Managing narratives, managing identities: Language and credibility in legal consultations with asylum seekers

Abstract

This study examines interactional management practices and narrative co-construction in lawyer-asylum seeker consultations in Flanders, Belgium. Drawing upon linguistic-ethnographic fieldwork, it presents a case study of a consultation between an Afghan applicant for international protection, his adviser, and his lawyer. The purpose of the consultation is to prepare the applicant for testifying at the upcoming asylum hearing. Data analysis focuses on (i) the reorientation of the asylum narrative from an authentic-experiential towards a more objectified formal-institutional account; (ii) the participants’ positioning work that indexes this reorientation process; and (iii) their fluctuating alignment of local-interactional and translocal-gatekeeping perspectives. In the discussion, we analyse the consultation in terms of competing legal and experiential voices and views on participant roles/responsibilities. We reflect on how this ambiguity of roles and ideologies relates to the constructed character of credibility, which reveals the importance of adequate legal assistance in this linguistically challenging context. (Legal consultations, asylum procedure, linguistic ethnography, narrative performance, credibility assessment)*

The metapragmatics of legal advice communication in the field of immigration law

“…It comes as no surprise that newcomers who entered Belgium unfamiliar with the language and the culture might experience confusion as they encounter the institutional maze of refugee status determination (Jacobs and Maryns 2021). My fieldwork revealed that many asylum seekers do not know what to expect of their lawyers: there is often ambiguity about the division of roles and responsibilities when it comes to the different institutional stakeholders.…”

“…The lawyer-client interaction within this asylum context seems linguistically diverse and intercultural by default. Although legal directives stipulate the importance of adjusting legal information provision to the (sociolinguistic) needs of the asylum seeker (EU Agency for Fundamental Rights 2014), it is up to practitioners to manage the local interaction by addressing discursive challenges and safeguarding mutual understanding (Jacobs and Maryns 2021). Meeting the sociolinguistic needs of the multilingual clients is closely intertwined with organising language support (Inghilleri and Maryns 2019): about half the consultations in my corpus were mediated by an interpreter or a confidant of the asylum seeker.…”

“…In this communicative move, the lawyer hints at the way in which the asylum authorities attach importance to the consistency of the facts when assessing applications. Asylum institutions consider a certain level of narrative detail as indicative of the credibility of the testimony (Jacobs and Maryns 2021;Maryns 2006) -an idea motivated by metapragmatic assumptions that evaluate certain discourse as (un)convincing. Therefore, lawyers often request interpreters at the official governmental hearings.…”

“…I noticed how limited resources result in tight schedules and how the lawyerclient communication is considerably affected by the constrains of time. The status of pro bono lawyers and the right to (free) legal assistance, is under great pressure, due to budget cuts and the current political climate in Belgium (Asylum Information Database 2019; Jacobs and Maryns 2021). This translates into an inevitable preoccupation with efficiency.…”

“…The analysis of this data fragment, in which the lawyer tries to manage the interaction by indicating the institutional conditions of time constraints, foregrounds how the need for efficiency poses a challenge in the face of the client's emotions and lifeworld concerns. Within scholarly literature, a shift can be noticed with regard to the ways in which the role of the lawyer is characterised (Barkai and Fine 1982;Jacobs and Maryns 2021;Westaby and Jones 2018;Zwier and Hamric 1996): whereas law used to be regarded as an objective and rational undertaking, the inherently emotional dimension of legal problems, and accordingly the importance of trust and rapport between lawyer and client, is foregrounded in contemporary job descriptions of legal practitioners. The idea that there is an inherent emotional dimension to law can be nuanced when it comes to certain branches of the law, but it is clearly relevant when it comes to asylum law.…”