Tommaso M. Milani

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• PhD
• Professor (Full) at Pennsylvania State University

This article employs the notions of citizenship as status, habitus and acts as a framework through which to capture how sovereign power, disciplinary power and biopower intersect in the context of Sweden's current management of migration. Through an analysis of policy and media debates, the article first illustrates how citizenship as status and so...

In this article, we analyse Il Memoriale della Shoah, the memorial of the victims of the Shoah in Milan, which was inaugurated in 2013 and, in 2015, was turned into a night shelter for destitute migrants. To understand the rhetoric and politics of the Memorial, we bring together the notions of affective practices, découpages du temps (lit. slices o...

The last decades have seen the ideological transformations of graffiti and street art once constructed as criminal acts and associated with urban decay to being acceptable and profitable forms of commercial art. The spaces and places where these art forms are found have long transcended streets to art galleries and corporate advertising billboards...

This article was born out of a sense of discomfort with the privilege accorded to movement and mobility in critical scholarship in the social sciences and the humanities, including critical work on the relationship between language, sexuality and space. It is our contention in this article that stasis can be deployed as a radical practice of defian...

In this article, we reflect upon Wolfgang Klein’s provocative suggestion, in Writing or reading, but not both or: a proposal to reintroduce cuneiform writing using the hammer and chisel , that “every scientist” at universities or other research institutions “may and must publish exactly thirty pages a year.” In our view, Klein’s proposal to limit t...

This article presents an analysis of Rana Bishara’s installation Roadmap for Elimination , which is semiotically and materially interesting due to the skillful combination of language, maps of Palestine, and other key symbolic elements of Palestinian resistance such as cactus leaves. The article illustrates how, in the artwork, space and time fold...

This article contributes to ongoing discussions on education for migrants as a form of integration policy and practice. It does so by investigating whether the initiative Civic Orientation for Newly Arrived Migrants in Sweden constitutes an example of culturally relevant education. Drawing on a mixed-method and multi-level analysis, we hone in on "...

Recently, it has been suggested that the study of family multilingualism could benefit from serious engagement with current discussions about southern and decolonial theories. Against this backdrop, this article draws upon raciolinguistics to investigate whether, and if so how, racialized ideologies of language have been internalized by family memb...

This commentary advances the notions of passports and checkpoints as heuristics through which to theorise the external and internal push and pull of identity and desire within specific regimes of normativities and geopolitical imbalances. More specifically, passporting happens when normative regimes of representations issue what one could call disc...

This paper examines the relationship between language, (in)visibility, and (im)mobility in racialized spaces, focusing on Finnish, Somali, and Arabic speakers in Sweden. Using a theoretical framework based on hegemonic whiteness and intersectionality, the study explores how multilingual practices and subjectivities intersect with race, religion, ge...

The aim of this position paper is to engage with the focus of this yearbook on language and participation by revisiting some of the arguments advanced by the North American political philosopher Nancy Fraser, who theorized (1) the structural components that enable and/or constrain participation, and (2) the ways in which we can transform the status...

Israel has recently undertaken a branding strategy that has created a problematic image of the country as an LGBTQ haven in a supposedly sexually retrograde Middle East. Interestingly, while there is a large body of critical scholarship investigating the workings of Israeli homonationalism outwards, as a form of soft diplomacy, wooing international...

Sweden has long been described as a beacon of multiculturalism and generous access to citizenship, with integration policies that seek to offer free and equal access to the welfare state. In this article, we use the policy of Civic Orientation for Newly Arrived Migrants as a case with which to understand how migrants' inclusion is discursively arti...

This article contributes to ongoing discussions in the social sciences about how to interpret the incorporation of gender equality into integration policies-is it a form of state feminism or femonationalism? Drawing upon intersectionality, we analyse how gender equality is presented, discussed and negotiated in relation to ethnicity and nationality...

