WP355 Communication challenges in the practice of diaspora among Sri Lankan Tamils

This paper builds on Brubaker’s (2005) conception of diaspora as practice and describes how a legacy of conflict feeds into basic communicative processes in the formation of diasporic spaces and identities within the Sri Lankan Tamil (SLT) community in London.  It begins with a review of research on the history and character of the SLT diaspora, and then turns to an initiative in which SLT university students in London sought to establish links with university students in Jaffna (the ‘Jaffna Project’).  The paper concentrates its analysis on the challenges involved in setting up effective cross-border channels of communication, using this as a point of entry into an understanding of the perceptions, complexities and metapragmatic dynamics entailed in forming diasporic relationships, not only between the UK and Sri Lanka but also among the London-based SLT young people themselves. The paper draws on a three-year Leverhulme-funded linguistic ethnography (2015-18), takes inspiration from Scollon’s (1998) ‘nested maxims of stance’, and closes with a summary of the broader processes instantiated in the relatively brief episode we examine, together with reflections on the significance of interactional sociolinguistics for the study of diaspora as practice.