(Im)mobility infrastructure and the production of the linguistic precariat

1 Introduction

Refugees who enter Greece use two routes: sea or land, via human smugglers. Geographical restrictions are applied when people cross borders via sea. Those who cross via land do not have the same restrictions authorised on what they call their white cards or “ausweis” in German. The latter group who arrive via land, namely via the Evros river that separates Türkiye from Greece are often (im)mobilised in detention centres or police and border guard stations before they are transferred to Fylakio Reception and Identification Centre and Pre-Removal Centre. However, refugees are not always formally registered, and this makes the pushbacks easier. As soon as refugees arrive in Greece, they experience undetermined periods of spatial, temporal and legal uncertainties and (im)mobility because of the implementation of the EU-Turkey statement signed in March 2016 which means any “irregular migrants” who arrive to the Greek islands via Türkiye could be returned.^[1] Refugees stay in Fylakio Reception and Identification Center, a closed detention facility, until they are registered. However, many of them also stay in detention facilities, including a speculated informal detention centre called Poros, for up to 25 days.^[2]

After being released from detention centres, many refugees arrive in Athens. They then stay in accommodation provided by non-governmental organisations, or they find alternative, informal housing through their networks, such as the ones described in this ethnography – in squats. When staying temporarily in squats, refugees’ multiple linguistic needs emerge because they share a common space with local Greek speakers as well as other individuals who may speak languages such as Arabic, Persian and/or Romanian. The English language plays a key role, as a “shared” code among these individuals, who include refugees, international solidarians, and the local anti-authoritarians experiencing everyday political and social struggles. While multilingualism in spaces of precarity is a struggle, solutions that precarious living conditions bring are equally noteworthy. First, language is collectivised as a resource to meet the needs of the community. Second, language is individualised to meet the needs of the individuals who plan to continue their journeys in Europe. Language as a collective need, in the specific context of this ethnography, meant that individuals took responsibilities such as interpreting during communal meetings. The role of interpretation in assemblies enabled the democratic distribution of knowledge about politics, met the everyday needs of squatters and supported the general conduct of people in a shared space.

While living under uncertain conditions, stuck in Athens, and waiting to find smugglers to leave the city, many refugees in this ethnography invested in English language learning while others invested in learning Greek. Waiting (Jacobsen et al. 2020) while searching for smugglers, and desiring to reach another European destination, shaped my participants’ language learning choices. Therefore, this paper explores ways in which (im)mobility shapes and produces the linguistic precariat, that is individuals who are in a perpetual state of uncertainty, anxiety and insecurity, in the context of forced displacement. I demonstrate how the governance of the (im)mobilised produces a specific type of linguistic precariat, including both refugees and solidarity structures, under mutual aid and self-organisation. I show how language teaching and learning as well as communication are mobilised in the everyday struggles of the linguistic precariat. Data I discuss involve field notes, video recordings, audio recordings, and interviews with refugees who stayed in detention centres and later in squats.

In what follows, I first give a brief explanation of what (im)mobility infrastructure is. Second, I explain how (im)mobility infrastructure produces the linguistic precariat by focusing on refugees’ language learning processes. Third, I show how language classes and refugees’ communicative practices play a key role in mobilising language and communication, as a way of mobilising their precarity and ways in which they turn uncertainty into collective action, during periods of (im)mobility. Fourth, by providing examples from an English language class in Exarcheia, known as an alternative or anti-authoritarian neighbourhood of Athens, where I conducted fieldwork with refugees’ and their everyday linguistic and social practices as well as a second neighbourhood, Ampelokipi, where they lived in a squatted block of flats. I demonstrate ways in which refugees’ hypothetical future mobilities are shaped in the dynamics of a classroom and their squats. More specifically, I demonstrate how the conditions of precarity that emerge from refugee (im)mobility are challenged under self-organisation. I also explore the ways in which individuals not only self-economise to block governmental and non-governmental interventions – via collective kitchens, bakeries, food collection from street markets-, but how they mobilise their linguistic resources in everyday struggles to collectivise their resources to deal with their precarity.

