ABSTRACT
In their grounding-breaking collection of essays, Migratory Settings, Aydemir and Rotas make a subtle conceptual and discursive shift in order to unsettle prevailing assumptions about migration. The juxtaposition of an adjective of movements with a plural noun suggesting fixture highlights a paradox inviting ‘a shift in perspective from migration as movement from place to place to migration as installing movement within place’ (Aydemir & Rotas, 2008, p. 7). It is a tension with which each of the papers in this special issue of Language and Intercultural Communication wrestles in different ways, approaching the subject of migration from different disciplinary perspectives and using diverse methodologies and analysis. It is also a tension inherent in languages and intercultural communication as a field of research and practice. Transcriptions and thick descriptions capture and fix, installing – to echo Aydemir and Rotas – what is an aural and oral flow in interview narratives, as text. One medium is rendered as another, a medium which is human sound becomes a medium of human technology – that of writing, or of vision. The senses are translated and dissonance occurs, marking an awareness that something has shifted, something has changed, something is not as it was.
