Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gvvz8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-21T13:26:38.107Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Communicative resources and credibility in public discourse on refugees

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 April 2019

Laura Smith-Khan
Laura Smith-Khan*
Affiliation:
University of Technology Sydney, Australia
*
Address for correspondence: Laura Smith-Khan University of Technology SydneyPO Box 123, Broadway Sydney, NSW 2007, AustraliaLaura.Smith-Khan@uts.edu.au
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article examines how communicative resources affect the construction of credible texts and identities in a public debate on Australia's treatment of a refugee. It centres on two key written statements—one from the Immigration Minister, and another from a Somali refugee. The analysis is divided into four levels, exploring the parties’ respective linguistic, material, identity, and platform resources, and how these impact their statements’ creation and reception, and their participation in discourse creation more generally. The article finds that there are inequalities on all four resource levels that largely undermine the refugee's ability to present a credible text and identity and challenge mainstream discourse on refugees. The article demonstrates how a multi-level analysis of communicative resources can challenge assumptions about participation and uncover inequalities invisible in the prevailing discourse. (Asylum, Australia, communicative resources, discourse, intercultural communication, media, power, refugee)*

Type
Articles
Information
Language in Society , Volume 48 , Issue 3 , June 2019 , pp. 403 - 427
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

Research for this article was undertaken as part of a Doctor of Philosophy, conducted at Macquarie University and supported by an Australian Government Research Training Programme Scholarship (formerly APA). I am thankful for the outstanding support and guidance offered by supervisor, Professor Ingrid Piller (Linguistics Department), associate supervisor, Dr Daniel Ghezelbash (Macquarie Law School), and co-members of the Language on the Move research group. I am equally appreciative of the thorough constructive feedback and suggestions of the journal's anonymous reviewers and editorial team.