This special issue of Multilingual Margins on the theme of “Space/place matters” has its origin in a doctoral summer school organised in December 2016 by the Department of Linguistics and the Centre for Multilingualism and Diversities Research at the University of the Western Cape as part of a collaboration with the University of Oslo and three...

In Milani, T.M. & Salö, L. (ed.)

Milani & Salö (eds.). https://www.studentlitteratur.se/kurslitteratur/sprakvetenskap-och-sprakdidaktik/flersprakighet-sva-och-sfi/sveriges-nationella-minoritetssprak---nya-sprakpolitiska-perspektiv/ TOC: 1. Minoritetsspråkspolitik och sociolingvistiska verkligheter - Linus Salö (Stockholms universitet) och Tommaso M. Milani (Göteborgs universite...

The aim of this article is to use courses in civic orientation for newly arrived adult migrants in Sweden as the empirical entry point from which to investigate whether, and if so, how, civic values are tied to the Swedish nation through specific discourses and narratives. With the help of a framework that brings together theorisations of the discu...

The aim of this chapter is to investigate the emergence of the characterological figure of the sexually abnormal male asylum-seeker in Denmark. For this purpose, we examine compulsory courses in Danish sexual morals. With the help of a Foucauldian discourse ethnography, we take a multi-layered approach that investigates media debates about the intr...

This article addresses the role of translocal interconnectedness between offline and online spaces by examining the varied presence of language displays in such spaces. Quantitative findings on language presence in the offline public spaces of four Gothenburg neighbourhoods are contrasted with the online presence found in three Swedish search porta...

This article offers a critical semiotic analysis of the media discourses about Banksy’s Walled Off Hotel in Bethlehem. Unlike the existing burgeoning scholarship on this tourist initiative, the article focuses less on the space of the hotel itself and the street art therein than on their mediatization. With the help of the notion of mediatization,...

This article examines how names and language choices are used to position mosques vis-à-vis other mosques and in relation to the majority population. Using Anthias’ positioning theory, Giraut and Houssay-Holzschuch’s theoretical framework for naming and naming processes, and the concept of spatial scaling, we analyze the names and language choices...

Denna artikel behandlar finskans och somaliskans roll i den göteborgska språk- hierarkin. Analysen bygger främst på intervjuer med talare av de två språken, kompletterat med statistik och en fotodokumentation av språkens synlighet i fyra Göteborgsområden. Finskan var länge det största minoritetsspråket i Göteborg, men det har liten synlighet och ha...

This article introduces the key issues and themes that the articles in the Special Issue aim to apply and develop in greater detail. First, we argue that the field of collective remembering can be conceived as a site of active contestation, rather than simply a means of communicating a historic past or our deontic position in relation to these past...

This article examines how names and language choices are used to position mosques vis-à-vis other mosques and in relation to the majority population. Using Anthias’ positioning theory, Giraut and Houssay-Holzschuch’s theoretical framework for naming and naming processes, and the concept of spatial scaling, we analyze the names and language choices...

Previous studies of translanguaging in educational contexts indicate that translanguaging practices have the potential to generate a decolonial, emancipatory process for language-minoritized students. However, these insights are mainly based on studies of minoritized learners of English as a second language. Drawing on a one-year ethnographic study...

Civic orientation has become one of the dominant immigrant integration policies in western Europe, with the aim of transmitting knowledge, norms, and values, thereby furthering “integration” into the new country. However, there is a not much research regarding how the educational content is communicated and negotiated in civic orientation courses i...

In the current climate of extreme nationalism and fear-mongering, a new politics for a socially just world is needed more than ever. Featuring internationally-renowned scholars, Applied Linguistics and Politics explores how innovative theories, methodologies and pedagogies in applied linguistics can address the political challenges and issues arisi...

While anger is often treated as a ‘dirty’ feeling or a pathology, queer anger holds the potential for a renewed politics of (self-)discomfort. I draw upon queer theory in order to strategically highlight that anger is what constitutes queer both as a homophobic slur and as a reclaimed label of self-identification. Put differently, it is impossible...

