Engineering commodifiable workers. language, migration and the governmentality of the self
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Authors
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Publication date
2017
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Type
01A - Journal article
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Language Policy
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Volume
17
Issue / Number
Pages / Duration
239-259
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Springer
Place of publication / Event location
London
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Abstract
This article examines the strategies and forms of expertise on language and communication mobilized to engineer commodifiable migrant workers. Drawing on an ethnographic account of counselling practices in a state-run Italian job guidance centre for newly arrived migrants, I examine the calculations, tactics, and forms of expertise on language and communication mobilised by job counsellors. Here, I illustrate how these tactics regulate, or “police”, migrants’ communicational conduct and promote their socialisation into a desirable professional self that can be commodified on the Italian job market. In doing so, I demonstrate that the state’s investment in the policing of migrants and the commodifiability of their labour is an investment in a larger project of societal consent for both the arriving migrants and for the forms of precarity they are believed to embody in Italy. At the same time, I argue this state agenda should not make us blind to the fact that the individuals and actors, including professional counsellors, working in these job guidance centres seem ready to invest a great deal into these spaces in the interest of pursuing another, more emancipated agenda. Indeed, in my paper I aim to demonstrate that job guidance centres are also spaces of hope where people work to support migrants who are preparing themselves for a viable future and attempting to create the practical framework for their life projects.
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ISBN
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1568-4555
1573-1863
1573-1863
Language
English
Created during FHNW affiliation
No
Strategic action fields FHNW
Publication status
Published
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Peer review of the complete publication
Open access category
Hybrid
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Citation
Del Percio, A. (2017). Engineering commodifiable workers. language, migration and the governmentality of the self. Language Policy, 17, 239–259. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10993-017-9436-4