I am interested in issues concerned with language, interaction, social identity, institutions, and political economy, with a focus on understanding how inequality operates across different social fields. My past research projects have involved the ethnographic and sociolinguistic study of language and cultural ideologies through discursive practices in institutional spaces in London, Madrid, Mainland China and Hong Kong vis-à-vis wider national and international policies shaped by: mobility and migration, shifting politics of national identity, neoliberalism, and institutional processes of commodification. I am currently exploring trajectories of social actors as they navigate professional fields and labor markets under the conditions of late capitalism.

Some of my forthcoming and latest publications include:

Pérez-Milans, M. & Soto, C. (under contract). Language, Ethnicity and the Politics of Struggle: A Critical Ethnography of Activism. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.

Pérez-Milans, M. & Guo (Grace) X. (2020). Hoping for success, becoming a spiritual subject: Converted returnees in China. Language, Culture and Society 2(2): 197-226.

Pérez-Milans, M. (in press). Futures, imagined cities and emerging markets: The semiotic production of professional selves. Social Semiotics. To appear in the Spring of 2021.

Pérez-Milans, M. (2020). Transnational trajectories of multilingual workers: Emerging geographies and spatializing practices of mutant sovereignty. International Journal of Multilingualism 17(1), 97-106.

Zhang, J. & Pérez-Milans, M. (2019). Structures of feeling in language policy: The case of Tibetan in China. Language Policy 18(1), 39-64.

Tollefson, James W. & Miguel Pérez-Milans (Eds.) (2018). The Oxford Handbook of Language Policy and Planning. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Soto, C. & Pérez-Milans, M. (2018). Language, neoliberalism and the commodification of pedagogy. Language and Intercultural Communication 18 (5): 490-506.