Submitted by tomash on 16 May, 2014 - 09:53.
Sam Bennett
Becoming ‘British’: UK integration policy 2000-2010
When mass migration into the UK started after World War II, it was never envisaged that migrants would settle in the country and were therefore never seen as potential citizens. In reality though, this migration was often a permanent process and the UK recently has seen increasing levels of migration. This phenomenon, combined with the fact that integration is not just a moving across geographical borders but also across “conceptual borders of identity, belonging and entitlement” (Horner and Weber, 2011: 139-159), has forced the UK to decide how to integrate non-nationals. Despite outward rhetoric that integration is a two-way process in which migrants and pre-existing populations need to adapt to each other, a critical analysis of government discourse indicates that integration is primarily the responsibility of migrants.
In this paper, I critically analyse ten years of UK government discourse on integration. Employing the Discourse Historical Approach (Reisigl and Wodak, 2001), I show how integration policy became ever more proscriptive and prescriptive in this period. I argue that integration discourse in the UK cannot be understood fully without analysing other related policy discourses such as immigration, community cohesion and citizenship. To this end, the paper takes a synchronic and diachronic approach to the discourse and employs a discourse-conceptual analysis of integration and its sister concepts (Krzyżanowski, 2010). I indicate how integration is discursively constructed, who has agency/responsibility for integration and what processes are involved.
Bibliography:
Horner, Kristine and Jean-Jacques Weber. 2011. ‘Not playing the game: Shifting patterns in the discourse of integration’. Journal of Language and Politics, 10:2, pp. 139-159.
Krzyżanowski Michał. 2010. ‘Discourses and Concepts: Interfaces and Synergies between Begriffsgeschichte and the Discourse-Historical Approach in CDA.’ In: de Cillia, R.; Gruber, H.; Krzyżanowski, M.; Menz, F. (eds.) Politik-Identität/Discourse-Politics-Identity. Tübingen: Stauffenburg Verlag, 125-137.
Reisigl, Martin and Ruth Wodak. 2001. Discourse and Discrimination: Rhetorics of Racism and Anti Semitism. London: Routledge.
Janusz Kaźmierczak
Transatlantic pilgrimages: Travel to America in the writings of the Polish
participants of the University of Iowa International Writing Program
The International Writing Program was started at the University of Iowa by Paul Engle and Hualing Nieh in the 1960s. To date, over 1400 writers from all over the world visited the USA under its auspices. Some of the Program's participants published accounts of their stay in America on return to their home countries. Polish writers form one of the largest national groups among the all the participants of the Program; a number of them, on returning home, published accounts of their American experience. In this talk I discuss these accounts with the use of theoretical perspectives developed in pilgrimage studies, by such scholars as Victor Turner, Alan Morinis, and others. For the sake of comparison, in search of 'pilgrimages' going in the opposite direction, I also look at some of the accounts published by American writers visiting Poland.
