Language and migration: the workshop presenters and organizers On December 11th, Ingrid Piller (Macquarie University) and Donna Butorac (Curtin University), organised a workshop on Language and Migration for the 2015…
Australia: The White Man's Land (Source: NLA) Australia has a proud national narrative of migration and multiculturalism. It also has an equally prevalent history of exclusionary and discriminatory migration policy.…
Who is a real refugee? The refugee crisis in Europe has caught a lot of global media attention. Countries at the entry points and their official actions, as well civil…
Condemned to consume My migration newsfeed in the past few weeks has been dominated by news about the Syrian refugee crisis and the various European and international responses. But there…
"The English" migrated to their "ancestral homeland" in the first few centuries of the Common Era (Source: Wikipedia) “Indigenous languages” and “immigrant languages” are much discussed in language policy research,…
Churchill Square Shopping Mall, Brighton, UK (Source: Wikipedia) In a shopping mall in the city of Brighton, UK, a tourist was arrested on terrorism charges last week for taking a…
Bilingualism has a gender A while ago, I reported on the findings of a US study that demonstrated that children of immigrants who achieve high-level bilingual proficiency in both English…
Meat workers, Fletcher Abattoir (Source: SheepCRC) One of the most famous research subjects to ever have participated in second language learning research is a man known in the literature as…
Website of the German Club Montevideo, founded in 1866 The current issue of Begegnung (“Encounter”), the magazine of German International Schools, has a feature about the German School in Montevideo,…
A broken arm in multicultural Queensland (Source:antilogic.co.za) I recently broke my arm by ignominiously falling in my own living room and landing on my elbow. The force of the impact…
Bilingual kids are more resilient October is Mental Health month here in New South Wales. The campaign runs under the slogan “Celebrate, connect, grow” and includes some fantastic tips how…
Postnatal depression (Source: rcpsych.ac.uk) Last week I was interviewed for a publication intended to showcase the achievements of women in research. When the interviewer, Meryl Hancock, asked me about the…
Pakistani flour mill workers recovering from a near-fatal lung infection due to poor occupational health and safety conditions, West Ham Hospital, 1960s (Source: Qureshi 2012, p. 7) To be transnational…
WSB TV report: Apple discriminates against Persian-speaking customers I’ve just found an e-mail from Apple in my spam folder with a ‘personal’ invitation to attend one of their new store…
How to make English-speaking friends is one of the perennial hot topics for new overseas students and new migrants. Advice on how to make “native” friends circulates like an underground…