Maria Sabaté i Dalmau's critical sociolinguistic ethnography examines alternative spaces of transnationalism, looking at how they are defined by language, migration, and information and communication technologies (ICTs). Her longitudinal research explores the discursive practices and social organization of migrants who use and operate a telecommunications services center—a call shop, or locutorio—in the outskirts of Barcelona, Spain. Through interviews with locutorio workers and users and analyses of documentary materials, the author investigates how those at the social margins experience exclusion and resist institutional regimentation. In doing so, she also illuminates the social structuration processes of transnational populations while challenging established views on their mobilities and life trajectories.

The author frames her research in Castell's theories on the role of ICTs in networking capital and knowledge circulation. She explains how, within transnational networks, migrants have become ‘key transnational providers and consumers of digital knowledge and information’ (p. 10). Yet, when marginalized, they must resort to de Certeausian resistance tactics against anti-migrant governmentality and operate in alternative spaces, such as the locutorios, to skirt exclusionary social orders. Sabaté i Dalmau views this resistance as Giddens does social agency, that is, as ‘the capacity to react to and to act upon exclusionary institutional regimes’ (p. 176). That these regimes are largely linguistic explains her grounding in Blommaert's sociolinguistics of globalization.

Through this critical lens, the author argues that migrant transnational populations use ICTs, often creatively, together with heteroglossic discursive practices, to mobilize their resources and reinsert themselves into localized economic and sociopolitical orders. Those orders, she argues, and the social spaces in which they form—in this case, the locutorios—can then become for migrants sites of individual and collective agency. For this reason she also contends that such spaces are ideal vantage points from which to study the discursive practices and ideologies of marginalized communities. In particular, she shows how locutorios become stays against social exclusion and nodes in a transnational network where information is redistributed and social infrastructures are negotiated. They are also sites where transnational migrants’ linguistic repertoires, constrained by exclusionary communicative barriers in so-called mainstream society, become resources for enacting identity and building network capital. And it is through these resources, she contends, that migrants come to negotiate the complex power dynamics and linguistic regimes of both the alternative spaces they occupy and the wider societies they seek to inhabit.

This insightful, fine-grained research reminds us how our experiences in a networked society are complexly and multifariously mediated by language and technology. Yet, for those at the margins, whose numbers continue to rise through widening transnational migration and socioeconomic inequalities, those mediations can both legitimize and delegitimize. This itself has warranted Sabaté i Dalmau's critical attention, as it should ours, to the tactical ways the marginalized resist exclusion.