Linguistic and Intercultural Mediations in a context of International Migrations – LIMINAL

The methodological challenges of ANR LIMINAL are (i) the adoption of a methodology specific to sensitive areas through a multidisciplinary approach. In terms of its structure, the project has moved towards an increasingly participatory and interactional approach (associative actors, activists, exiles, etc.), in that it concerns and requires speakers of languages that are said to be «rare« in France, as well as taking into account interaction situations and the necessary mediation. Interns and occasional collaborators have come to enrich the initial team, in particular to document the terms in situation of MIGralect.org. The team was thus renewed and extended to open collaborations (languages, situations of enunciation), and at the same time its participative and involved methodology was transformed, these points constituting the main structural evolutions of the project.
Furthermore, the programme has considerably refined its anthropological methodology to the point of proposing an innovative framework for thinking about contemporary migration, as theorised in the final collective work (Lingua (non) grata, Langues, violences et résistances dans les espaces de la migration, Presses de l'Inalco, 2022). The renewed approach to the field has enabled the constitution of an innovative corpus and therefore original reports: a hitherto unstudied multilingual corpus of inscriptions, tags and graffiti of asylum seekers in reception and accommodation centres and camps (book planned for 2022), use according to an ethical charter of audiovisual data filmed in accommodation centres and camps, etc.
Finally, the technical challenges of transcription, transliteration and translation into five rare languages and three European languages have led to a progressive refinement and adaptation to needs. A lexical database (Okapi - INA - 2194 words, 223 documents and nearly 600 documented records in 5 non-Western languages and 3 European languages) was thus developed as the research fields progressed and then transferred to a site created with SPIP.

The results obtained are of different kinds. On the one hand, the Liminal programme offered the opportunity to produce a multi-sited, multilingual and multidisciplinary knowledge, and thus to enrich academic work in this central, but minor, field of migration studies, based on unpublished anthropological fields (list of publications in E.2). On the other hand, the Migralect.org database and the university diploma Hospitality, Mediations, Migrations (DU H2M) constitute innovative initiatives, both in terms of knowledge sharing, methodology and training. The whole opens up new perspectives in terms of fundamental research, applied research to the needs of social actors and research in collaboration with exiled speakers whose skills and experiences are valued in the programme. This last aspect has a direct impact on the integration of refugees and their access to the professional world. In this sense, this need has exceeded the project's initial forecasts: the DU H2M receives a growing number of applications each year (85 on average for 25 places), including geopolitical parameters (Afghan or Ukrainian students welcomed).

The programme has given rise to a renewed and innovative study on a central field of migration, linguistic practices, thus circumscribing an open-access, spatial and subjective cartography of the languages used between 2017 and the end of 2021 (Migralect.org). On the other hand, it offered the opportunity to experiment with a participatory interactional methodology, based on the linguistic knowledge of people in migration as practised in migration spaces in the specific contexts of emergency. Finally, LIMINAL has developed a co-constructed knowledge that feeds a new type of training and professionalization programme, closer to the current needs of solidarity and social actors, the DU Hospitality, Mediations, Migrations (H2M), which is to be reinforced with a professional degree, the first of its kind, in 2023-2024. The scientific and societal impact thus appears to be strong, through productions that meet the demands of solidarity actors as well as academic audiences and support for people in migration. Consequently, the prospects opened up by the programme appear important: enrichment of the database in France and on a European scale, expansion of a comparative study to include other contexts, development of adapted training courses meeting the needs of actors (institutional, civil society, refugees) in terms of integration and specific know-how. As an example, a research programme based on Liminal's analyses and research methodologies has been submitted to and accepted by the Convergences Migrations Institute (Savoirs partagés aux frontières - CO-FRONT), as a prelude to the submission of a new ANR or ERC. In the same vein, the project coordinator, recently appointed deputy director of the ICMigrations, is an IUF senior 2022 laureate and is considering an ERC project as a follow-up to Liminal.

