Leonie Schulte

Area(s) of Focus: Linguistic anthropology, anthropology of migration, time and temporality, labor, bureaucracy, policy, Europe, Germany

About Me: My research broadly explores the intersections of migration, language, policy, and time. Taking Germany as a core field site, I examine the ways in which state-sanctioned “integration” requirements impact newcomers’ socioeconomic (im)mobility. In so doing, my work addresses the lingua-temporal dimensions of migration, displacement, and policy-in-practice, exploring themes of temporal disruption, uncertainty, waiting, stuckness, and boredom. My ongoing work is concerned with the relationship between language proficiency requirements and newcomer access to the German labor market, exploring how underlying societal expectations for linguistic integration, as well as bureaucratic and administrative procedures, intersect with newcomers’ own decision-making and future-building. Before joining UW-Madison, I was an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow at University College London.

Affiliations:

Department of Anthropology, University of Wisconsin-Madison

School of Anthropology and Museum of Ethnography, University of Oxford

Publications:

– 2021 “Uncertainties Compound: How the Covid-19 Pandemic Exacerbates the Pressures of Linguistic Integration Facing Refugees in Germany”. B/Orders in Motion Corona Blog, European University Viadrina, Frankfurt. 22.07.2021. 1-3.

– 2020 “’Just Be Patient’? How Refugees and Migrants Learn German During Covid-19”. Diggit Magazine. 19.06.2020. 1-12.

– 2019 “Stancetaking and Local Identity Construction among German-American Bilinguals in Berlin,” in B. Schneider, T. Heyd, F. von Mengden (eds.), The Sociolinguistic Economy of Berlin: Cosmopolitan Perspectives on Language, Diversity and Social Space, DeGruyter.

– 2019 “Book Note: L. Lim, C. Stroud, L. Wee (eds.), The multilingual citizen: Towards a politics of language for agency and change. Bristol: Multilingual Matters, 2018. Pp. 320,” Language in Society 48(2): 326-328.

– 2019 “Language, Mobility and Belonging,” Journal of Language and Communication 68: 1-5 (with N. Hawker, K. Kozminska, R. Hall).

– 2017 “Introduction to the Special Issue on Language, Indexicality and Belonging,” Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford 9 (1): 1-7(with N. Hawker, K. Kozminska)

Courses:

– Anthro 300: Theory and Ethnography