In this paper we investigate Nya Hovås, a completely new neighbourhood in Gothenburg, where the construction has been accompanied by an extensive and expensive advertising campaign. For this purpose, we draw upon a multi-pronged theoretical framework that brings together Lefebvre’s (1991) notions of conceived, perceived and lived space, with curre...

This article concerns knowledge negotiations as an aspect of interactional power in three-way interaction between Arabic-speaking women, Swedish-speaking midwives and interpreters in Swedish antenatal care. The notion of epistemic stance is used to investigate how all three participants negotiate knowledge, and how this affects the ongoing consulta...

This introductory article lays some theoretical ground that stimulated this special issue: first, the argument that affect is not “in”, or indeed “outside of” the individual or the social, but relates to the circulation of emotion between different sites, objects or bodies; and, second, that how this circulation of emotion works, in and through dis...

The aim of this article is to analyze the reactions of some mainstream Israeli politicians to a celebrity marriage between Tzahi Halevi, a Jewish Israeli actor, and Lucy Aharish, a Palestinian Israeli TV personality. Drawing upon the notion of stance, we unveil the affective trouble generated by this heterosexual union vis-à-vis the Israeli nationa...

Full text click here https://benjamins.com/catalog/lcs.19014.mil/fulltext/lcs.19014.mil.pdf The focus of this article is on the mundane nastiness of language. Drawing on Arendt’s (1963) banality of evil and Briggs’s (2005) notion of infectious communicability, the article highlights the moral dimensions of political and media discourses that sprea...

The notion of language ideology has become a key concept in critical research about language and society. While it is axiomatic for linguists that “all languages are equal” in terms of their meaning‐making potential and their worth as objects of academic inquiry, a quick look at the “real world” will reveal a very different picture—one in which lin...

Denna artikel behandlar finskans och somaliskans roll i den göteborgska språkhierarkin. Finskan var länge det största minoritetsspråket i Göteborg, men det har liten synlighet och hade länge relativt låg status. Somaliskan som är ett nyare minoritetsspråk i Göteborg tycks ha låg social status men präglas av en större medial och visuell synlighet. I...

In this paper we investigate Nya Hovås, a completely new neighbourhood in Gothenburg, where the construction has been accompanied by an extensive and expensive advertising campaign. For this purpose, we draw upon a multi-pronged theoretical framework that brings together Lefebvre's notions of conceived, perceived and lived space, with current socio...

Drawing upon queer theory and Said’s notion of the counterpoint, the article analyses the launch episode of a reality television series produced by the South African NGO loveLife, which focused on a young, self-identified lesbian woman in Soweto. We offer a counter example to discourses of the powerless victimhood of Black, gender and sexually non-...

The threatening young man who speaks Rinkeby Swedish has become a culturally recognizable ‘figure of personhood’ (Agha, 2007) of linguistic and ethnic otherness in Sweden. Drawing upon Billig's theory of humour, we illustrate how this characterological persona is not monolithic; nor does it remain uncontested but is constantly being (re)negotiated...

The aim of this paper is to offer a theoretical and empirical contribution to current sociolinguistic discussions about "existential threats", and their discursive construction in everyday life. Theoretically, the paper argues for the importance of (re-)purposing some of the ideas of Hannah Arendt, a key political scientist, who, however, has remai...

This special issue was born out of a conversation initiated at a panel organized by two of us at the ninth biannual meeting of the International Gender and Language Association (IGALA), held at City University of Hong Kong in May 2016. The principal goal of the panel was to stimulate an academic discussion on the role of normativity and antinormati...

Israel has recently succeeded in presenting itself as an attractive haven for LGBT constituencies. In this article, we investigate how this affective traction operates in practice, along with the ambiguous entanglement of normativity and antinormativity as expressed in the agency of some gay Palestinian Israelis vis-à-vis the Israeli homonationalis...