The results of the field surveys are used in 3 publications (2 journal issues, 2 collective works, the last of which is currently being finalised in English - a final work on graffiti and inscriptions is in the process of being written) but also in the creation and provision of free access to a database on the languages of migration, migralect.org, which required four years of work.
All the research also feeds the course modules of the training of mediators-peers in the framework of the DU Hospitality, Mediations, Migrations (INALCO and financing by a private Foundation + financing by the MESRI - AMI-emergence project between 2022 and 2024), the first diploma of this nature in France (brochure: www.inalco.fr/actualite/diplome-universitaire-hospitalite-mediations-migrations-h2m-inscriptions-jusqu-16-juin), whose pedagogical coordination team and a large part of the teachers are members of the LIMINAL programme.
The DU H2M has served as an example and as a basis for the creation of two new degrees: the DU Dialogues - Mediation, Interpretation, Migration (University of Lyon 2, since 2020-2021) and the DU Frontières - Mediation and Interpretation at the Border (University of Lille- PSM, 2021-2022). The DU H2M will evolve into a professional licence in 2023-2024.
All the outputs of the LIMINAL project (from the MIGRalect database to the publications) are intended for the research community but also for the actors in the field of migration (state, local, associative and humanitarian actors) and for the exiles themselves. Finally, all of the scientific results have been presented to field actors (knowledge sharing workshops between solidarity actors and researchers in Briançon and Calais) and popularised. In this respect, the research notebook liminal.hypotheses.org and the facebook page (ANR LIMINAL) accompanied the project, as well as the blogs Azil, langues, migrations, exils on the Le Monde portal (until 2019) azil.blog.lemonde.fr and then on Mediapart (https://blogs.mediapart.fr/liminal/blog).

The LIMINAL project focuses on the interactions and mediations between migrants and institutional, associative and informal actors in situations of migration and humanitarian crises, as they have been developing in France since 2015 (increasing number of refugee camps, refugee shelters and welcome centers). Although linguistic and intercultural interactions and mediations in the context of international migration and humanitarian emergency have major social impact, they have never been studied by national and international research programs. They are, however, in line with the priority challenges of the European Union (H2020).
LIMINAL's multidisciplinary team brings together anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, linguists, sociolinguists and semioticians from three major research centers from the National Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilizations (INALCO) –The America, Africa and Asia Center for Social Sciences (CESSMA), the Center on Plurality of Languages and Identities: Didactics, Acquisition and Mediation (PLIDAM) and the Center for Studies and Research on Literatures and Oralities (CERLOM), to which are attached researchers specialized in migration and mediation from other French Centers (Triangle/ENS Lyon, URMIS and CRPMS from University Paris Diderot) and the SOAS (University of London). They will work together on the interactions and practices of mediation in five major languages: Urdu, Farsi, Dari, Amharic, and Arabic. The team will conduct field studies in pairs (anthropologists-sociologists and sociolinguists) in refugee camps and centers of three zones in France: Paris and suburbs, Hauts-de-France, Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur, as well as in two border towns (Dover and Ventimiglia).
LIMINAL is thus an action-oriented research on sensitive fieldworks, requiring the respect of an ethical charter for the collection and exploitation of data. It is based on several theoretical hypotheses, including (i) the interest of questioning interactions and mediations for a better understanding of the strategies of the actors; (ii) the impact of institutional and informal contexts on mediation situations; (iii) key role of the interpreter-mediator in facilitating mediation with migrants (iv) the need to develop adequate training tools in response to the constant demands of the actors in the field. To answer these proposals, LIMINAL will develop an original and reflective methodology based on the collaboration between researchers and professional and associative actors, in particular Emmaüs Solidarité (Paris) and the Migrants Service Platform (network of 24 associations working on refugee camps in Hauts-de-France). Through the collection and analysis of verbal and non-verbal, textual, audio and audiovisual data, the LIMINAL project aims to (i) constitute a multilingual digital platform based on lexico-terminological data in order to document poorly known migrant populations and their use of languages in migration contexts (ii) produce an audio-visual corpus on key situations of interaction and mediation (iii) create scientific and pedagogical tools for the training of interpreters-mediators (development of training modules, proposal of glossaries and lexicons). These deliverables will be developed thanks to the expertise of members of the consortium working with the digital environment (audiovisual archives of research, HAL-INALCO, INALCO digital humanities presses) and external members (INA, TELECOM PARIS TECH). The LIMINAL project aims at responding in an innovative way to the understanding of migration issues and their treatment, focusing on the challenges of welcoming migrants in France and Europe.