Mobility, migration and sustainability: re-figuring languages in diversity

Abstract

Debates within Europe, including super-diversity, may offer a lens on discourses accompanying change in Australia, located in the geographic South, but with ambivalent aspirations towards the North. Migration from africa, the Middle East/Afghanistand and Asia brings tangible, unequal movements in the local ecological landscape. As elsewhere, increasing diversification expels urbanized anxiety while civil and public layered responses exert pressure towards both divergence and convergence. Changing identities and linguistic citizenship emerge in local narratives of attempts to widen or close spatial divides, and in seams of language shift, maintenance and sustainibility.