32.1476, Review: Discourse Analysis; Pragmatics; Sociolinguistics: Greenbank (2020)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-32-1476. Wed Apr 28 2021. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 32.1476, Review: Discourse Analysis; Pragmatics; Sociolinguistics: Greenbank (2020)

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Date: Wed, 28 Apr 2021 16:38:03
From: Christos Sagredos [chr.sagredos at gmail.com]
Subject: Discursive Navigation of Employable Identities in the Narratives of Former Refugees

 
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/31/31-2164.html

AUTHOR: Emily  Greenbank
TITLE: Discursive Navigation of Employable Identities in the Narratives of Former Refugees
SERIES TITLE: Studies in Narrative 27
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2020

REVIEWER: Christos Sagredos, King's College London

SUMMARY

The “Discursive Navigation of Employable Identities in the Narratives of
Former Refugees” by Emily Greenbank aims at exploring how former refugees
negotiate employability and make sense of the various challenges undermining
their efforts to gain access to the labour market of New Zealand. The book
consists of eleven chapters, five of which (Chapters 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9) cover
a thorough, moment-by-moment micro-analysis of ethnographic interviews with
five former refugees as well as data from authentic workplace interactions.
Drawing on interactional sociolinguistics, linguistic ethnography, the
narrative analytic concept of positioning and Bourdieu’s theorisation of
cultural and social capital, Greenbank walks the reader on the complex
discursive processes shaping former refugees’ identity work vis-à-vis
employability. 

CHAPTER 1
Chapter 1 begins with the author’s personal motivations (e.g. previous
experience as a volunteer at a local refugee resettlement agency) and a
definitional disentanglement of basic concepts like ‘asylum seeker’, ‘refugee’
and ‘former refugee’, with the latter denoting that  refugeehood ends upon
arrival and permanent residence in the country of resettlement. Amongst the
many challenges that former refugees are confronted with during resettlement
into their new countries of residence (e.g. discrimination and othering),
Greenbank focuses on employment challenges, from the perspective of an
employable identity as negotiated and co-constructed in discourse. In this
respect, Greenbank conceptualises employability in terms of an interactionally
achieved and context-dependent employable identity; that is, far from
essentialising and individualistic accounts of interpreting and assessing
employability in terms of a list of pre-discursive attributes or skills (e.g.
confidence or adaptability) assumed to be “exhibited, approved, and ticked off
a list” (p. 8). Rather, Greenbank highlights the relational and co-constructed
nature (e.g. between job seekers and employers, colleagues) of the performance
of employable skills and attributes (e.g. adaptability, teamwork), subscribing
to a view of employable identity as discursively emerging in and through
semiotic choices of positioning of self and others, and the ways these
positionings are (re)affirmed, or rejected by interlocutors.  In light of
this, Chapter 1 finishes with the preliminary and overarching research goal of
the book, i.e. to explore how refugee-background jobseekers and employees
enact employable identities in discourse, and an overview of the book.

CHAPTER 2
Chapter 2 lays out the theoretical underpinnings of this book, delineating an
approach to identity in anti-positive and anti-essentialist terms as a
discursively situated and intersubjective phenomenon that exhibits and is
defined by fluidity, multiplicity, dynamicity, agency and structure. Adopting
an interactional sociolinguistic perspective, Greenbank draws on social
constructionism and Bucholtz and Hall’s (2005) principles of identity
formation processes (i.e. emergence, positionality, indexicality,
relationality and partialness), and goes on to present narrative as the prime
site for identity analysis. The chapter also draws on Bourdieu’s (1986)
theorisation of capital to present employability as a “field” where former
refugees’ cultural and social capital are judged against benchmarks of
field-specific “rules” and of a field’s symbolic capital, i.e. forms of
capital that are assigned with value and legitimised as indicators of
employability on the basis of ideologies – often defined by those possessing
power in a field. From this perspective, the author points to issues of power
inequality vis-à-vis employability highlighting that former refugees’ embodied
and institutional cultural capital (e.g. linguistic proficiency, academic
degrees) may lose its value in the host society, and their social capital
(e.g. membership in social networks) may be non-existent and difficult to
regenerate. Former refugees’ making sense of self and identity work are also
discussed in relation to capital-D-discourses (Gee 2015) circulating at a
macro-level context, such as Discourses of Refugeehood (i.e. dominant
narratives of what it means to be a refugee) and Discourses of Gratitude (i.e.
expectation that refugees be grateful for what that the host country has
provided them with upon resettlement). The chapter closes with basic
theoretical tenets of interactional sociolinguistics, and how concepts like
‘(cross-cultural) context’ are therein understood. 