The main argument of this article is that Israel seeks to govern its expat citizens not so much through the mobilisation of their ‘rational capacities to evaluate truth claims but through affects’ (Isin, 2004:225). Such viscerality of Israeli nationalism can be seen in the ways in which speci?c emotions – mourning, shame, guilt and fear of loss – a...

This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles publishing online in advance of print publication. At this time, we cannot add information about unpublished articles in this handbook, however the table of contents will continue to grow as additional articles pass through the review process and are added to the site. Please note...

In this article we investigate the spatial politics of sexuality in Israel by focusing on two different but related data sets: (1) the official video for Tel Aviv Pride 2013 produced by the Mizrahi Jewish music group Arisa; and (2) a protest against the Occupation of Palestine performed at Tel Aviv Pride in 2017. We analyze these examples with the...

This special issue of Multilingual Margins on the theme of “Space/place matters” has its origin in a doctoral summer school organised in December 2016 by the Department of Linguistics and the Centre for Multilingualism and Diversities Research at the University of the Western Cape as part of a collaboration with the University of Oslo and three oth...

This article engages with the semantic ambiguity of the notion of the ‘margins’,together with its heuristic potential. It begins by discussing how the margins can bestrategically employed as unsettling vantage points through which to re-read existingsociolinguistic research on ‘non-normative’ linguistic practices in Sweden. Moreover,on the basis of...

South Africa (SA) has been undergoing a process of transformation since the end of White minority rule (apartheid) in 1994. During this period, various employment and lifestyle opportunities have given rise to a growing Black middle class (BMC). Against this backdrop, the article draws upon an intersectional approach to corpus-assisted discourse st...

This chapter investigates a potential shift in representational regimes and the consumerist exploitation of the rectum, a male body part often considered taboo. The analysis is based on a set of advertising texts that promote sex toys that are said to improve the health of the male prostate, as well as produce sexual enjoyment. The chapter also see...

This Themed Section assembles sexuality/queer, geographical and socio-linguistic scholarship to pursue – what we, a collaborating geographer and semiotician, frame as – critical geographical queer semiotics. We regard this as an on-going episteme-techne research frontier at the crossroads of language-focused geographical inquiry (see, e.g., Brown,...

The aim of this article is to unveil how cisnormativity is institutionalised in a Brazilian gender clinic, creating an emotionally charged local regime of doctor/ patient interactions. Our interest is not only in illustrating how the clinic’s institutionalised normatitivies about transbodies are the result of the crystallisation of particular trans...

In this paper, we examine representations of masculinity in the English-language South African print media. Using both quantitative and qualitative techniques to interrogate a large corpus (18 million words) of English-language newspaper articles on masculinity that appeared in South Africa between 2008 and 2014, we investigate the ways in which di...

This volume offers fresh, cutting-edge perspectives on issues of language and citizenship by casting a critical light on a broad spectrum of geo-political contexts – Flanders, Luxembourg, Singapore, South Africa, the UK - and discourse data – policy documents, newspaper articles, ethnographic notes and interviews, skits, bodies in protests. The mai...

This volume offers fresh, cutting-edge perspectives on issues of language and citizenship by casting a critical light on a broad spectrum of geo-political contexts – Flanders, Luxembourg, Singapore, South Africa, the UK - and discourse data – policy documents, newspaper articles, ethnographic notes and interviews, skits, bodies in protests. The mai...

This article frames the Special Issue on ‘Discourse, Gender and Sexuality from the Global South’. It does so by providing an overview of the notion of the South in the social sciences and the humanities. We engage, in particular, with current theoretical discussions around a set of concepts and approaches that have been labelled ‘southern theories’...

The militarized response to the rhino poaching crisis in southern Africa exposes poachers to "fatal couplings of power and difference" (Gilmore 2002). While the racialized dimensions of this phenomenon are currently the subject of robust debate, this paper focuses on how race, gender, and sexuality are co-constructed in the anti-poaching discourse....

