Marco Jacquemet, University of San Francisco, presents "The Structuration of Asylum Narratives".
This presentation explores how asylum seekers are socialized into performing narratives of personal trauma by two opposing, and yet complementary, forces: the refugee support community (certified refugees, immigration lawyers, and human rights activists) and the asylum courts. In developing their asylum cases, applicants learn how to tell their personal stories from two sources of structuration: 1) prior “successful” refugee narratives as told to them by past applicants who have been recognized as legitimate refugees, and 2) the expectations of what constitutes a “credible narrative” by the judicial system as explained by asylum lawyers and hinted by judges. To document this process, the talk will analyze the communicative development of the joint narrative of two Kurdish brothers in Italy, including their initial asylum application (filed with the help of other Kurdish refugees), their first interview with a human rights lawyer and her interpreter, the entextualization of their story by the lawyer, the rehearsal by the applicants of the story as rendered by the lawyer, and finally their deposition in front of the asylum court. This case shows how individual experiences become structured into socially acceptable communicative patterns according to dominant representations of authenticity. It also demonstrates that this semiotic structuration is made particularly complex by the massively fluid and multilingual nature of the asylum process, where assumptions of shared knowledge and the prospects for achieving intersubjectivity can no longer be taken for granted.
For more information, visit the Project Narrative website.
