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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 1259

Part of Session 158: Language biographies and migration experiences in urban contexts (Other abstracts in this session)

Telling lives: Personal and professional identities at the crossroads in a migration context

Authors: Lanza, Elizabeth; Golden, Anne
Submitted by: Lanza, Elizabeth (University of Oslo, Norway)

Migration has led to a global marketplace where language plays a significant role as symbolic capital. In this paper, we focus on linguistic identity construction occurring in the presentation and positioning of self in social experiences related to migration and labor among a group of highly skilled migrants, namely psychiatrists. As psychiatrists depend upon language for diagnosis and treatment, language plays a decisive role in their life in a new urban context. Narratives in language biographies provide insight into conceptions of the self and the other within a cultural context, as narrators affirm aspects of their own identity and of the identity of others via the presentation and evaluation of behaviors. In our paper, identities are conceived of as negotiated and emergent in interpersonal communication, with narratives as an excellent tool for investigating identity construction.

In our paper we address the ways in which psychiatrists with a migrant background construct their identities in interaction in narrating about their own linguistic and cultural background and that of Scandinavia, their new home. We examine the episodes they choose to narrate in relation to language problems, challenges and opportunities, and especially in regards to their professional life. We address their lexical choice in their narratives, especially the metaphorical expressions they use to give meanings to their life experiences. Metaphors are construed in line with Lakoff and Johnson’s Conceptual Metaphor Theory (1980, 1999) as a way of conceiving of one thing in terms of another, with the primary function being understanding. To use metaphor as a tool in the study of identity is promising as interlocutors’ choice of metaphors often reveals their attitudes and values (Cameron 2008).

Data for this presentation come from a database of focus group discussions consisting of two to three psychiatrists with a migrant background, along with one or two interviewers. Our analysis focuses mainly on the language biographies of two women from different parts of Africa both of whom have gone back to the country from which she originally emigrated before returning to Oslo, Norway, their current residence. Each woman presents her complex migration trajectory in her narratives, which provide occasions for reflection and evaluation of her personal life experiences and particularly of her professional life in a new country. Both language and culture are recurrent topics in these narratives. We examine how these migrant doctors negotiate agency in their identity construction through their use of metaphorical expressions in their narratives. Agency is “the socioculturally mediated capacity to act” (Ahearn 2001: 109) and speakers negotiate various degrees of agency along a cline of empowered to diminished agency (cf. De Fina 2003). Notions of power are inevitably drawn into discussions about identity among migrants and as Pavlenko and Blackledge (2004) note, the dimension of power and power relations should be given more attention in constructivist approaches to the study of identity.  Results will be discussed in light of the role that language plays as capital at the personal, professional and community level for this group of migrants.