Crossing boundaries: Investigating ‘fair’ in British parliamentary debates on im/migration

The paper is a by-product of a recent, interdisciplinary research project, bringing together various disciplines and methodologies, aiming at critically assessing the European Union’s impact on global justice by looking at different areas*. One of such areas is 'migration', broadly including asylum and refugees, an issue which has been raising a number of dilemmas with regard to justice for the EU and its member states as it hints at fundamental (and possibly) conflicting principles within the Union. Moving from the assumption that justice is a ‘human construction’ (Waltzer 1986), and that different theoretical conceptions of justice are at stake (Eriksen 2016), the paper will draw on methodological tools and techniques of corpus-assisted discourse analysis (inter alia, Partington, Morley and Haarman eds 2004, Baker 2006, Baker et al 2008, Bayley and Bevitori 2009, Miller et al 2014) to critically analyse how perspectives on ‘justice’ are linguistically and discursively construed in the House of Commons by looking at a specialized corpus of British parliamentary debates on ‘migration’, and how this can contribute to an interdisciplinary agenda. Although a number of critical discourse studies have focussed on some distinctive features of parliamentary discourses on ethnic issues (Wodak and Van Dijk 2000, Martín Rojo and Van Dijk 1997), studies from corpus-based perspectives have mostly concentrated on newspaper discourse (e.g. Baker et al 2008, Taylor 2014). The present paper will take further steps with the aim of examining discourses surrounding the issue of migration in a wider context of ‘global justice’, within this type of institutional and political domain, regulated by long-standing conventions (Bayley ed 2004, Ilie 2006), which may be considered as a privileged site of the ‘struggle over meanings’ (Miller 1997; see also Bevitori 2005, 2006,2007).