ABSTRACT
Displacement, as discussed in this chapter, is a fairly recently recognised phenomenon within studies of migration, where people flee from their local environment to another location inside their own country, rather than to another country as refugees. The phenomenon occurs as a result of involuntary departure usually because of conflict, rapid onset disaster, or climate change. These conditions cause not only spatial dislocation, but also a range of associated disruptions in the linguistic ecology, epistemology, and cosmology of affected people. These in turn result in psycho-social ruptures for individuals and communities (e.g., Dunn 2014). By far the majority of people affected by dislocation are marginalised communities and the locations to which they flee are often remote borderlands. Here the circumstances of vulnerability may be overlooked by national governments, international agencies, and researchers. The focus in this chapter is to draw attention to the paucity of research, including both migration studies and linguistics (sociolinguistics and educational linguistics) in regards to people who have been displaced inside their countries or in the porous border regions of adjoining countries. It is also to point towards the need for cautious research among communities that have suffered ongoing cycles of displacement, and how such research may contribute to ethical understandings of the relationship among conflict and or disaster, marginality, vulnerability, and the role of language(s), well-being (Polzer and Hammond 2008), and (dis)citizenship (see also Ramanathan 2013).
