Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-jkksz Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-23T10:35:09.194Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Managing narratives, managing identities: Language and credibility in legal consultations with asylum seekers

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 March 2021

Marie Jacobs Open the ORCID record for Marie Jacobs [Opens in a new window]  and
Katrijn Maryns
Marie Jacobs*
Affiliation:
Ghent University, Belgium
Katrijn Maryns
Affiliation:
Ghent University, Belgium
*
Address for correspondence: Marie Jacobs Ghent University Department of Translation Interpreting and Communication Groot Brittannielaan 45, 9000Gent, Belgium[email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This study examines interactional management practices and narrative co-construction in lawyer-asylum seeker consultations in Flanders, Belgium. Drawing upon linguistic-ethnographic fieldwork, it presents a case study of a consultation between an Afghan applicant for international protection, his adviser, and his lawyer. The purpose of the consultation is to prepare the applicant for testifying at the upcoming asylum hearing. Data analysis focuses on (i) the reorientation of the asylum narrative from an authentic-experiential towards a more objectified formal-institutional account; (ii) the participants’ positioning work that indexes this reorientation process; and (iii) their fluctuating alignment of local-interactional and translocal-gatekeeping perspectives. In the discussion, we analyse the consultation in terms of competing legal and experiential voices and views on participant roles/responsibilities. We reflect on how this ambiguity of roles and ideologies relates to the constructed character of credibility, which reveals the importance of adequate legal assistance in this linguistically challenging context. (Legal consultations, asylum procedure, linguistic ethnography, narrative performance, credibility assessment)*

Type
Article
Information
Language in Society , Volume 51 , Issue 3 , June 2022 , pp. 375 - 402
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

We would like to thank our research participants for their cooperation. We are also grateful to Dr. Rebecca Tipton for her insightful feedback on an earlier version of this article. Finally, we would like to acknowledge the reviewers for their valuable input.

