DisPOSEG - Disentangling postcolonial encounters in globalisation: a sociolinguistic-ethnographic study of Lusophone migrant workers’ positionings in third space

• Research team: Bernardino Cardoso Tavares (PI), Aleida Evandra Tavares Vieira, Ingrid de Saint-Georges
• Duration: April 2021 - March 2024
• Funding : Fonds National de la Recherche

Lusofonia embraces diverse groups and individuals. If they share the Portuguese language, on the one hand, they do not share the same historical positions on the other. This sociolinguistic-ethnographic project investigates labour encounters of Lusophone migrants in Luxembourg, an officially trilingual country with its own complex entanglement of migration at the border with three neighbouring countries.

The project will examine the complex linguistic and workplaces interactions between axes of Lusophone migrants - Europeans, Africans and Brazilians - in Luxembourg. Some of old hierarchies, relations, values and norms brought into existence by conquest, colonialism and global neoliberalism might be replayed in the host country even unknowingly and be taken for granted in policies and practices.

Fieldwork will be carried out in strategic workplaces and adult education settings as crucial spaces for exclusions, emancipation or reversion of hierarchies. Through ethnographic interviews, participant observation, fieldnotes, audio/video recordings in those settings, and collection of relevant visual and material data, this project aims to an enhanced understanding of mobility and migration, by exploring rearrangements and competitions between former colonisers and respective former colonised social actors in Luxembourg, where both of them are migrants. It explores how axes of differentiation and compromise play out in working contexts within this ‘imagined community,’ taking into account Lusophone migration routes both via and/or beyond Portugal. This is a line of enquiry that this project encompasses, broadens and brings to the centre of academic research.