29.4087, Review: Discourse Analysis; Historical Linguistics; Sociolinguistics: Bennett (2018)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-29-4087. Fri Oct 19 2018. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 29.4087, Review: Discourse Analysis; Historical Linguistics; Sociolinguistics: Bennett (2018)

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Date: Fri, 19 Oct 2018 16:52:53
From: Seyma Toker [seytoker at gmail.com]
Subject: Constructions of Migrant Integration in British Public Discourse

 
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AUTHOR: Sam  Bennett
TITLE: Constructions of Migrant Integration in British Public Discourse
SUBTITLE: Becoming British
SERIES TITLE: Bloomsbury Advances in Critical Discourse Studies
PUBLISHER: Bloomsbury Publishing (formerly The Continuum International Publishing Group)
YEAR: 2018

REVIEWER: Seyma Toker, Georgetown Univeristy

SUMMARY

Upon their arrival into a new country, migrants are surrounded by discourses
of integration. These discourses are created by politicians, circulated by
media, and paradoxically exclusive of the agents of the integration – migrants
themselves. This is also a common pitfall in existing literature on migrant
integration policies; migrants’ perspective on integration does not receive
the attention it deserves, either in policy making or in policy research. Sam
Bennett acts on this contradiction and brings a methodological innovation to
critical discourse analysis of migrant integration in his book “Constructions
of Migrant Integration in British Public Discourse: Becoming British”. Drawing
on a comprehensive pool of both “top-down” and “bottom-up” public discourse
data including policy documents, media texts and data from focus group
interviews with migrants and new citizens, Bennett examines the shift in the
discursive construction of migrant integration between 2000 and 2010 in the
UK.

Chapter 1, To Be or Not to Be (British): Discourse, Integration and the Public
Sphere, outlines the theoretical orientations and the methodology in his
study. It starts with definition of terms such as discourse, text, context,
and the description of the “discursive public sphere” model developed by the
author that differs from the existing models in that public discourse is
conceptualized as emerging from a dialectical relation between political
discourse, media discourse and interpretive community. Description of the
model is followed by a brief survey of the literature on migrant integration
in the UK, where the author argues that discursive construction of integration
in the public sphere across multiple discourse genres and its connection to
migrants’ own understanding of integration remains an area underexplored. 

Chapter 2, Discourse, Race, and Migration, examines the discursive nature of
racism and exclusion in the history of the UK. It reviews several theories of
racism and particularly elaborates on social constructivist theories in
relation to policy and media. Aligning with critical discourse scholars such
as Fairclough, Wodak, and van Dijk, the author takes a discursive stance on
the construction of racism, believing that “racist ideologies are produced in
discourse and reproduced and acted upon through discourse, the effects of
which, in turn, reinforce our initial conceptions” (p.31).

Chapter 3, (En)Acting Integration, is devoted to explanation of two important
concepts for the study: integration and citizenship. Bennett first gives a
review of different theories of integration and citizenship such as
multiculturalism, politics of recognition, politics of redistribution, and
theory of transnational membership. He then moves on to explain integration in
practice, detailing integration models from Berry's (2003) model of
acculturation to Ager and Strang’s (2004) two-way integration framework, which
is the one adopted in this study. He contends that integration in the UK is a
performative process and a neoliberal model of citizenship best explains how
incoming non-nationals are integrated in the society.

Chapter 4, Historical and Socio-Political Contexts, prepares the readers for
the following analysis chapters by providing the history of migration and
integration policies in Europe and the UK during the Labour governments of
1997-2010. It argues that Britain’s migration policies have historically been
tied to race or ethnicity as they were during the Labour governments. The
author draws attention to the shift in Labour’s approach to migration during
this period from the rhetoric of border control to a neo-assimilatory stance,
differentiating between desirable and non-desirable migrants based on their
contribution to the economy and commitment to British values. 

Chapter 5, Analysis of Government Policy Texts, provides an in-depth discourse
analysis of government documents on integration over a decade, including white
papers, green papers, and government reports. The analysis reveals that
integration and community cohesion are discursively constructed as separate in
policy documents, the former pertaining to newcomers while the latter is a
result of integration. In addition, a closer examination of the concept of
“community” across the texts demonstrates vague and differing meanings, at
places referring to a single body of people and in others plural but inclusive
or exclusive of migrants and refugees. The author also unpacks the meaning of
“integration”, discussing that integration discourse is normative and is
constructed as an endless process in which ‘migrants’ particularly
asylum-seekers and refugees are portrayed as the problematic object supported
by government rather than agents of this process. The main argument in this
chapter is integration policy between 2000 and 2010 appears as normative,
assimilatory, and racialized (particularly against British Muslims) in the
policy documents, and it is paving its way to a more performative
understanding driven by neoliberal assumptions on expectations of economic
self-sufficiency and active participation in the nebulous concept of
“community”.