References

REFERENCES

Ardalan, Sabrineh (2014). Access to justice for asylum seekers: Developing an effective model of holistic asylum representation. University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform 48:1001–1038.Google Scholar
Arguedas, Cristina (1996). Duties of a criminal defense lawyer. Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review 30:7–12.Google Scholar
Asylum Information Database (2019). Comparative reports. Online: www.asylumineurope.org/comparator/asylum-procedure.Google Scholar
Barkai, John, & Fine, Virginia (1982). Empathy training for lawyers and law students. Southwestern University Law Review 13:505–30.Google Scholar
Barsky, Robert (1994). Constructing a productive other: Discourse theory and the convention refugee hearing. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blommaert, Jan (2010). The sociolinguistics of globalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blommaert, Jan; Collins, James; & Slembrouck, Stef (2005). Spaces of multilingualism. Language & Communication 25(3):197–216.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Boccaccini, Marcus (2002). What do we really know about witness preparation? Behavioral Sciences & The Law 20(1–2):161–89.10.1002/bsl.472CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bogoch, Bryna (1994). Power, distance and solidarity: Models of professional-client interaction in an Israeli legal aid setting. Discourse & Society 5(1):65–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bohmer, Carol, & Shuman, Amy (2007). Rejecting refugees: Political asylum in the 21st century. London: Routledge.10.4324/9780203937228CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cicourel, Aaron (2007). A personal, retrospective view of ecological validity. Text & Talk 27(5–6):735–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cochran, Robert; DiPippa, John; & Peters, Martha (2011). The counselor-at-law: A collaborative approach to client interviewing and counseling. New York: LexisNexis.Google Scholar
Copland, Fiona, & Creese, Angela (2015). Linguistic ethnography: Collecting, analysing and presenting data. London: SAGE.10.4135/9781473910607CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cunningham, Clark (1991). Lawyer as translator representation as text: Towards an ethnography of legal discourse. Cornell Law Review 77:1298–1387.Google Scholar
Eades, Diana (2010). Sociolinguistics and the legal process. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.10.21832/9781847692559CrossRefGoogle Scholar
EU Agency for Fundamental Rights (2014). Handbook on European law relating to asylum, borders and immigration. Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union.Google Scholar
European Commission (2019). Common European Asylum System. Online: https://ec.europa.eu/home-affairs/what-we-do/policies/asylum_en.Google Scholar
European Parliament & Council of the EU (2013). Directive 2013/32/EU on common procedures for granting and withdrawing international protection. Official Journal of the European Union L180/6:62.Google Scholar
Felstiner, William, & Sarat, Austin (1992). Enactments of power: Negotiating reality and responsibility in lawyer-client interactions. Cornell Law Review 77:1447–98.Google Scholar
Firth, Alan (1996). The discursive accomplishment of normality: On ‘lingua franca’ English and conversation analysis. Journal of Pragmatics 26(2):237–59.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goffman, Erving (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. New York: Anchor.Google Scholar
Goffman, Erving (1981). Forms of talk. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
Habermas, Jurgen (1996). Between facts and norms. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hall, Maggie, & Rossmanith, Kate (2016). Imposed stories: Prisoner self-narratives in the criminal justice system in New South Wales, Australia. International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy 5(1):38–51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hambly, Jessica (2019). Interactions and identities in UK asylum appeals: Lawyers and law in a quasi-legal setting. In Gill, Nick & Good, Anthony (eds.), Asylum determination in Europe, 195–218. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hayes, David, & Houston, Stan (2006). ‘Lifeworld’, ‘system’ and family group conferences: Habermas's contribution to discourse in child protection. British Journal of Social Work 37:987–1006.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Heydon, Georgina, & Lai, Miranda (2013). Police interviews mediated by interpreters: An exercise in diminishment? Investigative Interviewing: Research and Practice 5(2):82–98.Google Scholar
Inghilleri, Moira, & Maryns, Katrijn (2019). Asylum. In Baker, Mona & Saldanha, Gabriela (eds.), Routledge encyclopedia of translation studies, 22–27. London: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jakobson, Roman (1959). On linguistic aspects of translation. In Brower, Reuben A. (ed.), On translation, 232–39. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Johnson, Kevin (1999). Lawyering for a social change: What's a lawyer to do? Michigan Journal of Race & Law 5:201–28.Google Scholar
Kagan, Michael (2010). Refugee credibility assessment and the religious imposter problem: A case study of Eritrean pentecostal claims in Egypt. Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law 43(5):1179–1234.Google Scholar
Kamler, Barbara, & Maclean, Rod (1996). You can't just go to court and move your body: First-year students learn to write and speak the law. Law Text Culture 3:176–209.Google Scholar
Katzmann, Robert (2008). The legal profession and the unmet needs of the immigrant poor. Georgetown Journal of Legal Ethics 21:3–30.Google Scholar
Marcus, George, & Fischer, Michael (1999). Anthropology as cultural critique: An experimental moment in the human sciences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Maryns, Katrijn (2006). The asylum speaker: Language in the Belgian asylum procedure. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Maryns, Katrijn (2013). Theatricks in the courtroom: The intertextual construction of legal cases. In Heffer, Chris, Rock, Frances, & Conley, John (eds.), Legal-lay communication: Textual travel in the law, 107–26. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McKinnon, Sara (2009). Citizenship and the performance of credibility: Audiencing gender-based asylum seekers in U.S. immigration courts. Text and Performance Quarterly 29:205–21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mishler, Elliot (1984). The discourse of medicine: Dialectics of medical interviews. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.Google Scholar
Okrainec, Karen; Miller, Mark; Holcroft, Christina; Boivin, Jean-François; & Greenaway, Christina (2014). Assessing the need for a medical interpreter: Are all questions created equal? Journal of Immigrant and Minority Health 16(4):756–60.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Orde van de, Vlaamse Balies (2019). Codex Deontologie voor Advocaten. Online: https://www.advocaat.be/DipladWebsite/media/DipladMediaLibrary/Documenten/Deontologie/Codex-Deontologie-versie-update-tot-BS-15-01-2019.pdf.Google Scholar
Pöllabauer, Sonja (2004). Interpreting in asylum hearings: Issues of role, responsibility and power. Interpreting 6(2):143–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rampton, Ben; Tusting, Karin; Maybin, Janet; Barwell, Richard; Creese, Angela; & Vally, Lytra (2004). UK linguistic ethnography: A discussion paper. Online: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B5slLqugzxc-cmJ4TmlTblhsazA/view.Google Scholar
Reynolds, Judith (2020). Investigating the language-culture nexus in refugee legal advice meetings. Multilingua 39(4):395–429.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Smith-Khan, Laura (2017). Negotiating narratives, accessing asylum: Evaluating language policy as multi-level practice, beliefs and management. Multilingua 36(1):31–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Smith-Khan, Laura (2020a) Why refugee visa credibility assessments lack credibility: a critical discourse analysis. Griffith Law Review 28(4):406–30. Online: https://doi.org/10.1080/10383441.2019.1748804.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Smith-Khan, Laura (2020b). Migration practitioners’ roles in communicating credible refugee claims. Alternative Law Journal 45(2). Online: https://doi.org/10.1177%2F1037969X19884205.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Suzuki, Carol (2006). Unpacking pandora's box: Innovative techniques for effectively counseling asylum applicants suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. Hastings Race and Poverty Law Journal 4:235–80.Google Scholar
Tipton, Rebecca (2008). Reflexivity and the social construction of identity in interpreter-mediated asylum interviews. The Translator 14(1):1–19.10.1080/13556509.2008.10799247CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Translators without Borders (2017). Language factsheet. Online: https://translatorswithoutborders.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Farsi-and-Dari-Factsheet-English.pdf.Google Scholar
Trinch, Shonna (2001). The advocate as gatekeeper: The limits of politeness in protective order interviews with Latina survivors of domestic abuse. Journal of Sociolinguistics 5:475–506.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tusting, Karen (2019). The Routledge handbook of linguistic ethnography. Abingdon: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (1998). Note on burden and standard of proof in refugee claims. Geneva: United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.Google Scholar
United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (2015). UNHCR observations on the use of age assessments in the identification of separated or unaccompanied children seeking asylum. Geneva: United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.Google Scholar
United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (2016). UNHCR global trends 2015. Geneva: United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.Google Scholar
Vogl, Anthea (2013). Telling stories from start to finish: Exploring the demand for narrative in refugee testimony. Griffith Law Review 22(1):63–86.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Westaby, Chalen, & Jones, Emma (2018). Empathy: An essential element of legal practice or ‘never the twain shall meet’? International Journal of the Legal Profession 25(1):107–24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zagor, Matthew (2014). Recognition and narrative identities: Is refugee law redeemable? In Jenkins, Fiona, Nolan, Mark, & Rubenstein, Kim (eds.), Allegiance and identity in a globalised world, 311–53. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zwier, Paul, & Hamric, Ann (1996). The ethics of care and reimagining the lawyer/client relationship. Journal of Contemporary Law 22:383–434.Google Scholar