The aim of this paper is to open a discussion about multimodal work in the area of gender, language and discourse, and propose the kinds of multimodal approaches that are most appropriate for this task. Multimodality, we claim, is a rather fragmented and unconsolidated field where many of the tools and concepts applied by different researchers are...

This article explores the “performativity of the body” (Butler, 2011) using ‘anarchic’ and ‘anti-authoritarian’ protests in Greece as empirical starting points. We analyze the ways in which bodies speak politically by producing spatial turbulence in interaction with other bodies, and the materiality of urban environments. In doing so, we seek to co...

This chapter investigates the evolving representation of gay and lesbian identities in four non-fiction books: Male Homosexuality (1992), Defiant Desire (1994), Tommy Boys (2005) and Performing Queer (2005). This study tracks how the representations of gay and lesbian identities change as political and public discourses about homosexual issues prog...

This special issue on the theme of language, gender and sexuality in South Africa does not emerge in an academic vacuum. It is the continuation of a long-standing academic dialogue which has played out, inter alia, in two issues of the journal Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies dedicated to "gender and language" (de Kadt 2002...

The aim of this article is to investigate T-shirts as semiotic tools of the politics of visibility, showing which role these sartorial artefacts may play in competing struggles for recognition in which gender and sexuality intersect with other axes of social categorisations. Drawing on a queer multimodal approach, the article offers an analysis of...

The main argument advanced in this article that frames this special issue is that citizenship is not just a highly polysemic word employed by the media and other political institutions; it is also a set of norms and (linguistic) behaviours that individuals are socialised into, as well as a series of practices that social actors perform through an a...

This article explores an incident that took place in the context of Joburg Pride 2012, where the activist group One in Nine Campaign attempted to temporarily stop the Pride parade through means of a die-in protest, resulting in resistance and violence on the part of the Pride participants. The article argues that Pride and the One in Nine protest a...

This article showcases an exploratory study of the website of a Cape Town-based company specialising in arranging same-sex weddings. Informed by queer theory, the article deconstructs the discursive strategies - both linguistic and visual - through which same-sex weddings, and the affects attached to them, are represented on the website. Essentiall...

Introduction At first glance, Sweden and South Africa might seem to share very few traits. We could go as far as to suggest that they are opposite poles in a geographical, historical and sociopolitical sense, with Sweden as an ‘old’ democratic welfare state in the very north of the world at one end of the continuum, and South Africa at the other as...

This article explores how the study of the linguistic landscape (LL), which is to say the texts visible in public space, allows for a rich and complex understanding of place. More specifically, the article studies the Bosman neighbourhood in Pretoria through a geosemiotic lens. Geosemiotics situates signs in the material world, approaching them as...

A large body of scholarship across several disciplines has convincingly illustrated how the gender binary – the distinction between males and females as complementary and desirable opposites – is constantly reproduced through everyday, apparently ‘banal’, practices. Such process is not innocuous but is part and parcel of hegemonic ideological forma...

This article investigates a corpus of herbalist pamphlets – fairly common, everyday texts found in (South) African cities – which promote the services of traditional healers and promise solutions to a plethora of ailments and life problems. The article's multi-pronged approach brings feminist critical discourse analysis (FCDA), corpus linguistics (...

The main argument of this article is that Linguistic Landscape (LL) scholarship has largely ignored – erased even – gender and sexuality, two important axes of power along which public spaces are structured, understood, negotiated and contested. In order to partly redress this academic oversight, this article investigates a small data set of banal...

Applied Linguistics Review (ALR) is a peer-reviewed journal that serves as a testing ground for the articulation of original ideas and approaches in the study of real-world issues in which language plays a crucial role, by bringing together critical reflections of current debates and new theoretical and empirical research. The issues dealt with in...

The aim of this chapter is to offer an outline of the origins and developments of "queer" as a theoretical construct in the study of the complex intersections between language, gender, and sexuality, focusing in particular on the topic of masculinities. Such a queer approach to masculinities will be illustrated not only through an overview of the e...