2 (Im)mobility infrastructure and the linguistic precariat

(Im)mobility infrastructure [is] the manage [ment of] people’s physical movement, both over long distance and daily, partly through the redistribution of mobility across types and populations. (Xiang 2024:1)

From urban neighbourhoods to international migration, (im)mobility infrastructure shapes the language and language learning choices of individuals and their everyday precarity, short term and long term. It is a dynamic infrastructure that involves “journalists and jailers, smugglers and spooks, defence industry contractors and policy makers” (Andersson 2014: 10) as well as the researchers. I position the ethnographer, myself, as part of this apparatus, as the knowledge producer and one of the actors of this infrastructure, that I will reflect on in my analysis. Hence, (im)mobility is not only about how language resources are unequally distributed but also how language resources are mobilised as part of collective and individual struggles of the linguistic precariat. Sociolinguistic research has focused on “mobile populations” in relation to transnationalism, interdiscurisivity, time-space configurations/chronotopes (Park 2017), metapragmatics of mobility (Lo and Park 2017); materiality of mobility such as the travelling of texts (letters) as well as scales, global and the local (Pennycook 2012), and recently on enforced (im)mobility (De Fina and Mazzafero 2021). Furthermore, sociolinguistic research has concentrated on mobility from a perspective that we should “focus[es] on mobile resources rather than immobile languages” (2010: 197) and this line of research has taken globalisation and superdiversity (Blommaert and Rampton 2015) as their vantage points. This approach has encouraged us to pay attention to the role of mobility in relation to language resources such as specific genres, registers, varieties (Blommaert 2010: 47) and ways in which these play a role in the production of inequality. In this article, I take these conversations further and explore how bordering regimes as well as vulnerability and (im)mobility, could shape linguistic regimes and practices in spaces of precarity.

The notion of the linguistic precariat originates from Samata’s (2017) work who draws on Judith Butler’s work on Precarious Life and brings this conceptualisation into the field of Applied Linguistics. Precarity in this sense “brings certain vulnerabilities ‘vulnerability is not exactly overcome by resistance but becomes a potentially effective mobilising force in political mobilizations” (Butler 2016:14). In Precarious Life, Butler (2004: xii) argues that 9/11 revealed our vulnerability and dependency on one another: “One insight that injury affords is that there are others out there on whom my life depends […] No security measure will foreclose this dependency; no violent act of sovereignty will rid the world of this fact.” The two key notions that are embedded in precarity are vulnerability and dependency, but these also shape precarity. The fact that our lives depend on one other in spaces of precarity brings political and social dynamics such as dependency, dealing with uncertainty, making collective and individual decisions that are not only shaped by being stuck together in temporary spaces but also the anxieties, uncertainties and temporariness of everyday life. Butler (2012:134) in her earlier work Precarious Life, Vulnerability, and the Ethics of Cohabitation asks

[…] what it means for our ethical obligations when we are up against another person or group, find ourselves invariably joined to those we never chose, and must respond to solicitations in languages we may not understand or even wish to understand. This happens, for instance, at the border of several contested states but also in various moments of geographical proximity – what we might call “up againstness” – the result of populations living in conditions of unwilled adjacency, the result of forced emigration or the redrawing of the boundaries of a nation-state.

In this way, I understand linguistic precarity to be not only a product of (im)mobility infrastructure that involves bordering regimes that are relational to security, law, political economy, and which produce specific types of vulnerabilities, but also how it reinforces the mobilisation of the linguistic and communicative resources into individual and collective action but also an apparatus that reinforces forced solicitations in languages that individuals do not understand. While (im)mobility infrastructure produces the linguistic precariat who in return mobilise their linguistic resources to deal with everyday vulnerabilities: e.g. not knowing the language of the other when encountering the police or border guards, this vulnerability allows individuals to mobilise and both struggle together and individually. In this sense, the vulnerability of the precariat is not to be understood as resistance but as struggle. This means tensions among individuals and the ways in which they deal with these individually and collectively. I explore these in detail in Section 3.

