian man, Mohammad Shanar Ryad, a former commando and recent refugee, has been arrested over the murder.

Dahir Noor Shire, 37, who came to New Zealand as a Somali refugee in 1999, gave evidence in his own defence before a jury in Wellington District Court yesterday.

These two men, both accused of crimes, have both their ethnicity and former refugee status explicitly mentioned. Ethnic and refugee-related qualifiers, when repeatedly used in the context of articles about crime, expose an ideology which correlates criminal activity with refugees, and goes some way to actually attributing the crime to refugeehood.

Emphasising positive differences can also result in othering of a given group from a presumed ingroup, as this may fetishise the apparent differences, bestowing exotic or otherworldly attributes to that group. This can be seen in the excerpt below describing a funeral:

Women in headscarves wailed yesterday morning as Eman Jani Hurmiz was carried into the Ancient Church of the East in Strathmore.

This kind of phrasing throughout the article creates the feeling of an exotic spectacle of otherness, using distance to bestow mystery and reverence. Despite perhaps being benevolently enacted, this positive othering still imagines an outgroup whose observed differences from society exclude those groups from that society by implication, affecting their ability to fully participate as members of their community.

In sum, the media discourses that combine semantic prosody, othering, and disparity in voice attribution together make a compelling argument for denial of power to refugees in these representations. The taken-for-granted and out-of-sight discursive processes depict refugees as othered victims, associated with crime and danger, as well as exoticism and helplessness.

Of course, the intentions of the writers of these articles may be honourable. By definition, refugees have experienced adversity, and representing groups as traumatised victims can draw much needed attention to their plight. At the same time, even if benevolently enacted, employing these prevalent discourses of helplessness and othering can have negative real-world consequences for the ways in which the mainstream views refugees, suggesting they are incapable of helping themselves, and impeding full participation in society.

It’s important to recognise ordinary refugee perspectives that are not associated with trauma or suffering, and to consider refugee views and contributions in discourses that concern them. Given the way that all language use generally, and media discourse specifically, reproduce and transform society, re-framing of refugees and asylum seekers in this manner could contribute to addressing the inequalities currently maintained by the mainstream media. Instead of being framed using linguistic strategies that suggest victimhood, refugees and asylum seekers could perhaps better be framed as capable, resilient people who have overcome adversity, who have resisted and freed themselves from oppressive or dangerous situations.

Related content

• Agnes Bodis, Who is a real refugee?
• Laura Smith-Khan, Crucial communication: language management in Australian asylum interviews
• Ingrid Piller, The real problem with linguistic shirkers
• Laura Smith-Khan, We all have a culture, we all speak a language: the Australian legal system discusses diversity
• Ingrid Piller, Bitter gifts: migrants’ exclusive inclusion
• Ingrid Piller, Children as language brokers

References

Baker, P., & McEnery, T. (2005). A corpus-based approach to discourses of refugees and asylum seekers in UN and newspaper texts. Journal of Language and Politics, 4(2), 197–226.

Gabrielatos, C., & Baker, P. (2008). Fleeing, Sneaking, Flooding – A Corpus Analysis of Discursive Constructions of refugees and asylum seekers in the UK Press 1996-2005. Journal of English Linguistics, 36(1), 5–38.

Greenbank, E. (2014). Othering and Voice: How media framing denies refugees integration opportunities. Communication Journal of New Zealand, 14(1), 35–58.

Khosravinik, M. (2009). The representation of refugees, asylum seekers and immigrants in British newspapers during the Balkan conflict (1999) and the British general election (2005). Discourse & Society, 20(4), 477–498.

Sulaiman-Hill, C. M. R., Thompson, S. C., Afsar, R., & Hodliffe, T. L. (2011). Changing Images of Refugees: A Comparative Analysis of Australian and New Zealand Print Media 1998-2008. Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies, 9(4), 345–366.

However, existing research suggests that despite aiming at objectivity, credibility assessments raise a plethora of issues. They are conducted in settings that involve intercultural communication, the use of interpreters, and power inequalities. Limited access to quality legal assistance can also undermine applicants’ ability to put forward a strong case, in the language expected by the institutions tasked with processing their claims. Elsewhere, I have explored how the various participants involved in applications and appeals each play a role in co-constructing the refugee narrative (Smith-Khan 2017a). Yet often, this co-construction is not readily acknowledged in decision-making procedures, placing too much responsibility on the asylum seeker.

