UC Davis

This dissertation uses mixed methods to critically investigate the role of listening and the constitution of listenership in various contexts of asylum processes. Drawing from scholarship in applied linguistics, linguistic anthropology, discourse analysis, and speech perception, I developed three distinct, yet related, studies. The first study, in Chapter Three, reconciles these diverse bodies of work by developing an experiment that investigated the effects of bias on listeners evaluations of migrants’ narratives. In the second study, in Chapter Four, I ethnographically investigate listening practices in interaction based on two years of fieldwork with a mutual aid group that hosts monthly pro se clinics to assist migrants with filing their asylum applications. An investigation of how participants in the group use various modes of listening as they co-construct asylum narratives, this study also addresses how listening is a vital yet underacknowledged component of bottom-up initiatives to expand access to asylum. The third study, in Chapter Five, goes further by exploring how nonhuman entities can also act as listening subjects of asylum speakers. Here I scrutinize a new US asylum policy whereby officials use text analytics to screen asylum applications for fraud. To do this I comparatively apply sentiment analysis, a form of text analytics, with a discourse analytic evaluation of a corpus of migrants’ narratives. This study shows how regimes of hearing can become embedded in technologies used by states to adjudicate asylum policies. In the conclusion, Chapter Six, I synthesize what I have learned from the studies and review my contributions to the linguistic study of asylum and to the social theory of listening and listenership. In doing so, I underscore the value of critically aware listening as a form of mutual aid and advocacy for asylum seekers.