3 Doing ethnography in two neighbourhoods of Athens

Between 2018 and 2020, I conducted my ethnographic fieldwork in two neighbourhoods of Athens: Exarcheia and Ampelokipi. I passed by Café U, in Exarcheia whilst I worked in a nongovernmental organisation that provided informal education for refugee children. In Café U, self-identified leftists and revolutionaries of Türkiye including refugees who identified as “political refugees”, hung out, drank tea and coffee, discussed politics, and more specifically a communist revolution (and anarcho-Marxism). Often sitting and waiting in front of the café, on wooden chairs, while searching for smugglers, migrants were learning English and Greek before their journeys to northern Europe. In one of my interactions with Mazhar who ran the café together with other comrades (as used by participants), and often invited me for tea, he emphasised that Café U was a place where ideas were exchanged, but that ultimately ideas that “would take us to a revolution”. Mazhar^[3] often challenged me politically, asking me how science could contribute to revolutions. He often explained that his approach to revolution was “scientific”, and he encouraged me to read articles and books on communism. When I proposed to Mazhar that I wanted to conduct my fieldwork in the café, he agreed and asked for the permission of his other comrades who were part of their collective. Once my access to the café was granted as a researcher, I began to go to the café on a regular basis to participate in the English language lessons twice a week.

The wooden shelves of the café had books from Bob Avakian, the founder and chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party in USA, Mikhail Bakunin, the Russian revolutionary anarchist, socialist and the founder of collectivist anarchism and Søren Kierkagaard, the Danish theologian, philosopher, poet, social critic who was an existential philosopher, whose philosophical work has been translated into Turkish, and some Kurdish books. Whilst these books indexed some of the ideological orientations of the café, its interior was covered with posters of various leftist political parties. On one of the walls, there was a carved piece of wood that had pictures of Karl Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao – indicating the Marxist-Leninist affiliation of the collective and at the same time welcoming dialogue with other ideologies too. During one of my visits to the café, Mazhar said “we build everything on these five people” implying the ideological foundations of his political orientation.

Spending most of their days in the café while doing their deneme meaning attempt/experiment to cross the Greek borders, my participants’ everyday lives revolved around their squats and the café. Many of them neither had money nor confidence to go to the different parts of the city, because they did not have papers if the police stopped them. They were contained in the specific locality and the surrounding areas as the police were located on strategic corners of the neighbourhood at the time of this ethnography. The presence of the police however became more visible during the pandemic and DRASI, the motorcycle riding police squad, started patrolling the neighbourhood. A sense of restriction affected the visibility of the migrants in the area, and Café U provided a space of safety, solidarity, political engagement and a space for sharing anxieties about refugees’ future journeys. The English and Greek lessons were organised because many of my participants did not want to get involved with nongovernmental organisations as a political attitude and some of them did not have the documents to enrol on their courses.

The English lessons took place twice a week between 6 and 8 pm on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Lessons were regularly cancelled, and learners changed during my participation in the lessons. Ozan, a young man provided English lessons in the basement of the café which was very cold during winter. Three refugees Serin, Demir who attended the English lessons, and Özgür, who attended the Greek lessons regularly, became my key participants. During my fieldwork, I video recorded these lessons and followed them up by in-depth, video and audio recorded interviews. Here we discussed the refugees’ experiences of detention, and imprisonment, as well as their language learning experiences and communicative practices during their stay in Athens. My data collection methods were admittedly entangled with regimes of surveillance. When I asked permission from my participants to use a camera during my participation in the lessons, three of them accepted and I positioned the camera in a way that did not record the rest of the classroom. I often checked if they felt any discomfort and I was reassured that it was okay. Gaining trust when using cameras was not easily granted, I was told by one of my interlocutors. I was aware of the attacks on strangers’ cameras in the neighbourhood but as I established rapport long before my fieldwork started, I was “known” in the neighbourhood, and occasionally encouraged to take photos during demonstrations in case of any police brutality. Although I did not want to be confused as an “insider”, I did however become an insider in certain ways. While the camera indexed my “outsider” position as a researcher, it also positioned me as an “insider”, as I was able to utilise it without restriction (except for recording my interlocutors’ faces).

