Tony Capstick

• Lecturer at University of Reading

This paper is based on a four-year ethnographic study of multilingualism in transnational Mirpuri families in Azad Kashmir (Pakistan) and Lancashire (United Kingdom). Data were collected in a range of physical settings in Pakistan and the UK as well as social spaces online. Migrants’ literacy practices are often related to the standard language var...

Much has been written about the prevalence and politicization of public discourses on migration. Less prevalent are analyses of the role of literacy mediators in making texts, and the discourses they invoke, accessible to displaced people. With this in mind, this paper takes a discourse-ethnographic approach to the analysis of discourses of displac...

This paper investigates the linguistic and semiotic resources that NGO coaches draw on to create safe spaces in their English language lessons for psycho-social support in refugee settings. We do so by applying the rapidly developing concept of translanguaging, using data from a multi-site linguistic ethnography study in an NGO in the Kurdistan reg...

As the threat of the Covid-19 pandemic intensified, displaced learners faced increasing challenges to accessing the learning online that they were attending offline before the start of the pandemic. It is these learners’ and their teachers’ dialogic relations which are at the core of the Covid-19, migration and multilingualism (CV19MM) project, run...

It is now twenty years since the term ‘social remittances’ was taken up to capture the notion that migration involves the circulation of ideas, practices, identities, and social capital between destination and origin countries, in addition to the more tangible circulation of money. In a similar vein, a social theory of literacy sees practices not a...

The framework for this paper takes its central orientation from the New Literacy Studies (NLS) body of research which focuses on the analysis of texts and practices rather than the skills-oriented perspective of large-scale quantitative studies. In this paper, these are the texts of everyday life and the literacy practices of adult migrants before...

The aim of this special issue is to question and, in our exploration, unsettle the rising hegemony of skills-oriented approaches and ideologies driven by the power of international literacy surveys such as the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) in the field of adult education. This special issue is the culminat...

This paper explores language learning for displaced people in the countries bordering Syria and attempts to establish a link between the concept of translanguaging and the concept of safe spaces used by NGOs. The paper uses the term ‘displaced people’ as it is this feature of being dis -placed that the paper seeks to explore through the lens of sup...

In this chapter, I aim to link the discussion about access to and the availability of literacy in Mirpur and Hillington to the way that the participants in this study accessed linguistic resources online. As discussed earlier, in the discourse of powerful Western governments, monolingualism is often taken to be the natural state of human life (Gal...

I draw on two overarching theoretical traditions in this research: the social practices approach to the study of literacy, generally referred to under the label New Literacy Studies (NLS), and the discourse historical approach (DHA) in Critical Discourse Studies (CDS). Further details related to these theoretical foundations can be found at the beg...

This article explores the literacy practices of a Mirpuri family and the ways family members challenge the bureaucratic discourses of migration as part of the literacy mediation they seek when applying for a visa. The central issue is to identify the institutional literacy practices in the visa application process by combining aspects of the Discou...

This chapter examines the availability of written material and the opportunities that prospective migrants in Mirpur have for participating in reading and writing activities which, following work by Judith Kalman (2005), I will characterise as access to literacy. Drawing from work by Urs Fuhrer (1996), Kalman has argued that using social practices...

The previous chapter explored vernacular writing by looking at what people said on Facebook and the linguistic resources they used to say it. This chapter explores vernacular writing by looking at what Usman said in interviews about his choice of the written and spoken forms of the linguistic resources discussed in the previous chapter and how he d...

In this chapter I look at three individual family members and how they use language and literacy in their everyday lives before focusing on the literacies that have been used in the family’s migrations. I begin with a section introducing the concepts of literacy mediation and cultural brokerage. Next, interpretation of the data begins with a biogra...

This chapter explores the broader sociopolitical and historical contexts within which the migration literacies of later chapters are embedded. Recent curbs on immigration to the UK are discussed in order to demonstrate how the UK, like other countries in the West, is implementing a tightening of the relationship between language, immigration, citiz...

This book explores the language and literacy practices which sustain transnational migration across generations and across traditional boundaries such as school and home. The author has conducted extensive fieldwork in Pakistan and the UK to study migration between the two countries. Individuals’ access to the dominant literacies of migration are c...

My aim throughout this book has been to explore the relationship between literacy, language and migration, as the critical project I embarked on was to identify how power relations in Pakistan and the UK both provide and prevent access to the literacies of migration. To address this problem, I examined dominant multilingual literacies and migrants’...

This book is the result of work I have carried out as a researcher, teacher trainer and language adviser in Pakistan and the UK. It emerged from several research projects which I was involved in from 2008 to 2013. Initially, I explored language and literacy in the lives of a Pakistani family in north Manchester, UK. Taking the opportunity to extend...

Ethnography and textual analysis are combined in the approach I take here in exploring in more depth the interrelationship between language and social life. Firstly, it is important to emphasise that I take an ethnographic perspective in my work, following Papen (2005), as this study is not a full ethnography of literacy but rather an exploration o...

This is a follow-up to an earlier report, "Teaching and Learning in Pakistan: The Role of Language in Education" (Coleman 2010). The earlier document was subjected to public scrutiny in Pakistan through a series of policy dialogues, conference presentations, ministerial level discussions and radio phone-in programmes. This report describes the cons...