The politics and ethics of researching refugee return: mediating language assessment at Europe’s borders

Abstract As European governments intensify efforts to regulate mobility, language assessment and other forms of linguistic gatekeeping have become increasingly important in shaping refugees’ possibilities for settlement, onward movement and return. This paper examines these processes through sociolinguistic research on literacy mediation among Syrian refugees in Turkey and the transnational networks through which they navigate migration decisions and institutional requirements. It illustrates how refugee families rely on distributed networks of mediators, including family members, to negotiate bureaucratic, welfare and language-assessment encounters (Capstick, 2020). Drawing on ethnographic and interview data with displaced Syrian academics, including follow-up research with participants, the paper examines how language assessment becomes entangled with decisions about settling in Turkey, moving onwards to Europe or returning to Syria. The analysis demonstrates how linguistic gatekeeping can misrecognise the communicative resources through which refugees navigate mobility infrastructures, while also showing how language does not map neatly onto territory, ethnicity or fixed group membership (Ammer et al., 2013). The findings demonstrate how linguistic gatekeeping can reinforce deficit framings of refugees’ communicative resources while obscuring the multilingual, mediated and socio-material infrastructures through which communication and mobility are actually negotiated.