Negotiating Identities, Language and Migration in Global London: Bridging Borders, Creating Spaces: 24 (Encounters)

This book explores the transnational practices of migrant groups in global London, illustrating the complex relations between migrants and the city in the context of globalisation. The chapters offer a starting point to examine migrants and the city from a comparative perspective by bringing together case studies of diverse migrant communities. They use ‘languaging’ as the central concept in the development of an interdisciplinary framework that creates an opportunity to ‘talk across disciplines’ to engage with key issues crisscrossing migration, cities and language. The book promotes ‘language-based’ or ‘language-sensitive’ research, drawing on the plurilingual repertoires and the language and translanguaging practices of migrant communities as the tool for data collection and ethnographic fieldwork. This approach generates fresh insights into the complex issues of diasporic identities, belonging and place-making, which have broad implications for migration studies in post-Brexit Britain and beyond.

Cangbai Wang is a Reader in Chinese Studies at the University of Westminster, London, UK. He is the author of Museum Representations of Chinese Diasporas: Migration Histories and the Cultural Heritage of the Homeland (2021, Routledge).

Terry Lamb is Professor of Languages and Interdisciplinary Pedagogy at the University of Westminster, London, UK. His most recent book is Insights into Language Education Policies (ed. 2020, Peter Lang, with M. Jiménez Raya and B. Manzano Vázquez).