Language analysis in asylum procedures: expertise, interaction, and institutional practice

Abstract When an expert witness is called to provide their language analytical expertise with the goal of determining the asylum seeker’s country of origin as part of the administrative procedure, discussions on the legitimacy of such expertise are backgrounded by the institution. We look at a case in Austria in which the asylum seeker’s representative, supported by a group of scholars including the authors, challenges the expert witness. Our focus is not so much on legal questions, such as how expertise is defined and regulated in procedural law, but on the interactional and institutional order surrounding the courtroom encounter. Based on participant observation in an asylum hearing, we conduct a reflexive ethnographic analysis of interactional practices through which participants organise the encounter in its communicative, spatial, and affective dimensions. In our analysis of the encounter, we examine how participants are aligned with the institutional procedure under way. The aim is to shed light on how expertise is constructed, contested, and negotiated in asylum procedures in order to contribute to broader debates on authority in language analysis. We argue that, despite recent and ongoing changes in the field which seem to challenge individual expertise and idiosyncratic processes such as in the case at hand, this reveals much about legal bodies as gatekeeping institutions.