CHAPTER 3
Chapter 3 begins with a reflection on the implications of the participants’
refugeehood for the methodology of the study and issues of power differentials
between the participants and the researcher (e.g. culturally bound
understandings of research participation, potential vulnerabilities,
performing in a language other than one’s mother tongue). The author then
moves on to on the merits of a (critical) ethnographic approach for the
purposes of the study and the procedure of collecting data while touching upon
the challenges of participant recruitment and ethical considerations (e.g.
seeking informed consent). The chapter then introduces the dataset under
analysis and closes with a brief yet illustrative example of analysing
narrative positioning drawing on the work by Bamberg and Georgakopoulou
(2008). 

CHAPTER 4 
Chapter 4 introduces the five participants of the study, describing their
geographical, social and educational trajectories: 

Kelly: origins from Palestine but born in Kuwait, completed primary education
in New Zealand but finished school and got married in Palestine, returned to
New Zealand, got divorced and completed a Bachelor of Business Studies, mother
of two. 

Omar: grew up in Syria, where he worked as a (chief) engineer for various
shipping companies, left Syria with wife and children after a massacre,
resettled in New Zealand after spending 20 months in Egypt where he was
granted asylum, seeks to find a job suitable to his experience and with a
prospect of advancement. 

Isaac: born in Eritrea,  left in fear of being arrested for political reasons,
made use of counterfeit documents and smugglers to enter Sudan, where he
stayed in a United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) camp and was
granted asylum, worked as a cleaner upon resettlement in New Zealand,
completing a degree in International Relations. 

Arwa: grew up in a Middle Eastern country, completed a master’s degree and PhD
in Computer Science in Malaysia where she was granted refugee status by the
UNHCR, has volunteered with local charities and taken several English-language
courses after resettlement in in New Zealand but has had little success in the
labour market.  

Nina: grew up in Colombia, death threats made her and her daughter flee to
Ecuador, where she lived for 10 years and had 3 more children, discrimination
and health issues prompted her to accept an offer for resettlement in New
Zealand, initially worked as a cleaner but now works as a carer in an
eldercare facility. 

At the end of the chapter, the author reflects on how her own autobiographical
journey and her position as “a politically liberal, feminist, middle-class,
Pakeha woman” (p. 58) have an impact on her research. 

CHAPTER 5
The fine-grained linguistic analysis in Chapter 5 skilfully illustrates how
stories-in-interaction function as rich sites where former refugees and the
researcher herself contribute to the co-construction of three participants’
multiple identities by drawing on a range of linguistic and semiotic
strategies through which they variously (dis)align themselves with
capital-D-discourses –as protagonists in the story-worlds and/or in the
here-and-now of the storytelling practice. Through a highly reflexive,
painstaking micro-analysis of what Greenbank refers to as ‘narratives of
flight’ (i.e. stories about refugees’ leaving their countries of origin, or a
secondary country outside their country of origin), the author shows how
former refugees construct their employable identities by reaffirming normative
expectations of refugeehood (e.g. exhibiting vulnerability, victimisation,
powerlessness) or rejecting them (e.g. exhibiting strength, determination,
responsibility, personal capability).    

CHAPTER 6
In Chapter 6, Greenbank explores former refugees’ discursive enactment of
agency vis-à-vis the negotiation of employable identities, demonstrating how
agency becomes relevant in participants’ stories both in their role as
protagonists in their narrated taleworlds and as storytellers in the research
context of interviews. Drawing on the moment-by-moment exploration of agency
from an intersectional perspective and Bamberg’s (2011) agency dilemma – where
it is conceptualised as a scalar notion ranging between positionings of a
strong, in-control self and victimised/less influential self, the author shows
how former refugees navigate past periods of low-agency, structural challenges
and macro-level Discourses through narrative positionings that reconcile them
with a present, capable, agentive and thus employable self.

CHAPTER 7
In Chapter 7, Greenbank elaborates on how “employability involves narratively
packaging the self” (p. 119), focusing on the discursive processes through
which former refugees draw on their cultural and social capital in order to
perform locally appropriate employable identities. The complexity and the
challenges undermining this enactment of employability are also highlighted.
The thorough analysis of the narratives in this chapter sheds light on the
constraints imposed by the lack of the cultural capital of citizenship or the
limited proficiency of the local language, the inherent difficulties of forced
migration with regard to creating and maintaining a useful social capital, and
the fact that institutional cultural capital (e.g. tertiary qualifications) is
no longer a guarantee of employment – and in the case of refugees, its value
may even be erased or diminished in the host country. 