In my new article, Telling Stories: Credibility and the representation of social actors in Australian asylum appeals (Smith-Khan, 2017b), I critically analyse the official text guiding credibility assessment in the Australian merit review process, and a corpus of published asylum review decisions. Studies involving critical discourse analysis encourage us to reflect on how the linguistic choices made in texts both reflect and perpetuate certain beliefs. Following Van Leeuwen (1996), I adopt a ‘socio-semantic’ approach to explore how these texts present the different social actors. I reflect on the beliefs behind these presentations, as well as considering the effects the resulting discourse may have on asylum decision-making.

The naming conventions in the Migration and Refugee Division Guidelines on the Assessment of Credibility are particularly striking. Calling the decision-makers ‘Members’ and ‘the Tribunal’, the Guidelines reflect legal language conventions. They position the decision-makers as insiders, taking on the identity of the institution itself. These terms represent and reinforce a belief that decision-makers are capable of neutrality and objectivity, each one expected to act and think in a uniform way, capable of setting aside their individual subjectivity. In contrast, the Guidelines present asylum seekers as subjective ‘applicants’, with multiple references to how they are affected by their social and cultural background. Multiple references are made to the ‘applicant’s account’ and the applicant presenting evidence, reinforcing the belief that it is the applicant who tells the refugee narrative, rather than it being co-constructed by all those involved in the process, with the final, official version being written by the decision-maker (I present a more detailed analysis of the way diversity is dealt with in these texts in another article (Smith-Khan, forthcoming)). Further, there are few references to other participants involved in asylum applications and appeals, such as legal advisers and interpreters. This has the effect of downplaying the role these participants play in helping to construct the refugee narrative, and the many ways in which they may affect the applicants’ credibility in the process.

Analysing my corpus of 27 review decisions, I note that the decision-makers vary in their way of presenting these same social actors, although in general, their approaches reflect those adopted in the Guidelines. For example, a majority of the decision-makers refer to themselves as ‘The Tribunal’, with only a few referring to themselves in the first person. Similarly to the Guidelines, many decision-makers make scant reference to the role played by interpreters and legal advisers. In some cases it is not even clear whether the applicant used English, or whether they had any legal assistance or not.

I argue that the corpus reveals some key challenges for credibility assessments. Firstly, the variations amongst different decision-makers indicates that far from being uniform, they are individuals who each have their own approach to reporting their hearings and sharing their decisions. The minimal references to interpreting, language choice and legal assistance create the impression that these factors are not important in how applicants construct their refugee stories and create and defend their credibility. Further, the decision-maker’s position as objective receiver of information suggests that self-reflection is not encouraged. Overall, this means that when applicants attempt to explain credibility issues such as inconsistency or vagueness by referring to the roles other participants play in shaping their narratives, their arguments are largely ineffective.

The discursive roles assigned to each of the actors involved in these processes suggest that there remains a need to scrutinise credibility assessment processes (and the texts that govern them). It is only through acknowledging and seeking to address the structural challenges and power asymmetries hidden by such discourse that we can improve processes to ensure the best possible outcomes for those seeking our protection.

Related content

• Laura Smith-Khan, Crucial communication: language management in Australian asylum interviews
• Laura Smith-Khan, Discrimination by any other name: Language tests and racist migration policy in Australia
• Laura Smith-Khan, Don’t know what “jurisdictional error” means? Some people’s future depends on it
• Laura Smith-Khan, We all have a culture, we all speak a language: the Australian legal system discusses diversity

References

• Smith-Khan L (2017a) Negotiating narratives, accessing asylum: Evaluating language policy as multi-level practice, beliefs and management. Multilingua 36: 31-57.
• Smith-Khan L (2017b) Telling stories: Credibility and the representation of social actors in Australian asylum appeals. Discourse & Society.
• Smith-Khan L (Forthcoming) Different in the same way? Language, diversity and refugee credibility. International Journal of Refugee Law.
• Van Leeuwen T (1996) The representation of social actors. In: Caldas-Coulthard CR and Coulthard M (eds) Texts and Practices: Readings in Critical Discourse Analysis. London: Routledge, pp. 32-70.