Research

Abstracts 

"Be Like Water": The Adjustment Practices of Tibetan Immigrants to Paris (October 2025)

This paper attempts to explore how integrationist immigration discourses play out in real life, by examining the different multilinguistic approaches used by Tibetan migrants as they adjust to life in Paris. I explore how social values become emotionally embodied over time as we learn language, meaning that those who speak multiple languages must negotiate multiple, simultaneously felt realities on a day-to-day basis. An awareness of the mechanisms behind the acquisition of languages and their associated value systems can therefore help us to understand how acculturation happens within immigrant communities. I give a brief overview of the Tibetan and French sociocultural milieus, and highlight the complexity, variety and importance of multilingual narratives in the wider context of migration policy-making. Specifically, I examine instances of code-switching to reveal potentially “sticky” moments of emotional charge for a given term, indicating points of connection forged with the new country, or else maintained with the old.

Keywords: Tibet, France, multilingualism, emotion, code-switching

“The Past is a Foreign Country”: How Insights from Modern Multilingual Migration Research Can Inform our Understanding of the History of Emotions (forthcoming)

This paper draws important parallels between the study of the history of emotions, and ongoing work into adjustment practices among immigrant groups. Where historical accounts of emotional regime shifts can often only be gleaned from textual sources, modern migrants are picking their ways through complex, bumpy and dissonant worlds through the various languages at their disposal. Whether between people of different countries, religions, regions or generations, human communication is strange, convoluted and imperfect. The emotion-words that anchor them are similarly mercurial, personal and imprecise, but they also represent real touchstones which people hold within them throughout their lives. If the past is a foreign country, then looking at how people from so-called “foreign countries” negotiate the new cultures they migrate to can help us in turn understand how emotions were being felt in the past. Words may only offer us snapshots of lived experiences, but if we collect enough, then we can begin to piece together, like a detective on a corkboard, a wider picture of a life lived. 

Keywords: emotion, multilingualism, immigration, history

"Make Space": The DJ as Decolonialiser (forthcoming)

In the safe-zone of the club, new realities can be created and experienced far more viscerally by audience members than in most other settings. The content, tonality, provenance and danceability of the songs played in DJs’ setlists make space for new futures, ones which break down old colonial hierarchies, with the only criterion for acceptance by the group that the music “goes hard.” Today’s global accessibility to sounds from a wealth of disparate locations and timeframes means that powerful juxtapositions can be made “in the mix,” creating a potentially revolutionary, flattened, meritocratic space in the process.

I focus on one particular artist – Pakistan-born, London-based DJ Ahadadream, and his May 2023 Boiler Room set – to explore how powerful ideological messages can be disseminated and accepted by a crowd, through the shared rituals of dance and participation in longstanding (British) rave culture tropes. By playing UK-Ghanaian raps straight after Pakistani Qawwālī classics; mixing samples from 90s illegal warehouse jungle raves into South African kwaito tunes; or adding Indian dhol drum effects into contemporary ItaloDisco tracks, Ahadadream leads the crowd through an associative journey which crosses geographic, temporal and societal divides, in so doing creating a modern-day ecstatic ritual in which his key message of inclusion can sink in. Combining notions such as Foucault’s heterotopic body; Merleau-Ponty’s corporeal perception; Bey’s revolutionary idea of the Temporary Autonomous Zone (TAZ); and Lévi-Strauss’ insights into the important role the shaman plays as a site of emotional projection for a community; I explore how the joyous force unleashed by the DJ can generate an experience of a genuinely interconnected global society, which can begin to dissolve colonial separations, in line with Bhabha’s idea of gathering as a point of assembly for peoples scattered by empires. As Ahadadream’s track declares, “There’s space at the front – make space.”

Keywords: DJ, club, Ahadadream, decolonialisation, globalised