I was occasionally challenged about the role of the university, research on migration and what my contribution was going to be to the suffering of the refugees. As Greece attracted too many researchers, journalists, nongovernmental organisations, and solidarity people, some of my interlocutors expressed their fatigue with large number of people interested in their lives. However, as we developed deeper relationships, I was accepted as a migrant woman, and a researcher in the field, which had lessened the tensions to an extent. On one hand, my interlocutors acknowledged the significance and contributions of science to their political goals, i.e. a revolution, but at the same time they expressed their dissatisfaction with academics’ lack of direct participation in their actions. Although I hesitate to label myself as an activist researcher, in a 2015 interview as Blommaert suggests that “research is social action”: he continues “activist […] represents a discursive scale in which “esoteric” academic knowledge is converted into discourses of wider currency […] without sacrificing the analytical accuracy and power of the academic discourses”. In my case I do not separate these discourses as activist or academic, and do not see research as merely an academic endeavour.

As I established trust with Demir and Serin, they invited me to their squats for tea. Prosfygika, a block of squatted flats on Leoforos Alexandras, where I carried a big part of this ethnography had a heterogenous combination of squatters including migrants, former drug addicts, political people, solidarians from European countries, the Roma and those who became homeless after losing jobs or becaming ill. Some squatters, especially those who spoke Turkish and English, were employed on precarious contracts, and became part of a large workforce for call centres because of the languages they spoke. As refugees were granted asylum and developed their English language skills, they found jobs in a multilingual call centre which appeared to also attract other European solidarians too.

4 Investing in English as language of precarity

Political and social movements, such as the leftists and anarchists in Athens, deal with precarity by creating self-organised infrastructures such as language classes, collective kitchens and health clinics, not only to provide alternatives to the oppressive state infrastructures, but as a response to the philanthropists who govern the migration industry (Andersson 2014). Within this political, ethical and solidarity ethos, leftists and anti-authoritarian movements in Athens have mutual aid structures such as the sharing and the distribution of linguistic resources. These practices involve translation, interpretation in assemblies, language learning technologies via platforms such as WhatsApp, but also face-to-face language classes, established as gatekeeping tactics to reject governmental and nongovernmental interventions. These practices are enmeshed with logics of self-governmentality, and self-surveillance on one hand, and solidarity and collectivism on the other. The inclusion and exclusion of the individuals may depend on their willingness and the degree of responsibility everyone is willing to take. For example, when I introduced myself to the squatters at a Monday Assembly, where squatters discussed their everyday lives and responsibilities, I was encouraged to join the collective kitchen and the skipping activities-food collection from the street market, with the understanding that in this way I would get to know the community and that this period will last 3 months. After I requested that I wanted to do fieldwork in the squat, the assembly decided that I was welcome to do fieldwork but that they would see how I interacted with the community over the next 3 months – I was on a so called “probation” (my words) to show my interest in the community and gain trust. I was then taken to the person in charge who asked me whether I was autonomous. My answer was that I worked for a university, and that institutions are not neutral spaces. My independence as a researcher was important to the community and they made sure I did not work for any nongovernmental organisation at the time of this research.

Serin, a young refugee woman who had a degree in Sociology and Agriculture, was learning English in Café U and she stayed in another squat, not far from Prosfygika, together with two of her comrades. Here they participated in communal life – sharing chores, expenses and responsibilities such as the reception at the squat. When she first arrived at a border city in northern Greece, she and her friends were detained in a police station. Knowing few words of English, she said “saved our lives”.^[4] When she first encountered the border police, she told them that they were “political persons” indicating that they were asylum seekers fleeing persecution in Türkiye. Serin explained that using these two words saved their lives especially when encountering the authorities in the border area. Often people who arrive at the border are separated as political and economic migrants and the term political refugee was interpellated by my interlocutors. Serin further added her inability to ask questions in English or Greek led her to experience injustices and frustrations when for example a friend of hers bought bread and the cashier gave her five euros less. She resented her “inability” to “ask” for the correct amount of change she should have received. As sociolinguists we critique the role of English as an “imperial” (Phillipson 1992) language but, for Serin knowing bits of English meant she could “survive” in a context where she was vulnerable. On another occasion, Serin and a friend of hers were sexually harassed on a bus in Athens: she added that she could only utter “what are you doing?” and that she used mime and gestures to communicate her reaction to the abuse. She said, “normally back in [her] country [she] would not call for the police for political reasons but that in that situation it was the only thing that [she] could think of”. The lack of linguistic resources to express her anger, frustration and fear made Serin to invest in learning English. She said “if I knew English during my first days in the detention centre, interactions with the police while asking for food and water” could have made life easier. While it is difficult to claim that English is a key for better life, it certainly helped Serin as a life saver in the context of her precarious life while at the Greek borders and later in Athens. Whilst in Greece the official language is Greek, the English language is perceived as the language of international mobility by refugees who are still on the move. Investing in English was however a precarious endeavour, a temporary investment during uncertain times. If she was going to be “stuck” in Greece, she would have to shift her efforts towards learning Greek. Serin planned to go to Germany, she invested in English temporarily. English was associated with short-termism and precarity (Standing 2014) – a language that did not require an anchor. During a recent conversation, Serin who is now in Germany, said she was now fully invested in learning German and that she forgot all the English she learnt in Athens.

