L2 learning and togetherness through infrastructures of globalization: exploring the role of socio-technological platforms in conditions of asylum seeking

Abstract

Taking the sociolinguistics of superdiversity as its point of departure, the contribution investigates the sociolinguistic regimes present in the spaces of an asylum seeking centre in Flanders, the Dutch speaking part of Belgium. It looks at the spaces present in the centre as loci where ‘the guests’ who inhabit them are confronted with normative regimes of sociolinguistic behaviour. This snippet of entrenched normativity emerging from the centre’s daily sociolinguistic life, though, results to be in sharp opposition with the use that is being made of these very same spaces by the ‘guests’ once they have access to the web. There, in fact, these spaces become loci in which the intangible infrastructures of globalization – like the web, YouTube and its videos – allow for the construction of convivial fleeting encounters based on the use of pop-culture as the binding element that transcends ethnic, sociolinguistic and religious differences. The contribution concludes with some considerations on the validity of the concept of integration for asylum seekers in mainstream society dealing with whether and how conviviality through the resources that socio-technological platforms have to offer could work as a possible alternative to state-imposed sociolinguistic and sociocultural regimes of integration.