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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Parent work
Language Policy
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Volume
17
Issue / Number
Pages / Duration
239-259
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Publisher / Publishing institution
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
ISSN
1568-4555
1573-1863
1573-1863
Language
English
Created during FHNW affiliation
No
Strategic action fields FHNW
Publication status
Published
Review
Peer review of the complete publication
Open access category
Hybrid
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