This collection highlights the interplay between language and liminal places and spaces in building distinct narratives of selfhood. The book uses an interdisciplinary approach to examine linguistic and social phenomena in places shaped by displacement and social inequality. The book also looks at chronotopes, the Bakhtinian-inspired concept of the interconnectedness of time and space in identity. The volume demonstrates how studying liminal places and spaces can offer unique insights into how people construct language and selfhood in these spaces, making this key reading for researchers in sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, geography, and linguistic anthropology.

This book offers a close look at the discourse of and around three socially marginalised and vulnerable groups – Irish Travellers, Squatters and Homeless people – in order to understand more about how individuals within them position themselves vis-à-vis mainstream society. It investigates the groups' diverse and provisional relationship with space that challenges mainstream society's spatial logic. Given that the relationship between mobility, space and identity has been explored in migrant contexts, Roberta Piazza proposes a reconsideration of this relationship beyond people's movement from one place to another. Investigating the space-identity nexus among the three groups, she highlights how mobility is not solely a cross-country phenomenon, but a no-less crucial and dramatic reality within an individual nation. Based on close linguistic analysis of interviews collected over many years, Piazza investigates how the participants construct their social and personal identities when talking about themselves and the sites they inhabit, drawing on the concepts of 'heterotopia' and non-sexual desire.

The proposed volume reflects on the Coronavirus pandemic as a still evolving phenomenon and captures critically its socially constructed dimension. The papers by well-established international contributors deal with a variety of themes that range from the different discourses of the first and second lockdown; the comparative responses to Covid in different parts of the world, in light of the relationship between language and culture; and the reflection of who the actors are, who talk and are talked about, in relation to the pandemic. This last theme, in particular, offers a wide variety of responses, from politicians’ and health experts’ communiqués to the voices of marginal individuals and groups like the refugees. The overall questions the papers as a whole try to answer is whether the discourses of and around Covid are equalizing or inciting inequality, whether they perpetuate existing structures of dominance and exclusion and if and how they contributed to language change. The volume offers an opportunity to both discourse analysts and sociolinguists to cross paths and work together. The variety of analytic approaches adopted in both linguistic fields, from corpus-assisted and computational approaches, to survey and interview-based studies, guarantees a ground-breaking interdisciplinary volume, with contributions designed to include linguistic analysis at all levels including the plane of grammatical description, lexis, phonology and discourse analysis.

Exploring narratives produced by different groups of MENA and SSA migrants or refugees, this book focuses on the spatial and temporal aspects of their experiences. In doing so, the authors examine a wide range of accounts of journeys to host countries and memories (or recreations) of “home”. The spaces that migrants occupy (or not) in their new country; the spaces and times they share with local populations; and different conceptions of space and time across generations are also investigated, as are how feelings surrounding space and time are manifested within these different narratives and their affective-discursive practices. Taking both a traditional, linear view of migration as well as a multilinear, multimodal approach, the book presents an in-depth investigation into the ways in which people inhabit multiple real and digital spaces.

The impact of mobility and superdiversity in recent sociolinguistic research is well-established, yet very few studies deal with issues related to immobility. The chapters in this book focus on the sociolinguistic investigation of the dynamics between mobility and immobility as experienced by migrants, asylum seekers and members of minority or exploited groups. Central to the book is an exploration of how mobilities are affected by and in turn affect power relations and of the kinds of resources used by people to deal with (im)mobility processes. The book brings to light a new critical sociolinguistic imagination that is responsive to 21st century processes of (im)mobilities as socially, discursively and emotionally constructed and negotiated.

Aimed at equipping a new generation of scholars and students with the essential tools for analyzing discourse, this handbook provides an overview of key research fields and an introduction to the various methodologies, concepts and areas of investigation in discourse.

This collection highlights the interplay between language and liminal places and spaces in building distinct narratives of selfhood. The book uses an interdisciplinary approach to examine linguistic and social phenomena in places shaped by displacement and social inequality. The book also looks at chronotopes, the Bakhtinian-inspired concept of the interconnectedness of time and space in identity. The volume demonstrates how studying liminal places and spaces can offer unique insights into how people construct language and selfhood in these spaces, making this key reading for researchers in sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, geography, and linguistic anthropology.