Postdoctoral Affiliate
Leonie Schulte is a linguistic anthropologist and anthropologist of migration. Her work broadly explores themes of language policy, migration and displacement, language ideologies, time and temporality, labour and bureaucracy.
Leonie recently completed her DPhil in Anthropology at the School of Anthropology and Museum of Ethnography (SAME), Oxford, under the supervision of Zuzanna Olszewska and David Zeitlyn. Her doctoral thesis, Learning to Integrate, Waiting to Belong: Language, Time and Uncertainty Among Newcomers in Germany, examined the impacts of state-sanctioned language-integration requirements on newcomers’ socioeconomic (im)mobility. In so doing, Leonie’s work addresses the lingua-temporal dimensions of migration, displacement and policy-in-practice, exploring themes of temporal disruption, uncertainty, waiting, stuckness and boredom. Leonie’s doctoral research was generously supported by the SAME Scholarship Prize.
She has been conducting ethnographic research on the relationship between language, mobility and belonging in Berlin, Germany since 2013.
Leonie’s ongoing work is concerned with the relationship between language proficiency requirements and newcomer access to the German labour market, exploring how underlying societal expectations for linguistic integration, as well as bureaucratic and administrative procedures, intersect with newcomers’ own decisionmaking and future-building.
Website: leonieschulte.com
Twitter: @LeonieEMSchulte
Selected publications
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).
