The early part of the 21st century has been marked by widespread social upheaval and geographical displacement of people. This book examines how refugees, asylum-seekers, locals and professional refugee workers make sense of asylum and refuge in the context of current UK asylum policies.

The early part of the 21st century has been marked by widespread social upheaval and geographical displacement of people. This book examines how refugees, asylum-seekers, locals and professional refugee workers make sense of asylum and refuge in the context of current UK asylum policies.

Drawing on first-hand ethnographic data, field interviews with interpreters, interviewers and decision-makers, observations and off-record comments, The Asylum Speaker examines discursive processes in the asylum procedure and the impact these processes may have on the determination of refugee status. The book starts from the assumption that far-reaching legal decisions often have to be made on very limited grounds. Unable to submit any evidence to substantiate their case, the only chance that many asylum seekers have is to argue their case during the oral hearings with public officials at the different asylum agencies. Maryns investigates the performance of the asylum seeker during these interviews and analyzes the relationship between narrative structuring and gradations of linguistic competence. She explores a number of related questions: first, how the interaction between applicants and public officials proceeds; second, how this interaction forms the discursive input into long and complicated textual trajectories, and third, how the outcome of these discursive processes affects the assessment of asylum applications. Maryns demonstrates how propositional aspects play a crucial role in the asylum procedure whereas little attention is paid to narrative-linguistic diversity and multilingual speaker repertoires. Her analysis reveals how insufficient insight into the linguistic structure and narrative features of the asylum account often results in a deficient processing of important details.

This comprehensive, up-to-date volume reports on current practices and use of Language Analysis for the Determination of Origin (LADO). Readers will find chapters on how it is done, where it is used, how it is used, and learn about recent developments on the use of LADO reports in judicial practice, and current controversies in the field. LADO is a highly controversial topic, and a relatively new branch of forensic linguistics that is used by most European and some non-European governments. When asylum seekers cannot submit documentary proof of their origin, their language can be analysed in order to assess whether their linguistic profile is in accordance with their stated origin. Around 10,000 such language analyses take place annually. This volume is based on the series of meetings of the Language and Asylum Research Group held between 2010 and 2012 and convened by the editors, and offers a state-of-the art perspective from researchers, practitioners, policymakers and stakeholders working on or with LADO.

Winner of the 2000 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize 2002 finalist in poetry, Society of Midland Authors Quan Barry’s stunning debut collection has been compared to Sylvia Plath’s Ariel for the startling complexity of craft and the original sophisticated vision behind it. In these poems beauty is just as likely to be discovered on a radioactive atoll as in the existential questions raised by The Matrix. Asylum is a work concerned with giving voice to the displaced—both real and fictional. In "some refrains Sam would have played had he been asked" the piano player from Casablanca is fleshed out in ways the film didn’t allow. Steven Seagal, Yukio Mishima, Tituba of the Salem Witch Trials, and eighteenth-century black poet Phillis Wheatley also populate these poems. Barry engages with the world—the Tuskegee syphilis experiments, the legacy of the Vietnam war—but also tackles the broad meditative question of the individual’s existence in relation to a higher truth, whether examining rituals or questioning, "Where is it written that we should want to be saved?" Ultimately, Asylum finds a haven by not looking away.

Drawing on first-hand ethnographic data, field interviews with interpreters, interviewers and decision-makers, observations and off-record comments, The Asylum Speaker examines discursive processes in the asylum procedure and the impact these processes may have on the determination of refugee status. The book starts from the assumption that far-reaching legal decisions often have to be made on very limited grounds. Unable to submit any evidence to substantiate their case, the only chance that many asylum seekers have is to argue their case during the oral hearings with public officials at the different asylum agencies. Maryns investigates the performance of the asylum seeker during these interviews and analyzes the relationship between narrative structuring and gradations of linguistic competence. She explores a number of related questions: first, how the interaction between applicants and public officials proceeds; second, how this interaction forms the discursive input into long and complicated textual trajectories, and third, how the outcome of these discursive processes affects the assessment of asylum applications. Maryns demonstrates how propositional aspects play a crucial role in the asylum procedure whereas little attention is paid to narrative-linguistic diversity and multilingual speaker repertoires. Her analysis reveals how insufficient insight into the linguistic structure and narrative features of the asylum account often results in a deficient processing of important details.

International law provides states with a common definition of a "refugee" as well as guidelines outlining how asylum claims should be decided. Yet even across nations with many commonalities, the processes of determining refugee status look strikingly different. This book compares the refugee status determination (RSD) regimes of three popular asylum seeker destinations: the United States, Canada, and Australia. Though they exhibit similarly high levels of political resistance to accepting asylum seekers, refugees access three very different systems-none of which are totally restrictive or expansive-once across their borders. These differences are significant both in terms of asylum seekers' experience of the process and in terms of their likelihood of being designated as refugees. Based on a multi-method analysis of all three countries, including a year of fieldwork with in-depth interviews of policy-makers and asylum-seeker advocates, observations of refugee status determination hearings, and a large-scale case analysis, Rebecca Hamlin finds that cross-national differences have less to do with political debates over admission and border control policy than with how insulated administrative decision-making is from either political interference or judicial review. Administrative justice is conceptualized and organized differently in every state, and so states vary in how they draw the line between refugee and non-refugee.