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Procedures without borders: The language-ideological anchorage of legal-administrative procedures in translocal institutional settings

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 January 2013

Katrijn Maryns
Katrijn Maryns*
Affiliation:
FWO Research Foundation Flanders - Ghent University Kallobaan 43, 9120 Beveren, Belgiumkatrijn.maryns@ugent.be
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Abstract

Theoretical and applied research in the field of institutional discourse analysis calls for an increasing awareness of the constitutive nature of discourse in the representation and the assessment of social identities (Sarangi & Roberts 1999; Blommaert 2010; Eades 2010). The staunchly textualist accounts surviving institutional practice, however, tend to obscure complex multidiscursive and language ideologically anchored processes that mold procedural outcomes. On the basis of first-hand ethnographic data collected across legal-administrative procedures in Belgium, this article aims at revealing some meaningful contexts that have been erased in the case of an asylum seeker who became a murder victim and whose asylum file was used in the assize trial as a resource to sketch his social identity. The analysis explores the ideological functioning of textuality in the situated details of communicative practice, thereby aiming for a better understanding of the intricacies of multidiscursive identity construction in translocal procedural settings. (Institutional discourse analysis, multidiscursivity, language ideology and identity, sociolinguistic mobility, asylum procedure, assize court procedure)*

Type
Articles
Information
Language in Society , Volume 42 , Issue 1 , February 2013 , pp. 71 - 92
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013

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