Whilst Serin, highlighted the importance of knowing few words in English during her detention as “lifesaving”, Demir, a young man in his 20s also invested in learning English while waiting and planning his journey to northern Europe. Demir had a degree in Psychology and attended the English lessons in Café U too. Key participants, Demir and Serin had undergraduate degrees and were interested in the ethnography I conducted. They were also interested in the research because of my earlier work on Kurdish language and identity in the UK diaspora. Demir and Serin showed enthusiasm and wanted to be part of the research process. During a cold month of winter, Demir was playing chess with one of the men in the café. He arrived in Greece after 5 years of imprisonment in Türkiye. When we established a degree of rapport, Demir invited me to Prosfygika where he stayed with two other refugees. As I arrived in their flat, I saw a light bulb hanging on a wall. Water was running in the toilet, the kitchen looked decades old and there was not enough light. The broken windows were covered with bits of plastic and fabric. On the walls, Özgür, another refugee who lived with Demir, had his notes from self-taught Greek lessons when he was in detention – until he put some petrol on himself to burn himself during his time in a detention centre close to the Turkish border. He did not get burnt and requested an interpreter. Özgür did this as a reaction to administrative detention that lasted so long. He was a philosophy teacher in Türkiye before he arrived in Greece to claim asylum. After living precariously in Prosfygika, Özgür found temporary jobs in different parts of Greece. After many attempts, deneme, Özgür could not leave Greece. His health was noticeably deteriorating during my fieldwork. He passed away in 2023.

Migrant detention “deploys indeterminate waiting and temporal uncertainty […] Time spent in detention is not anticipatory waiting towards a projected future” as De Genova (2021: 191) notes. Although the prospects of refugees while in detention are uncertain, their temporary investments in language learning are noteworthy. Migrants’ waiting can be productive, creating the conditions of precarity that create certain kinds of temporary, short term and flexible linguistic investments. In this vein, “precarisations […] tend to be productive” possibly leading to refusals “to accept to be reduced to be pure objects” (De Genova 2021: 194). While in detention, Özgür taught himself Greek and English as interpreters were not available. For him, investing in language learning during this time meant he could communicate with detention police and other actors to release himself from detention – giving himself the skill he felt he needed to be self-reliant. At the same time Özgür learnt Greek via his smartphone and used dictionaries. Below he showed me how he studied Greek and English whilst in prison (Figure 1).

Figure 1:

Özgür’s vocabulary learning in detention (Greek, English and Turkish).

