Cape Verdean Migration Trajectories into Luxembourg: A Multisited Sociolinguistic Investigation

This thesis investigates Cape Verdean migration trajectories into Luxembourg from a multisited sociolinguistic point of view. Approaching migration as both emigration and immigration, the thesis examines sociolinguistic aspects of both aspiring and accomplished Cape Verdean migrants to Luxembourg. Based on a narrative and the material ethnography, the thesis seeks to understand migration and its inequalities from the colonial past to the current episode of globalisation. As a starting point, the thesis historicises Cape Verdean migration to Luxembourg as initially entangled in colonisation and labour policies. It has shown that, Cape Verdean movements to Luxembourg derived indirectly from Portuguese colonisation and unexpectedly meddled in Luxembourg foreign labour policies during the 1960s and 70s. This thesis explores this entanglement and unexpectedness of migration from the perspective of individual migrants. It explores what happened in between those points of departure and arrival by means of a multisited ethnographic linguistic landscape approach (MELLA). This approach consists of a material and narrative ethnography that studied traces of migrant presences and absences in public and private spaces on both ends of the trajectory. It was found that the linguistic landscape of Cape Verde contained numerous references to Luxembourg (e.g. Avenida Luxemburgo in Santo Antão) and vice versa (e.g. Epicerie Créole in Bonnevoie) and that some participants in the study, like myself, routinely went back and forth, sustaining relationships and engagements in both countries. However, findings also showed how unequal and exclusive South-North mobilities have become. It is obvious that as life in general is, South-North migration is a struggle, with language being a crucial dimension of this struggle. The thesis shows how migration is a struggle from the start in the country of origin with prospective migrants making considerable efforts and investments to travel North, often in vain, and continues to be a struggle for those who succeed to arrive North. Language duties are always demanded and migrants are constructed from a linguistic deficit perspective rather than addressing the systemic and structural conditions that contribute to unequal struggles among migrant groups and between the locals and migrants, intersecting with gender, class and race. This study provides an account of how multilingualism itself is also a struggle for Cape Verdeans, as Luxembourg’s trilingualism is often used as a gatekeeping device and as a proxy for race in a ‘colour-blind’ racism. It is my hope that this first book-length study of Cape Verdean migration to Luxembourg has opened a new empirical field of research, and will be followed by many more studies to come

Compounding forms of inequality: Cape Verdean migrants' struggles in education and beyond in Luxembourg

This paper seeks to show how language, combined with other social variables, exacerbates migrants’ and their descendants’ struggles at school and beyond in Luxembourg. To a certain extent, the official trilingualism of Luxembourg – French, German and Luxembourgish – corresponds to an ‘elite multilingualism’ (Garrido 2017; Barakos and Selleck 2018) which defines who can access certain resources, e. g. education, work etc., and who can be left playing catch-up. The latter are those migrants who I here conceive as multilinguals on the margins. The elitist system is a form of domination and power over those whose language repertoire is less valued. Migrants’ disadvantage is further impacted by other indicators of their identity that can go beyond their educational qualifications and language repertoire per se, such as their country of origin, ethnicity, race, gender, citizenship etc. Language intersects with other forms of disadvantage or privileges. From an ethnographic sociolinguistic perspective, drawing on interviews and participant observations, this paper will illustrate this intersection of language, race and ethnicity, and struggles from the ground-level educational realities and aspirations of Cape Verdean migrants and their descendants in Luxembourg. This helps cast light on the social organisation in Luxembourg and understand the effects of multilingualism in creating ‘abyssal lines’ (Santos 2007) between the nationals, certain European migrants, Lusophone and African migrants in terms of social and economic mobility

Black Luxembourg

This chapter addresses migrants’ associations and narratives, and landscape traces of blackness in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. It fosters a critical understanding of black representations, their absences, and presences in the country. In this context, Black Lives Matter’s (BLM’) impact has manifested itself on various levels of society, from rallies gathering together large numbers of people to artistic contestation tactics and the appropriation of public spaces, the mapping of buildings with colonial links, the defacement of monuments, and the renaming of streets, to mention just a few. All this happened in the context of uncovering Luxembourg’s colonial past, which is directly connected to Belgian colonization (Moes 2012). Although the early BLM movement had already pushed bottom-up and top-down discussions on racism, no political measures had been put in place until its impact in 2020. The events of that summer were a sort of “wake-up call” and a sudden turning point, with Black people raising their voices against unequal conditions in modern postcolonial societies in Europe, including in Luxembourg. Additionally, newly created associations of People of African Descent (PAD), such as the feminist and antiracist associations Finkapé and Lëtz Rise Up, have taken the lead and intensified their antiracist activities, shifting the conversation on race and racism from folklore to activism. As a result, the silencing of the colonial past has been broken. At the European level, an earlier study entitled “Being Black in Europe” (BBE), carried out by the Fundamental Rights Agency and published in 2018, had placed Luxembourg at the top of the list of European countries where perceptions of racism are very high. The BLM movements and the BBE study have also fostered a wave of debates at conferences, including one that focused on “Being Black in Luxembourg” and prompted studies on racism, a subject that previously had not been on the country’s public radar

South-North trajectories and language repertoires

This chapter explores language in global South-North migration from the perspective of aspiring migrants in Lusophone West Africa within the context of increasingly restrictive European immigration regimes and their consequence of involuntary immobility in the South. While sociolinguistic scholarship has successfully engaged with globalization, mobility, and movement of people, it has insufficiently engaged with that which and those who don’t travel well. We argue that a sociolinguistics of globalization needs to develop multi-sited methods and tools for investigating and understanding these absent presences – the invisibly excluded – and propose that repertoires and trajectories are useful tools in such undertaking. The paper attempts a theoretical review of these concepts and illustrates their analytical potential with three cases from ongoing fieldwork in Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau as part of a larger ethnographic project at the University of Luxembourg that explores the language lives, learning histories, (unfinished) travels, further mobile aspirations and changing social status of young West Africans on the move. The paper concludes by arguing that South-North mobilities are shaped by as well as shaping multilingual repertoires, and are entangled in complex desires and strategies of mobility

Praxis and poiesis: from arts practice towards art theory

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Cinema: estratégia de ensino-aprendizagem na disciplina de história da enfermagem

Considera-se neste estudo a dinâmica fílmica no contexto escolar como estratégia pedagógica na construção do conhecimento crítico, por meio da utilização do referencial teórico de Walter Benjamin, Marc Ferro e Marcos Napolitano. O objetivo geral foi expor o cinema, identificando ou não seus elementos verossímeis representados em determinados períodos históricos, de forma a motivar o público-alvo (os alunos) na apreensão da realidade concreta, estimulando então a reflexão, o raciocínio crítico e a autonomia intelectual

Aplicativo The Maze: A word hunt - Uma ferramenta à prática do léxico e fonética de inglês mediada por recursos semióticos

Neste artigo são analisados recursos semióticos (RS) que intensificam ointeresse, a motivação e o engajamento da aprendizagem de inglês. Duas versões com diferentes semioses compunham o aplicativo nominado The Maze: a word hunt: a) considerando os RS em conformidade com a Análise Composicional (AC) da imagem na Gramática do Design Visual (GDV); b) não levando em consideração os RS em conformidade com a AC da imagem na GDV. Os sujeitos participaram de um teste de preferência e, ao final, apontaram como RS intensificadores: sons, elementos de gamificação, disposição espacial, valores informativos, transcrições fonéticas, entre outros. Os resultados revelam que os RS incorporados ao Aplicativo The Maze contribuem à aprendizagem do léxico e da fonética da língua inglesa