Sociolinguistic regimes across an asylum-seeking centre: L2 learners doing togetherness via a socio-technological platform

This article investigates the digital literacy doings and affordances of those people who fall into the asylum seeking category. It first provides the reader with a snapshot of current trends in the study of language and contemporary global, networked societies. From there, it will move on to present some empirical data from an ethnographic interpretive study on the negotiation of sociolinguistic regimes across the spaces of an asylum-seeking centre located in Flanders, the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium. The article concludes by considering whether the category of ‘L2 learner in need of integration’ is a valid category for addressing the guests at the centre or whether socio-technological platforms like the one presented here do hold a transformative potential that allows digitally literate mobile subjects who were homogeneously relegated to the category of ‘L2 learners in need of civic integration’ to move beyond this homogenising categorisation.