Aleinikoff, T Alexander, 'Protected characteristics and social perceptions: An analysis of the meaning of "membership of a particular social group"' in Erika Feller, Volker Türk and Francs Nicholson (eds), Refugee Protection in
Whether those seeking asylum can be believed is a central concern in both public discourse and institutional processes. As a result, credibility assessments have become an important component of the latter. This article contributes to existing scholarship on credibility assessments by critically examining the discourse and related 'language ideologies' underlying them. The examination includes published tribunal decisions on appeals of institutional rejections of asylum-seeker applications, and the tribunal's official credibility assessment guidelines. It considers how constructions of language and diversity affect the way credibility is assessed in visa decision-making. In the application process, sole authorship of the texts produced is discursively assigned to the asylum-seekers. This discourse is problematic as it constructs credibility as attaching to them alone. However, this contradicts the sociolinguistic realities: the texts produced in this setting are institutionally controlled and result from the interaction of multiple participants. The examination also demonstrates how the essentialisation of culture and linguistic diversity can create implausibility. Institutional discourse thus creates serious challenges for applicants, who must communicate 'credibly' to gain protection, even though this communication and its evaluation are far from wholly within their control.
To secure protection in the global North, asylum-seekers must overcome restrictive government policies and present a convincing refugee narrative. Their credibility becomes their main asset and must survive the multiple challenges arising from intercultural communication and interactions involving multiple institutional actors. Aiming to explore the impact institutional understandings of refugee narrative creation have on credibility assessment, I present the findings of an analysis of a corpus of documents from the Australian tribunal responsible for the administrative review of asylum decisions. I critically analyse these texts to identify how the tribunal and its agents discursively present the various actors involved in asylum appeals. I argue that despite the cautions of existing scholarship, these texts present the asylum-seeker as the sole author of the final refugee narrative, regardless of the role that decision-makers and other actors, such as lawyers and interpreters, play in its co-construction. Thus, the institution places disproportionate responsibility on the asylum-seeker for communication outcomes, creating significant challenges for their credibility.
Theories of language policy increasingly emphasise focusing on the specific contexts in which language management occurs. In government settings, policy seeks to shape how individuals interact with officials. Australian asylum procedure is an area where policy aims at tight control. I examine how communication is managed in this setting, in which successful outcomes are so important. After reviewing the relevant policy documents, I explore the experiences of individual refugees and migration agents through a series of qualitative interviews. I consider the relationship between language management, beliefs and practice in this context and find that individual experiences in this setting can differ. This article demonstrates the impact of several agents in the co-construction of the refugee narrative, noting that while standardisation is institutionally valued, variation is inevitable. The findings suggest that outcomes depend on much more than just official policy.
This article examines how racial and linguistic identities are constructed on the Australian reality TV show Border Security. Based on an analysis of 108 episodes of the show involving 253 border force officers and 128 passengers, we explore how the hegemonic Australian identity of the White native speaker of English is constructed on the show. Officers are represented as a relatively uniform group of heroes devoted to protecting Australia’s national security. Simultaneously, most of them look white and sound like native speakers of Australian English. In contrast to the officers, passengers, as their antagonists, do not have a predominant racial or linguistic profile. They are represented as highly diverse. What unites them is not any racial or linguistic profile but that they represent a security risk. Threat thus comes to be mapped onto diversity. The show’s schema of heroes and antagonists invites the audience to identify with the heroes. By identifying with the White-English heroes, the audience also comes to take on their power of judgment over its diverse linguistic and racial Others. The analysis shows how the White-English identity bundle is constructed as the authoritative and legitimate position of the judging knower. The article’s main contribution is to show how the raciolinguistic construct of the White-English complex is made hegemonic in a diverse society officially committed to multiculturalism.
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