10 February 2021

Displacement and Professional Reintegration: Intercultural Communicative Competence and the Refugee Emergency in Europe

Tony Young (Newcastle University)

Across Europe there are currently well over a million refugees and asylum seekers. A small but significant sub-group of these people are highly qualified professionals who, having been displaced, often find themselves either unemployed or in low-skilled jobs for which they are over-qualified. The focus of this talk will be a response to this ‘brain waste’ – the “Critical Skills for Life and Work” Erasmus+ Project, funded by the European commission. This project aimed to enhance the social and professional integration of highly-skilled refugees through the development of language and intercultural communicative competences (ICC) among these people and among the language teachers, often volunteers, who work with them in different European contexts. The project consisted of three phases which I’ll briefly describe. As part of the needs analysis phase of the project, multilingual narrative data (semi-structured interviews and focus groups) of people who has successfully transitioned from displacement to professional reintegration was gathered, and this will be my main focus in this talk. Findings here emphasised the importance of psychological resilience and a sense of self; intrinsic motivation; and of building and maintaining social networks in professional reintegration. These findings prompt questions for further dialogue in relation to ethical research, intercultural co-production and to the framing of ICC. Responses have implications for intercultural researchers, for language educators and for policy makers responding to the human cost of involuntary displacement, which I’ll discuss.

Tony Johnstone Young is Professor of Applied Linguistics and Communication at Newcastle University in the UK. His work explores aspects of intergroup and intercultural communication in health, language education and higher educational contexts, and is informed (he hopes) by a strong social inclusion and social justice agenda. He is currently involved on projects promoting global citizenship and multilingual competences in Europe (gcmc.global); supporting the communicative needs of people living with dementia (demtalk.org); and exploring the experiences of people in ‘internationalising’ universities in the global North and the global South (academicmigrationtothailand.co). His work has been supported by a Newton Fund Advanced Scholarship, The Alzheimer’s Society, the Alzheimer’s Disease Foundation Malaysia, and the ESRC, among others.