Many of my participants described their communicative insecurities and uncertainties when they were unable to communicate in English or Greek, as having a “partial existence” or a state of being “waste” or a “half person”. These descriptions echo what Bauman (2004) calls “human waste”, and we see that (im)mobility is embodied as “unproductive” and “fragmented” (although short term, temporary investments in language learning are productive). For example, Demir expressed his linguistic insecurities: “when you don’t speak the language, you don’t exist fully”. When I asked him what he meant, he asked me if I knew the French Sculptor Bruno Catalano’s bronze sculptures called Les Voyaguers (The Travelers). When I replied that I was not aware of the artist’s work, he sent me one of Catalano’s sculptures on WhatsApp. The statue he sent to me was a fragmented body and parts of the body were missing, most notably the statue carried a suitcase. When I visited Prosfygika for the first time, Demir’s suitcase arrived from Türkiye as he could not bring his belongings with him. When I saw his suitcase, I was wondering how Demir left Türkiye – perhaps he crossed borders on foot and could not carry a suitcase with him. Perhaps the suitcase signified not only his past journey from Türkiye to Greece but also his future travel and his preparedness for his next journey. Demir explained that this was how he felt without “language”: Not knowing Greek or English for Demir meant his existence was partial the same way that Catalano’s sculptures were. Hence linguistic precarity is an embodied experience, a discontinuity where the self and the body are partially divided in the everyday way of being/existing. Demir’s partial existence that he associated with his lack of English language skills is closely linked to (im)mobility infrastructure. His precarious existence was part of bordering regimes as his arrival in the confines of different national borders meant the almost non-existence of the linguistic capital that he brought with him i.e. Turkish and Kurdish.

While Demir expressed his “partial existence” that he related to his language practices, he often shared his anxieties about not having enough money for smugglers and his inability to find a job or leave Greece. Demir was looking for a job and he was contemplating on opening a taverna. At this moment he stressed that he had to learn Greek which would distract his English language learning. In addition to his fluency in Turkish and Kurdish he wanted to learn English and work as a psychologist. As a solution, he started selling food with one of his friends that he knew from Türkiye (they were comrades). However, this endeavour was faced with problems. Their stall was in front of a shop and the shop owners did not want Demir and his friend in front of their premises, blocking their business. On another occasion, Demir approached a car wash service to ask if they were looking for someone to work for them. When he was asked if he had documents, Demir did not know the word “document” and hence didn’t get the job. He said the car wash people asked him “you have document?” and Demir said I understood the words “you” and “have” but not the word “document” and he understood that he was asked whether he had a job or not. He did not want to check the word “document” on google translate in order not to distract the conversation. He also added that these kinds of communicative moments distressed him. He said he felt stressed and anxious when he was trying to understand his interlocutors who spoke English or Greek, and that not knowing the languages was a “struggle”.

As many of my participants were in a state of precarity, not knowing where they might go to in Europe, or still deciding how and when they will continue their journeys, their language learning choices constantly shifted from English to Greek and vice versa. For example, Demir and Serin opted for English while their flatmates Derin and Ece who also planned to leave Greece, opted for the Greek lessons provided in Café U. Demir said in communicative situations where one person could not interact, they would “collectivise” communication. This was partly because of what was available to them and partly just in case they had to stay in Greece. Also, the negative experiences while crossing borders had led them to develop negative attitudes towards the Greek language, as well as reinforcing their beliefs about Greek being a “difficult” language with a “difficult” alphabet. While sitting in front of the café one day, Ece said she was unable to attend the lessons regularly as she was waiting to hear from a smuggler. Hence, she was unable to invest too much time in the lessons because her mind was busy with her journey. While I observed in the café the perpetual waiting and boredom among my participants and their changing decisions about learning English or Greek, they nevertheless invested in English language as a mobile resource during their (im)mobilisation. English appeared to be an asset that they could take with them wherever they might go. Although some participants had a clear idea of where they would go, some of them had to make decisions about their next journies depending on their financial resources and negotiations with smugglers on different routes (Khosravi 2007).

