Empowering a migrant identity: agency in narratives of a work experience in Norway

Authors

  • Elizabeth Lanza University of Oslo Author

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1558/sols.v6i2.285

Keywords:

migrant narratives, interview narratives, identity, agency, power, constructed dialogue

Abstract

Narratives of personal experience provide insight into how speakers utilize their linguistic resources to negotiate agency and power in their presentation and positioning of the self in social experiences. In this article, a focus is on identity construction in narratives about quests for employment in a migration context. The data consist of audio-recorded interactions in an interview situation in which a woman presents an autobiographical presentation of her migration to Norway and her search for work. The analysis first critically evaluates the use of interview data for investigating personal narratives and then focuses on a particular linguistic resource used for negotiating agency in discourse, the constructed dialogue. Furthermore, the co-construction of agency in interaction is also highlighted in the analysis. Narratives of the quest for employment are compelling sites for investigating agency and power, and for studying how the speaker orients herself to both the local interactional discourse at hand and the larger societal discourse. In conclusion, the implications of the results for the study of narrative and agency are discussed, particularly in light of immigrant discourse.

Author Biography

  • Elizabeth Lanza, University of Oslo
    Elizabeth Lanza is Professor of Linguistics at the Department of Linguistics and Scandinavian Studies, and Director of the Center for Multilingualism in Society across the Lifespan, University of Oslo, Norway. Her main field of research is multilingualism, and her work is sociolinguistically oriented. She has published on identity in migrant narratives, language socialization of bilingual children, language ideology, linguistic landscape and research methodology. She is on the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Bilingualism (Sage), Bilingualism: Language and Cognition (Cambridge University Press), Multilingual Margins (University of the Western Cape, South Africa) and IMPACT: Studies in Language and Society (Benjamins). She is the leader of the interdisciplinary research project Language, Culture, and Identity in Migrant Narratives, funded by the Research Council of Norway.

Published

2013-05-29

How to Cite

Lanza, E. (2013). Empowering a migrant identity: agency in narratives of a work experience in Norway. Sociolinguistic Studies, 6(2), 285-307. https://doi.org/10.1558/sols.v6i2.285