Interculturality and intersectionality in asylum and refugee legal advice

In this contribution, I focus on the intercultural and multilingual context of asylum and refugee family reunion legal advice meetings in the UK, drawing on data collected during a linguistic ethnographic study of legal advice communication. In this specific context, a range of different identities are relevant to and manifest in the legal advice interactions. In legal advice encounters, the main participants’ identities of lawyer and client are the dominant identity positions. These are unequal roles, due to each participant’s relative (lack of) knowledge of, and access to, the legal culture (in the shape of texts, processes and language) framing these interactions. I show how power, dominance, and systemic advantage arising from the performance of these positionings are clearly visible at various (macro, meso, and micro) levels of analysis of these intercultural encounters. I also discuss how a range of other (cultural) identities are performed or referred to by both parties within these encounters, in moves that either consolidate, or seek to challenge or mitigate, the inherent inequality of the lawyer-client relationship