5 Collectivising language and communication

In Café U, Ozan provided English lessons twice per week, in the evenings. He came from an elite background in Türkiye, where he went to the most prestigious college in Türkiye. Whilst he enrolled in three universities, he did not complete any of his degrees: first, he studied Translation and Interpreting, second Spanish and Literature and lastly Linguistics. He left Türkiye for political reasons as he was threatened with imprisonment. In Athens he had worked as a waiter, translator and English teacher. During his classes, he spared half of the lessons to grammar, vocabulary and other technicalities and allocated the second half to conversations such as everyday life and political discussions. His main motivation for teaching English was that the “political migrants”, siyasi mülteciler, were “carefree” or “emotional” due to their precariousness and that this was why they were not learning languages. He felt the need to “interfere” with this paralysed situation. For Ozan, “friends”, i.e. “learners”, were too preoccupied with their circumstances and demoralised that this hindered their language learning processes. He believed that language learning would give them structure and purpose. He complained that learners were coming to the lessons as they wished and that here in Greece and anywhere that they went, “they could use English and be independent”. Ozan’s frustrations often stemmed from helping his “friends” with translation and other communicative events such as helping refugees with hospital and asylum appointments. As he worked as a waiter and a translator, as well as voluntarily teaching English, he expected learners to take the lessons seriously. During an interview, he complained that because the lessons were free, “friends” were “undisciplined”, not attending the lessons regularly and skipping the lessons. As a member of the collective, Ozan responsibilised himself as a language teacher and this endeavour was requested by the asylum seekers too. Because he was investing time in these lessons, he had expected the learners to be motivated and enthusiastic about the lessons, but this did not happen as the general morale among the learners was very low – often anxious about their circumstances and next journeys. I was often asked to teach English to those who came to the café and did interpreting during the assemblies in Prosfygika It was believed that as a sociolinguist I had the “expertise” in teaching English and interpreting from Turkish to English vice versa. However, I chose to position myself as an ethnographer as I wanted to be transparent about my position as a researcher rather than an “expert”.

During an interview with Ozan, he said he had a curriculum that he prepared when he was giving private English lessons in Türkiye and that he changed that curricula according to the needs of the “friends” (learners) who were native speakers of Turkish or that their second language was Turkish meaning those who spoke Kurdish as their first language. He also added that these friends were not “students” as these were not private lessons, and that people were self-educating. This is usually a common practice among those who identified as political individuals and collectives – especially those who were imprisoned: many had their own reading lists and pedagogies. Many of the participants in this ethnography had experience of self-education from their prison times. In prison, they had a curricula and political readings that their parties designed, as well as their own independent readings. In my encounters in the squats, it was often mentioned that people were responsible for “self-education”. This meant once an individual was part of a movement, collective or structure, they had to educate themselves about politics and everyday life in the squats. In this sense, Ozan’s role as a teacher was to share knowledge and guide the learners as his comrades at the same time.

Ozan explained that he talked about politics in the lessons because this was the key challenge that the learners were facing during their migratory journeys. In the lessons he usually talked about Marxism and Anarchism as well as other topics such as sexism in the class. He said it was important, referring to the learners, to

express themselves in another language, politically, it is important to express one’s views. This way they (learners) speak. They feel they have to talk, they sweat […] This is a serious learning process”. He also added “there is no necessity in buying bread. Ok they buy bread somehow. But there are problems in expressing oneself as a human. It is language in the end (Interview with Ozan).

During the 2 hour English lessons, Ozan encouraged the learners to use “full sentences” meaning that learners complied with the grammatical rules of the English language e.g. Subject-Verb-Object agreement – avoiding grammatical errors.

Ozan discouraged learners constructing fragmented and ungrammatical sentences. He often wrote this on the upper right corner of the white board to remind the learners that he expected them to use full sentences rather than fragmented utterances. In the second half of the lessons when the group discussed everyday needs, Ozan talked about the learners’ anxieties and structured these as shown in Figure 2. During this lesson Ozan presented a roadmap about the learners’ future plans. The first need was identified as gaining political status/recognition, second to find shelter and third to find job/employment. While he encouraged the learners to comply with the rules of English grammar – and did not show much flexibility about grammar – he “structured” learners’ everyday struggles and proposed solutions (Figure 3).

Figure 2:

Representation of Ozan’s teaching on whiteboard.

Figure 3:

Representation of Ozan’s teaching on whiteboard.