References

REFERENCES

ABC Media Watch (2015). Exclusive Nauru access for The Australian (updated 26 October 2015).Online: http://www.abc.net.au/mediawatch/transcripts/s4339385.htm; accessed 2 January 2018.Google Scholar
Allard, Tom (2015). Somalian refugee Abyan becomes a political pawn after abortion request on Nauru. Sydney Morning Herald, 24 October 2015.Google Scholar
Anderson, Stephanie (2015). Pregnant refugee Abyan to return to Australia from Nauru for medical treatment, Peter Dutton says. ABC News, 28 October 2015.Google Scholar
Angermeyer, Philipp Sebastian (2015). Speak English or what? Codeswitching and interpreter use in New York City courts. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Angermeyer, Philipp Sebastian (2016). Promoting litigant consent to arbitration in multilingual small claims court. In Ehrlich, Susan, Eades, Diana, & Ainsworth, Janet (eds.), Discursive constructions of consent in the legal process, 163–85. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Anker, Deborah (1992). Determining asylum claims in the United States: A case study of the implementation of legal norms in an unstructured adjudicatory environment. NYU Review of Law and Social Change 19:433–528.Google Scholar
Appelman, Alyssa, & Bolls, Paul (2011). Article recall, credibility lower with grammar errors. Newspaper Research Journal 32(2):50–62.Google Scholar
Australian Border Force (2015). Freedom of Information Documents, released 1 January 2016.Google Scholar
Baillot, Helen; Cowan, Sharon; & Munro, Vanessa E. (2014). Reason to disbelieve: Evaluating the rape claims of women seeking asylum in the UK. International Journal of Law in Context 10(1):105–39.Google Scholar
Bleiker, Roland; Campbell, David; Hutchison, Emma; & Nicholson, Xzarina (2013). The visual dehumanisation of refugees. Australia Journal of Political Science 48(4):398–416.Google Scholar
Blommaert, Jan (2004). Writing as a problem: African grassroots writing, economies of literacy, and globalization. Language in Society 33(5):643–71.Google Scholar
Blommaert, Jan (2010). The sociolinguistics of globalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Bourdieu, Pierre (1992). Language and symbolic power. Cambridge: Polity.Google Scholar
Bourke, Latika (2015). Peter Dutton says advocates for Somali refugee ‘Abyan’ have let her down. Sydney Morning Herald, 19 October 2015.Google Scholar
Byrne, Rosemary (2007). Assessing testimonial evidence in asylum proceedings: Guiding standards from the International Criminal Tribunals. International Journal of Refugee Law 19(4):609–38.Google Scholar
Campbell, John (2013). Language analysis in the United Kingdom's refugee status determination system: Seeing through policy claims about ‘expert knowledge’. Ethnic and Racial Studies 36(4):670–90.Google Scholar
Capstick, Tony (2016). Multilingual literacies, identities and ideologies: Exploring chain migration from Pakistan to the UK. London: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Central Intelligence Agency (2018). The world factbook: Nauru. Online: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/nr.html.Google Scholar
Clyne, Michael (2003). When the discourse of hatred becomes respectable does the linguist have a responsibility? Australia Review of Applied Linguistics 26(1):1–5.Google Scholar
Coffey, Guy (2003). The credibility of credibility evidence at the Refugee Review Tribunal. International Journal of Refugee Law 15:377–417.Google Scholar
Corcoran, Chris (2004). A critical examination of the use of language analysis interviews in asylum proceedings: A case study of a West African seeking asylum in The Netherlands. International Journal of Speech, Language and the Law 11(2):200–21.Google Scholar
Council of Europe (2018). Common European framework of reference for languages: Learning, teaching, assessment. Companion volume with new descriptors. Online: https://rm.coe.int/cefr-companion-volume-with-new-descriptors-2018/1680787989.Google Scholar
Davidson, Helen (2017). Peter Dutton introduces bill to ban phones from immigration detainees. The Guardian, 13 September 2017.Google Scholar
Doherty, Ben (2015). Nauru police close case of alleged rape of Somali reufgee citing lack of evidence. The Guardian, 12 October 2015.Google Scholar
Doherty, Ben, & Medhora, Shalailah (2015). Somali refugee flown out of Australia denies saying she declined termination. The Guardian, 19 October 2015.Google Scholar
Doherty, Ben; Evershed, Nick; & Ball, Andy (2018). Deaths in offshore detention: The faces of the people who have died in Australia's care. The Guardian, 20 June 2018.Google Scholar
Eades, Diana (2003). Participation of second language and second dialect speakers in the legal system. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 23:113–33.Google Scholar
Eades, Diana (2005). Applied linguistics and language analysis in asylum seeker cases. Applied Linguistics 26(4):503–26.Google Scholar
Eades, Diana (2008). Telling and retelling your story in court: Questions, assumptions and intercultural implications. Current Issues in Criminal Justice November 2008:209–30.Google Scholar
Eades, Diana (2009). Testing the claims of asylum seekers: The role of language analysis. Language Assessment Quarterly 6(1):30–40.Google Scholar
Eades, Diana (2012). The social consequences of language ideologies in courtroom cross-examination. Language in Society 41(4):471–97.Google Scholar
Evans Cameron, Hilary (2008). Risk theory and ‘subjective fear’: The role of risk perception, assessment, and management in refugee status determinations. International Journal of Refugee Law 20(4):567–85.Google Scholar
Every, Danielle, & Augoustinos, Martha (2008). ‘Taking advantage’ or fleeing persecution? Opposing accounts of asylum seeking. Journal of Sociolinguistics 12(5):648–67.Google Scholar
Gartrell, Adam (2017). Peter Dutton abandons detention centre secrecy rules amid High Court challenge. Sydney Morning Herald, 13 August 2017.Google Scholar
Grattan, Michelle (2015). A counsellor should be sent to Nauru to help ‘Abyan’. The Conversation, 19 October 2015.Google Scholar
