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Questions surrounding mobility and migration are often connected to matters of language, citizenship, socio-economic status and class that are inherently unequal between developed and less-developed nation states. Scholars of geography and demographics have conceptualized both internal and external/international migration with "push" and "pull" factors as salient reasons for mobility. Traditional causes of external migration and so-called "push factors" include conflict, natural disaster, economic collapse, war, and transformations of socio-political systems as well as more promising employment options and decent incomes as contributing factors to external migration (Gonçalves & Schluter, 2020, p.3). Such "forced moves" affect largely disadvantaged populations that are at risk (i.e. asylum seekers, refugees, victims of human trafficking) (Castles, 2003). For individuals engaging in lifestyle migration and lifestyle mobilities and considered voluntary migration, their life circumstances are extremely different in that they are often equipped with "privileged preconditions" (Mancinelli, 2020, p.419) as "nomads from affluence" (Cohen, 1973) including for the most part, education, specialized skills, high standards of living and favorable visa regimes of their home countries (primarily in the West). These factors facilitate a range of choices in terms of where they travel to (i.e. place), also known as network capital, the kind of work they engage in and the rate of their mobility. Based on years of ethnographic work, in this paper, we investigate the different dimensions and discourses of lifestyle migration and lifestyle mobilities, both of which we argue presents a new trajectory and venue to explore within the field of migration linguistics (Borlongan, 2023). By focusing on two different case studies within Norway, we also draw on the notion of mediational repertoires (Lexander & Androutsopolous, 2021) as part of the communicative ecology in which jobs are found and where communication takes place among different types of migrants and their new permanent or temporary homes.

In "Voices of Modernity," Richard Bauman and Charles Briggs write their grand overview of the birth and maturation of modernity. Bauman and Briggs understand modernity as a discursive construction that opposes traditional and modern developments, ways of being, and modes of understanding. Central in this narrative project of modernity have been conceptions of language. A first step in founding modernity involved John Locke's imagination of language as a separate, autonomous domain of human intervention, standing apart from nature and from the social world. The second step was Locke's argument that language needed to be purified so that its use could be trusted in these two other domains. In order to make language a tool for the accurate exchange of empirical knowledge, and less dangerously prone to misunderstanding in the political sphere, it needed to be stripped from ambivalence, intertextuality, connotation, and emotion--qualities thought of by elites attributed to those they found ignorant, superstitious, lower class, indigenous, and rural. This paper discusses other papers found in this issue of "AILA Review," which focus on social mobility in the context of modernity, and examines M. Archer's social theory. The author of this paper suggests that the concern with social mobility highlights a particular quality of the issue, but also raises concerns that applied (and socio-) linguistics may have to address as a field.

Focusing on a YouTube performance by an emergent Finnish Somali rapper and the audience responses it has generated, this paper looks at ways in which rap music engages with the issue of belonging. Drawing on recent theorizations of belonging as a multi-dimensional, contingent and fluid process, along with sociolinguistic work on globalization and superdiversity, Finnish hip hop culture and popular cultural practices in social media, the paper investigates how belonging is performatively and multi-semiotically interrogated in its online context. It shows how rap can serve as a significant site and channel for new voices in turbulent social settings characterized by rapid social change and complex diversity, as well as provide affordances for critical responses to and interventions into xenophobic and nationalist debates and discourses of belonging.

This paper examines the ways in which the ethnic minority group the Tujia in Enshi, China, engages with heritage tourism, as a complex project of designing authenticity. Authenticity is taken as part of the chronotopic phenomena of identity making: the complex interplay of multiple, nonrandom timespace frames of discourses and semiotic performances which condition and offer new potentials to the meanings of authenticity. We show ethnographically the chronotopic nature of the local production of "authentic" heritage for tourism in Enshi. This leads to a historical grounding of the Tujia in China's nation-building and state politics of multiculturalism, which uncovers the anxiety of inauthenticity experienced by the Tujia in Enshi with their own minority status and cultural heritage, as well as their strategic chronotopic incorporation of both "authentic" and "inauthentic" aspects of local identity practices into a new order of authenticity afforded by heritage tourism as a form of new economy. Through such practices, we argue, the Tujia in Enshi chronotopically shift away from the periphery towards a new and reconfigured center of meaning-making, although this reappropriation of authenticity still must be understood within the "cunning of recognition" scheme, i.e. within the constraints of late modernity.

The challenge of contemporary South Africa is that of building a (post)nation of postracial equity in a fragmented world of a globalized ethical, economic and ecological meltdown. In this paper, we seek to explore the idea of multilingualism as a technology in the conceptualization of alternative, competing futures. We suggest that multilingualism is understood in terms of how encounters across difference are mediated and structured linguistically offer a space for interrupting colonial relationships. Furthermore, we argue that multilingualism should be approached as a site where colonial power dynamics of languages and speakers are troubled, and where the potential for new empowering linguistic mediations of the mutualities of our common humanity with different others are worked out.