Chapter 6, Analysis of Media Texts, presents the analysis of print national
and local newspapers on the discourse of integration. Combining quantitative
corpus analysis with a close-up qualitative analysis of language patterns, the
author shows how government policy texts are circulated, reproduced and
re-contextualized through media. The findings in this chapter parallel the
analysis of the policy documents, particularly regarding the construction of
community. Communities are primarily racialized in the media discourse, though
they are either framed more vaguely in the policy texts or linked to a certain
geography. Similar to the discourse in the policy texts, non-Brits are
discursively constructed as “different” and “required” to be integrated to be
the ideal citizens performing British values (e.g. tolerance and democracy)
and neoliberal citizenship. In this chapter, Bennett illustrates how elite
discourses of integration initiated in the government policy documents are
mirrored and interpreted in the media as explained in his model of discursive
public sphere.

Chapter 7, Analysis of Focus Groups with Incoming Non-Nationals, turns our
gaze to “the words, thoughts, feelings and experiences of incoming
non-nationals themselves towards integration” (p. 131). It first maps out the
discourse topics (Reisigl & Wodak, 2001) evident in focus group interviews
with migrants of different legal status and method of entry. Then, it provides
a critical discursive analysis of what the author terms “doing integration” by
the focus group. The findings illuminate that integration is constructed as a
locally experienced phenomenon by the respondents – a process that is mainly
dependent on language skills and opportunities for social contact with the
community. One interesting finding from the interviews is that incoming
non-nationals appear to internalize the public discourse on neoliberal
expectations from newcomers such as contributing to the economy, paying taxes,
and being self-sufficient. Though their understanding of integration shows
diversity and complexity, it parallels the local and performative aspect of
integration dominant in the political discourse. For instance, paying back to
the local community is a salient theme in how non-nationals describe good
citizenship. But, as opposed to the association of top-down British values
with integration by elite policy-makers, migrants view integration as a local
activity, not necessarily a national one. 

Chapter 8, Discussion and Conclusion: The Discursive Construction, summarizes
the findings in the analysis chapters and ties them back to the model of
discursive public sphere and theoretical discussions on the integration of
migrants in the UK. As throughout the book, the author contends that political
and media discourse discursively construct integration as neo-assimilatory
between 2000 and 2010, associating successful integration and good citizenship
as performing self-sufficiency and adherence to British values of democracy,
rule of law, and equality assuming that incoming non-nationals are deficient
in them. From the perspective of migrants of various legal statuses and
countries of origin, integration is perceived as a local and individual
experience. They challenge the elite, assimilatory representation of good
citizenship based on national values; they indicate that they have multiple
social bonds including the local community, the openness of which plays a
crucial role in their integration experiences. The chapter concludes by
reframing integration as a local activity and process, calling for further
cooperation of local authorities, and inclusion of multiethnic migrant groups
into policy design, and consideration of alternative model of transnational
citizenship.

EVALUATION

Bennett’s work advances the literature in migration research by introducing
methodological novelty to analyze integration in critical discourse studies
(CDS), combining top-down and bottom-up analysis of data. In this regard, it
achieves its aim to “add and develop research into integration theory by
providing an in-depth analysis on how migrants and other stakeholders view the
process of integration” (p.4). 

One limitation of the study concerns the exclusion of social media as a part
of the data used for bottom-up analysis. Although interviews in this study can
be considered as spaces where migrant groups can voice their resistance to
dominant political and media discourse on immigration, inclusion of social
media discourse generated by the migrants themselves, for instance, their
comments or tweets on relevant online platforms, would have strengthened the
bottom-up data sources and enriched the analysis.

The analysis sections incorporate some visuals and tables to highlight the key
themes and connections; however, Chapter 5 could, for instance, have
benefitted from a visually neat representation of the frequency of key terms
related to community and integration to paint a broader picture of the corpus,
as Chapter 6 attempts to do. These frequency tables would make it easier for
the readers to follow the analysis as well as helping them to compare the
instances across different genres of policy texts.

While not free of shortcomings, Bennett’s study remains innovative in
methodology and is recommended to graduate students and scholars interested in
migration research and critical discourse studies. 

REFERENCES

Ager, A. & Strang, A. (2004). Indicators of Integration: Final Report. London:
Home Office.

Berry, J. (2003). Conceptual Approaches to Acculturation. In K. Chun, P. Balls
Organista, & G. Marin (Eds.), Acculturation: Advances in Theory, Measurement
and Applied Research (pp. 17-37). Washington, DC: American Psychological
Association. 

Reisigl, M. & Wodak, R. (2001). Discourse and Discrimination: Rhetoric of
Racism and Antisemitism. London: Routledge.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Şeyma Toker is a Ph.D. student in Applied Linguistics at Georgetown
University. Her research interests include second language socialization,
migration, identity, and critical multilingualism.





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