난민임의 의사소통적 구성: 국내 난민 면담에 대한 민족지적 연구 = The Communicative Construction of Refugeehood: An Ethnographic Study of Interview with Asylum-seekers in South Korea

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This paper is a legal ethnography on the communicative aspects of interview with asylum-seekers in the Refugee Status Determination procedures (hereinafter “RSD”). Due to the problems that occurred during the interpretation, due process in the administrative procedures has been constantly broken down into. Interpretation skill issue may be considered most crucial, however, the issue of interview with asylum-seekers needs to be placed in the context of “how the interview itself is conducted”. Nevertheless, this aspect has rarely been addressed in South Korea. Using mainly qualitative research methods, this study explores the characteristics of interpreter-mediated interview with asylum-seekers, and linguistic and social interaction of the roles given to the actors in the RSD, thereby examining the construction process of asylum-seekers` ‘refugeehood’ and the implications of the analysis in terms of conducting the interview. Interview with asylum-seekers is primarily characterized in the respect that interpreter-mediated communication occurs in the institutional environment between interviewer and asylum-seekers who do not share socio-cultural backgrounds each other. Based on these characteristics and the analysis on the role performances and interactions among an interviewer, an asylum-seeker, and an interpreter, in chapter Ⅲ it identifies the context of the main problems on how the interview has currently been conducted and suggests possible improvements to consider. On the basis of these empirical cases, this microscopic review ultimately aims to argue that asylum-seekers` statement during the interview is not neutrally created at all and his or her refugeehood from the interview is actually ‘co-constucted’ in the process of linguistic and social interactions of the actors. The term of ‘co-construction of refugeehood’ in this regard means that the actors are assigned “a distributed responsibility” in the context of conflicting statements of aslyum-seekers and other interview-related problems during the RSD.