From inside Jaume Plensa’s House of Knowledge, Bordeaux, France (Photo by Shirley Yeung)

In much of Western and Northern Europe, we find ourselves in the wake of a widespread retreat from—and backlash against—“multiculturalism”, with “Brexit” as one poignant and palpable example of how such backlashes materialize in real politics and in the lives of people. Similar trends are detectable in the Unites States, where imaginaries of walled borders are instrumentalised as promising a renewed sense of security against national “others”.

Instead of the discarded idea of “multiculturalism”, “integration” has emerged as a new and dominant immigration policy paradigm in many of these contexts, dramatically transforming frameworks and practices surrounding the social, legal, and professional inclusion of immigrants in Europe and abroad. A sustained critical and ethnographic engagement with “integration” paradigms and practices will be undertaken in an upcoming special issue of Multilingua; the title of the special issue is “Discourses of Integration: Language, Skills, and the Politics of Difference,” and it will be published in November 2016.

“Integration” needs to be critically examined due to the ubiquity of integration discourses in the migration policies and programs of various states. These discourses demonstrate the flexibility of the integration concept as well as its complexity. This makes the concept highly contested, exceedingly difficult to pin down, and, as such, tremendously productive for arguments across the political spectrum. While in some contexts “integration” invokes the promotion of tolerance, equity, migrant/human rights, and diversity, its proponents more often than not also espouse a rhetoric of activation which strives to cultivate, among immigrants, varied intercultural “capacities”, communication skills, and a sense of personal responsibility for social mobility (often reflecting particularly neoliberal concepts of agency). Furthermore, in the wake of this “integration trend”, the majority of states have placed a policy focus on both promoting and assessing the linguistic competences of migrants in national language(s), commonly arguing that linguistic integration cross-cuts and enables all other forms of inclusion, such as employment-related, educational, and cultural inclusion. In this way, concerns over how to regulate and ensure migrant “integration” both produce and rely on situated ideologies of language, intercultural communication, and mono- and multilingual repertoires (and social orders).

It is not the aim of the special issue to provide an exhaustive panorama of such measures and language policies, but to present succinct and in-depth case studies which address some of the aspects and dilemmas of “integration” across various sites and regional/national contexts: English-speaking Canada, Catalonia, Finland, and French- and German-speaking Switzerland. The contributions by Kori Allan; Maria Sabaté Dalmau; Maiju Strömmer; Shirley Yeung; and Mi-Cha Flubacher, Renata Coray, and Alexandre Duchêne explore and analyze the practices, discourses and dilemmas of “integration” as constituted by, and constitutive of, a (trans)national politics of difference—a politics which incites multiple strategies for managing social diversity across various linguistic and communicative domains. The contributions variously explore logics of integration in relation to agency, citizenship, employment, economic and linguistic investment, language acquisition, multicultural orders, nationhood, skill, and social networks.

• Yeung and Flubacher highlight in their introduction the salience of critical ethnographic analyses for understanding “integration” beyond policy realms. In particular, they propose to untangle this complex by describing three central processes inherent to regimes of “integration”: processes of categorization, selection, and activation.
• Allan examines practices of labour-market integration in multicultural Canada, analyzing a program which strives to enhance the marketability of professionally qualified immigrants through “soft skills” education.
• Sabaté Dalmau reveals how the hegemonic monolingual order of peninsular Spanish and its ideologies of integration are simultaneously reproduced and contested in the translinguistic practices of undocumented labor migrants in a call shop, or “locutorio,” in Catalonia, Spain.
• Flubacher, Coray & Duchêne examine how logics of “investment” construct differing entitlements to language instruction, and thus different potentials for integration, among migrants in an unemployment office in the Swiss canton of Fribourg/Freiburg.
• Strömmer demonstrates how the invisibility of cleaning work prevents migrants from developing the language skills that are deemed necessary for social mobility in Finland, revealing “integration” as an ideal that is difficult to achieve. An extended overview of this article is available here.
• Yeung looks at how recent migration policies in Switzerland yield two social types in Geneva, “migrants” and “expatriates,” which reflect, on the terrain of language and culture, contrasting assessments of risk and profitability.

