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Papers by Shirley Yeung
In this introduction, we outline the most relevant concepts for this special issue on integration... more In this introduction, we outline the most relevant concepts for this special issue on integration and the politics of difference. This introduction characterizes " integration " as a dominant policy orientation and discursive regime concerned primarily with understandings of language, communication, and skill which constitute a (trans)national politics of difference. In various sites and national contexts of the global north, migrant " integration " policies render difference and mobility the site of both discursive elaboration and management. This introduction highlights the salience of critical ethnographic analyses for understanding " integration " beyond policy realms, arguing for attention to situated practices, emergent social categories and types, political-economic stakes, logics of linguistic (dis)engagement, and the reproduction of mono-and multilingual social orders. In particular, we propose to untangle this complex by describing three central processes that run through all of the contributions and which, we suggest, are indispensable for the analysis of current and emergent regimes of integration: processes of categorization, of selection, and of activation.
Multilingua, 2016
This article examines two social categories brought into being by recent migration policies in Sw... more This article examines two social categories brought into being by recent migration policies in Switzerland: the expatriate (or "expat") and the migrant. Treating these categories as relationally constituted, the article explores how this distinction was constructed and managed in response to processes of European harmonization in the 1990s, employing shifting discourses of difference: while Switzerland's Three Circle immigration model differentiated immigrants along lines of "cultural distance" vis-à-vis Switzerland, Swiss participation in the Agreement on the Free Movement of Persons contrasted these groups according to a new discourse of "skills." Focusing on this discursive transition, the article argues that the expatriate-migrant distinction constructs differently valued immigrants whose contrasting relationship to the nation and "integration" is enacted in legal and social expectations surrounding language use. The article argues for critical attention to how "brain gain" and skills discourses enable, and extend border-maintaining discourses of "culture."
Ordinary Ethics: Anthropology, Language, and Action, 2010
Beyond Yellow English: Toward a Linguistic Anthropology of Asian Pacific America, 2009
Book Reviews by Shirley Yeung
Blog entry by Shirley Yeung
Blog entry for Language on the Move (www.languageonthemove.com) on the forthcoming special issue ... more Blog entry for Language on the Move (www.languageonthemove.com) on the forthcoming special issue "Discourses of Integration: Language, Skills, and the Politics of Difference" to appear in Multilingua, 2016.
In this introduction, we outline the most relevant concepts for this special issue on integration... more In this introduction, we outline the most relevant concepts for this special issue on integration and the politics of difference. This introduction characterizes " integration " as a dominant policy orientation and discursive regime concerned primarily with understandings of language, communication, and skill which constitute a (trans)national politics of difference. In various sites and national contexts of the global north, migrant " integration " policies render difference and mobility the site of both discursive elaboration and management. This introduction highlights the salience of critical ethnographic analyses for understanding " integration " beyond policy realms, arguing for attention to situated practices, emergent social categories and types, political-economic stakes, logics of linguistic (dis)engagement, and the reproduction of mono-and multilingual social orders. In particular, we propose to untangle this complex by describing three central processes that run through all of the contributions and which, we suggest, are indispensable for the analysis of current and emergent regimes of integration: processes of categorization, of selection, and of activation.
Multilingua, 2016
This article examines two social categories brought into being by recent migration policies in Sw... more This article examines two social categories brought into being by recent migration policies in Switzerland: the expatriate (or "expat") and the migrant. Treating these categories as relationally constituted, the article explores how this distinction was constructed and managed in response to processes of European harmonization in the 1990s, employing shifting discourses of difference: while Switzerland's Three Circle immigration model differentiated immigrants along lines of "cultural distance" vis-à-vis Switzerland, Swiss participation in the Agreement on the Free Movement of Persons contrasted these groups according to a new discourse of "skills." Focusing on this discursive transition, the article argues that the expatriate-migrant distinction constructs differently valued immigrants whose contrasting relationship to the nation and "integration" is enacted in legal and social expectations surrounding language use. The article argues for critical attention to how "brain gain" and skills discourses enable, and extend border-maintaining discourses of "culture."
Ordinary Ethics: Anthropology, Language, and Action, 2010
Beyond Yellow English: Toward a Linguistic Anthropology of Asian Pacific America, 2009
Blog entry for Language on the Move (www.languageonthemove.com) on the forthcoming special issue ... more Blog entry for Language on the Move (www.languageonthemove.com) on the forthcoming special issue "Discourses of Integration: Language, Skills, and the Politics of Difference" to appear in Multilingua, 2016.