Hamlin, Rebecca (2014). Let me be a refugee: Administrative justice and the politics of asylum in the United States, Canada, and Australia. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Healicon, Alison (2016). The politics of sexual violence: Rape, identity and feminism. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Hitchick, Merran (2016). Immigration officials knew refugee Abyan still wanted abortion, emails show. The Guardian, 2 January 2016.Google Scholar
Hymes, Dell (1974). Foundations of sociolinguistics: An ethnographic approach. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
Jacquemet, Marco (2011). Crosstalk 2.0: asylum and communicative breakdowns. Text and Talk 31(4):475–97.Google Scholar
Jeong, Allan; Li, Haiying; & Pan, Andy Jiaren (2017). A sequential analysis of responses in online debates to postings of students exhibiting high versus low grammar and spelling errors. Education Technology Research and Development 65(5):1175–94.Google Scholar
Kelly, Joe (2015). Nauru offers home to hundreds as asylum rape battle rages. The Australian, 19 October 2015.Google Scholar
Kenny, Chris (2015). Refugee declines to report rape to police. The Australian, 21 October 2015.Google Scholar
KhosraviNik, Majid (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):477–98.Google Scholar
Lawlor, Andrea, & Tolley, Erin (2017). Deciding who's legitimate: News media framing of immigrants and refugees. International Journal of Communication 11:967–91.Google Scholar
Lindemann, Stephanie, & Moran, Katherine (2017). The role of the descriptor ‘broken English’ in ideologies about nonnative speech. Language in Society 46:649–69.Google Scholar
MacCallum, Mungo (2002). Girt by sea: Australia, the refugees and the politics of fear. Melbourne: Black.Google Scholar
Macken-Horarik, Mary (2003a). Working the borders in racist discourse: The challenge of the ‘Children Overboard Affair’ in news media texts. Social Semiotics 13(3):283–303.Google Scholar
Macken-Horarik, Mary (2003b). A telling symbiosis on the discourse of hatred: Multimodal news texts about the ‘Children Overboard’ affair. Australian Review of Applied Linguistics 26(2):1–16.Google Scholar
Martin-Lacroux, Christelle (2017). ‘Without the spelling errors I would have shortlisted her…’: The impact of spelling errors on recruiters’ choice during the personnel selection process. International Journal of Selection and Assessment 25(3):276–83.Google Scholar
Maryns, Katrijn (2004). Identifying the asylum speaker: Reflections on the pitfalls of language analysis in the determination of national origin. International Journal of Speech, Language and the Law 11(2):240–60.Google Scholar
McKinnon, Sara L. (2009). Citizenship and the performance of credibility: Audiencing gender-based asylum seekers in US immigration courts. Text and Performance Quarterly 29(3):205–21.Google Scholar
McKnight, David (2012). Henry Mayer lecture 2012: The market populism of Rupert Murdoch. Media International Australia 144:5–12.Google Scholar
Newhouse, George (2015). This young girl was raped and left stranded – bring her to Australia for urgent treatment. Online: https://www.change.org/p/malcolm-turnbull-this-young-girl-was-raped-and-left-stranded-bring-her-to-australia-for-urgent-treatment.Google Scholar
Opeskin, Brian, & Ghezelbash, Daniel (2016). Australian refugee policy and its impacts on Pacific Island countries. The Journal of Pacific Studies 36(1):73–90.Google Scholar
Pickering, Sharon (2001). Common sense and original deviancy: News discourses and asylum seekers in Australia. Journal of Refugee Studies 14(2):169–86.Google Scholar
Piller, Ingrid (2016). Linguistic diversity and social justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Piller, Ingrid (2017). Intercultural communication: A critical introduction. 2nd edn. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Google Scholar
Smith-Khan, Laura (2017a). Telling stories: Credibility and the representation of social actors in Australian asylum appeals. Discourse and Society 28(5):512–34.Google Scholar
Smith-Khan, Laura (2017b). Negotiating narratives, accessing asylum: Evaluating language policy as multi-level practice, beliefs and management Multilingua 36(1):31–57.Google Scholar
Smith-Khan, Laura (2017c). Different in the same way?: Language, diversity and refugee credibility. International Journal of Refugee Law 29(3):389–416.Google Scholar
Smith-Khan, Laura (2019). Debating credibility: Refugees and rape in the media. Australian Review of Applied Linguistics, to appear.Google Scholar
Stirling, Angus (2015). Asylum seekers and refugees in Australian print media: A corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis. Paper presented at Linguistic Society of New Zealand 2015 Conference, University of Otago.Google Scholar
Sweeney, James A. (2009). Credibility, proof and refugee law. International Journal of Refugee Law 21(4):700–26.Google Scholar
Symons-Brown, Bonny (2016). Pregnant Somali asylum seeker Abyan had not ruled out abortion, FOI documents reveal. ABC News, 2 January 2016.Google Scholar
Teo, Peter (2000). Racism in the news: A critical discourse analysis of news reporting in two Australian newspapers. Discourse and Society 11(1):7–49.Google Scholar
Thomas, Robert (2011). Administrative justice and asylum appeals: A study of tribunal adjudication. Oxford: Hart.Google Scholar
van Dijk, Teun A. (2006). Discourse, context and cognition. Discourse Studies 8(1):159–77.Google Scholar
van Dijk, Teun A. (2008). Discourse and power. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
van Leeuwen, Theo (1996). The representation of social actors. In Caldas-Coulthard, Carmen Rosa & Coulthard, Malcolm (eds.), Texts and practices: Readings in critical discourse analysis, 32–70. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
van Leeuwen, Theo (2007). Legitimation in discourse and communication. Discourse and Communication 1(1):91–112.Google Scholar
van Leeuwen, Theo, & Wodak, Ruth (1999). Legitimizing immigration control: A discourse-historical analysis. Discourse Studies 1(1):83–118.Google Scholar
Whyte, Sarah (2017). Government pays compensation to Save the Children workers removed from Nauru. ABC News, 31 January 2017.Google Scholar
Wolfe, Joanna; Shanmugaraj, Nisha; & Sipe, Jaclyn (2016). Grammatical versus pragmatic error: Employer perceptions of nonnative and native English speakers. Business and Professional Communication Quarterly 79(4):397–415.Google Scholar