I am interested in issues concerned with language, interaction, social identity, institutions, and political economy, with a strong focus on understanding how inequality operates across different social fields.  

My research projects have involved the ethnographic and sociolinguistic study of communicative practices, institutional policies and wider social processes of change in London, Madrid, Mainland China and Hong Kong, with focus on: a) mobility, multilingualism and migration in educational settings; b) shifting politics of national identity; c) neoliberalism and the commodification of language and culture; and d) trajectories of social actors as they navigate professional fields and labor markets in the new globalised economy.    

Some of my 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.

Guo Xiaoyan & Pérez-Milans, M. (in preparation). Markets, selves, and hopes: Returnees and the new global city in China. In: Gao Shuang & Wang Xuan (Eds.), Transnationalizing Chineseness: Language, Mobility, Diversity. London: Multilingual Matters.

Pérez-Milans, M. (in press). Transnational trajectories of multilingual workers: Emerging geographies and spatializing practices of mutant sovereignty. In: Maria Rosa Garrido & Maria Sabaté-Dalmau (Eds.) (2020), Transnational Trajectories of Multilingual Workers: Sociolinguistic Approaches to Emergent Entrepreneurial Selves. Special Issue in International Journal of Multilingualism 17 (1).

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.