CHAPTER 8 
Through an analysis of narratives co-constructed by the researcher herself and
a participant she calls Arwa, Chapter 8 proceeds with a longitudinal
exploration of a former refugee’s employable identity negotiation. More
specifically, capturing the trajectory from Arwa’s initial understanding of
employability as solely institutional capital to a view of employability as
the iterative performance of an identity that aligns with local interaction
norms and Discourses, Greenbank shows that besides emergent, dynamic and
co-constructed, the enactment of successful employable identities is
iteratively developed. From a methodological perspective, the chapter also
illustrates how an ethnographic approach to the study of narrative identities
was helpful for exploring this gradual shift in the ways the participant
conceptualised and narratively performed her employable identity over a span
of 20 months. 

CHAPTER 9
Chapter 9 draws on authentic interactions in in an eldercare facility between
a former refugee (Nina) in her job position as a carer and two residents. The
author explores the moment-by-moment navigation of Nina’s employable identity
by analysing how participants discursively negotiate self/other positionings,
issues of citizenship and ideological binaries (e.g. New Zealander vs Other),
capital-D-Discourses (e.g. of Refugeehood, Gratitude, Aging, Integration and
Assimilation), and standard language ideologies (e.g. about pronunciation).
Focusing on the relational work achieved in interactions, Greenbank
illustrates how Nina’s pragmatic skills assist her in fostering friendly
relationships with the elderly residents and overcoming power imbalances,
which in turn facilitates the (co-)construction of contextually appropriate
identities (including professional/employable identities). 

CHAPTERS 10 – 11 
In Chapters 10 and 11, the author summarises and discusses the findings of her
research  in relation to her initial research questions, as well as the
methodological, analytical, and societal contributions of the book. Of
particular interest here is the introduction of the concept ‘spectacle of
refugeehood’ though which the author discusses former refugees’ experienced
inequalities in relation to the social distribution of power and capital by
making a distinction between between refugees and consumers of Discourses and
(media) representations of refugees –or in Greenbank’s terms between “those
who have not experienced refugeehood, viewing it from the outside” and “the
spectacularised seen”, the “viewable and viewed object”, the “passive ‘seen’
for the viewing of the dominant ingroup” (p. 175). 

EVALUATION

Overall, this book provides an accessible and engaging overview of the ways in
which former refugees construct, navigate and make sense of their employable
identities through discourse, while effectively demonstrating the immense
complexity of the relationship between identity work, dominant discourses,
agency and structure, social and cultural capital. Assuming little to no prior
knowledge in this area, Greenbank provides a timely, thorough and
comprehensive account of the matrix of narrative, migration and employability
that is up to date with current sociolinguistic trends in theorising identity.
In addition, the author’s high reflexivity vis-à-vis her positionality in the
research context and throughout the micro-analysis and discussions of findings
is another strong attribute of this book in that it illustrates how the
researcher’s epistemological commitment to postmodern discourse analysis can
(and should) be achieved in practice for any ethnographically informed study.
On that note, this book is an excellent resource for scholars as well as
under/postgraduate students interested in discourse analytic perspectives on
narrative identities, (forced) migration and issues around
employment/employability. 

REFERENCES

Bamberg, M. (2011). Who Am I? Narration and Its Contribution to Self and
Identity. Theory & Psychology 21(1), 3–24.

Bamberg, M., & Georgakopoulou, A. (2008). Small stories as a new perspective
in narrative and identity analysis. Text & Talk 28(3), 377–96.

Bourdieu, P. (1986). The forms of capital. In J. G. Richardson (Ed.), Handbook
of theory and research for the sociology of education (pp. 241-258). New York:
Greenwood. 

Bucholtz, M. & Hall, K. (2005). Identity and interaction: a sociocultural
linguistic approach. Discourse Studies, 7(4–5), 585–614.  

Gee, J. P. (2015). Discourse, small d, big D. In The international
encyclopedia of language and social interaction (pp. 1-5).

Greenbank, E. (2020). Discursive navigation of employable identities in the
narratives of former refugees. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Co.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Christos Sagredos is a PhD student at the Centre for Language, Discourse and
Communication at King's College London. His research interests revolve around
narrative analysis and the matrix of language, gender and sexuality in digital
contexts.





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