Speeding up, slowing down. Language, temporality and the constitution of migrant workers as labour force

Abstract

This article offers an original ethnographic documentation of employability schemes targeting migrants in contemporary Italy. It argues that analysts’ current theorisations of time and space compression do not help us understand the multiple temporalities that migrants are subjected to when crossing borders, including those of labour market regimes. This ethnographic account is informed by a scholarship of migration that has extensively documented how the acceleration of movement and access to language, citizenship or work co-exist with experiences of waiting, elongation, withdrawal and delay – processes that complicate our understanding of the temporal regimes migrants are subjected to. Through a thick documentation of the experiences of unemployed migrants, job counsellors and other social actors in employability programmes in Rome, this article argues that both speeding up and slowing down are technologies of temporal management, including time–space compression, elongation and partitioning. These technologies regulate the time and speed of migrants’ incorporation into the labour market and allow the performance of processes of differential inclusion.