While language learning gave an opportunity to collectively use linguistic resources within the framework of their political agendas broadly leftist and anarcho-Marxist specifically, where learners explored solutions to their precarious lives, knowledge production in this specific context produced a specific type of language teaching and learning, indexing political affiliation and subjectivities that were related to political ideology. Language was also collectivised in the squat too. For example, during food collection in two laiki agora (street market) in Ampelokipi neighbourhood, decisions were made about who would speak to the market vendors and in which languages. This meant a certain degree of interdependence. On Wednesdays and Saturdays at around 3 pm, right before the markets closed, squatters gathered in front of the common space in the squat and picked the trolleys. They made decisions about who was going to push the trolleys and who was going to interact with vendors and so on. Often, someone who spoke Greek was selected for this role. When I asked why this was the case, one participant stressed that the vendors spoke Greek and that they were also more willing to give them the leftover vegetables and fruits as they thought these were “poor Greeks”. These interactions in the market were scripted and decisions were made prior to the market visits which was called skipping. The scripts were constructed collectively in front of the common area called steki. A typical conversation started with “Hello, we are from the refugee neighbourhood. Do you have something for us” and the street vendor would answer “yes” or “later”. When the answer was “later” it usually meant “no”. These scripts were meant to serve as a template for collecting food and avoiding possible refusal. Mentioning the name of the neighbourhood Prosfygika which in Greek meant “refugee homes”, was meant to establish sympathy in the interactions. The interaction times were kept to the minimum and long conversations were discouraged by some group members as every single word uttered had to be decided collectively. The time for food collection was very precise right before the vendors closed their stalls-around 3.45 pm, in order not to frustrate the vendors who were often in a rush at this time. And on early arrival, the participants took a cigarette break and then walked into the market. The decisions about who was going to interact with the vendors was a collective decision.

6 Conclusions

By presenting ethnographic material collected in a self-organised English language class in the alternative neighbourhood of Athens, Exarcheia and the other everyday lived experiences of refugees in Prosfygika in Ampelokipi, I have demonstrated how the (im)mobility infrastructure shapes refugees’ language learning processes and their communicative practices while experiencing uncertainty about their future travels to Europe. Refugees’ temporary and speculative investments in English language learning shows bordering technologies are productive. While (im)mobility infrastructure leaves individuals in precarity, it also allows individuals to mobilise their communicative practices as a form of collective action. However, these actions also create “independent” subjects who are on one hand “self-sufficient” and interdependent on the other. Moreover, self-responsibilisation and self-education short-term language learning investments are imbued in the practices that come with (im)mobility infrastructure. While in Özgür’s case, when he was in detention forced (im)mobilisation made him to invest in language learning as an individual endeavour, the very same infrastructure led to the collectivisation of resources as shown in the street market examples. From a governmentality perspective power individualises and collectivises populations. In this paper, I have tried to demonstrate how these processes are entangled with language learning and communicative practices of actors in their everyday lives.

Doing ethnography with precarious individuals, who are not only subjected to harsh border regimes, but also affected by the everyday obstacles of finding a common language within the constraints of their collective and individual desires, means that language choice and language learning becomes an important part of (im)mobility infrastructure. Choosing a language to learn, or making a commitment to language learning, is solicited by interdependency when it comes to collective life and the dependency of the individual on her/himself. This ethnography demonstrated that the complexities and struggles of the precariat in urban spaces could not be studied without ethnographic explorations. Doing research in spaces of vulnerability, temporality and dependency means that I, as the ethnographer, depended on my interlocutors’ trust, reciprocity and loyalty. This interdependency between the researcher and the researched disrupts some of our taken for granted assumptions about activism and power. That is to say, that the researcher has more power than the researched. While I will explore this in future work, I would highlight that this specific type of ethnography shows how our institutional roles as researchers can get disrupted, meaning that we are as equally likely to be on a pedestal: this may present important questions for what we do in/with our scholarship. Often, we teach students or learn in research methods, that we shall do no harm. While we try to be faithful to our interlocutors, we also represent elite institutions and specific types of knowledge production that may not always make precarious lives better. But by being in the field, and by getting challenged by our interlocutors, I learnt how ethnography not only allows us to explore and penetrate the worlds of the others but at the same time allows us to examine our own contradictions with what we represent with our institutional affiliations. This research allowed me to see the researchers’ vulnerabilities when conducting fieldwork with precarious individuals, our dependency and political choices which I will explore in my next work.