In view of their in-depth ethnographic approaches, these contributions provide a close reading and nuanced understanding of the effects and consequences that integration policies and language regimes have on the ground – and for migrants, especially. In this, this special issue aims to offer a complementary reading to purely discourse oriented analyses of language policies, language testing and regimes and, in its totality, presents new dimensions to the study of integration.

The articles previewed here can already now be accessed through the Multilingua “Ahead of print” page. Make sure to watch out for the full special issue when it comes out in November as Multilingua 35(6).

The legitimate speaker in a transforming political economy

Abstract: It is the aim of this thematic session to discuss the relation between political economy and the construction of the legitimate speaker in different contexts of social life (Gal 1989). For this purpose, the legitimacy and “value” attributed to languages and their speakers is brought into connection with current transformations of the political economy. We are particularly interested in how these transformations affect and produce new ideologies, through which language practices and speakers are regimented and through which the access to resources as well as to prestigious positions in society is regulated (Bourdieu 1982). In short, the main focus lies on the articulation and negotiation of the legitimacy of languages and their speakers in the globalised world of late capitalism.

Since the late 1970s and early 1980s, an acceleration of political, economic and social trans­forma­tions has occurred. This process is known as “late capitalism”, which is characterized by the liberalization and deregulation of national markets on the one hand, the emergence of new markets and new economic actors on the other. Modernist ideologies based on concepts such as fixity, standardization and authenticity have been challenged in this process and are now competing with post-modernist ideologies of flexibility, variability and hybridity. These new ideologies are mirrored in the emergence of new technologies and of improved mobility that facilitate the global circulation of goods, capital, information and people. In different contexts of social life, such as the work place, schools, public administration, health care and other organizational contexts, these socioeconomic transformations have an impact on how speakers and their linguistic skills and practices are valued.

Sociolinguists have paid particular attention to the impact of these transformations with regard to language ideologies and language practices. Studies have been conducted in different spaces in which language is commodified for different purposes, varying from tourism and the globalized workplace of the new economy to sports, pop culture and art. “Language” was thus found to allow speakers and economic actors to reach transnational multilingual networks (Duchêne & Heller, in press). In other research contexts, “language” was capitalized on with regard to distinctive, local and “authentic” features of linguistic practices (Heller 2010). Finally, languages of wider communication were used to perform “internationalism”.

In line with these studies, we would like to initiate a discussion in this panel on the relation between political economy and the legitimate speaker. This discussion will be empirically driven, i.e. we will discuss the empirical question of how the political economy impacts on how speakers and languages are constructed and valued. Therefore, we would like to discuss if, why and under which conditions the transformations of the political economy lead to the emergence of new language ideologies and practices that construct languages, their speakers and publics as legitimate or not. We will also use the opportunity to draw on the main theme of the conference in opening up a discussion on the dichotomy between the city and rural areas with regard to the articulation of shifting language ideologies and practices. At the same time, we will pay attention to the ideologies and practices that have not been transformed by the shifts in the political economy, but have persisted – sometimes having remained as they were, but appearing under a new form.

Our thematic session appreciates interdisciplinary approaches to language and political economy as well as various methodologies. This will open the floor for contributions that address the relationship between political economic transformations and new language ideologies regarding the legitimacy of languages and their speakers from an empirical viewpoint. We would like to encourage an international discussion reaching beyond a Eurocentric analysis of the phenomena that is conducive to a multiplicity of perspectives.

How to contribute: We are addressing the readers of Language on the Move to learn about research from various places and disciplines. You will have to submit an abstract through the Sociolinguistics Symposium’s online submission tool (ConfTool) before 31 January 2012. Please contact any of us prior to submission and for further information: mi-cha.flubacher(at)unifr.ch; alfonso.delpercio(at)unisg.ch; duchenea(at)edufr.ch.

Key References:

Bourdieu, Pierre (1982). Ce que parler veut dire: l’économie des échanges linguistiques. Paris: Fayard.

Duchêne, Alexandre/Heller, Monica (in press). Language policy in the workplace. In Bernard Spolsky (ed.). Cambridge Handbook of Language Policy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Gal, Susan (1989). Language and political economy. Annual Review of Anthropology 18. 345-367.

Heller, Monica (2010). Language as resource in the globalized new economy. In Nik Coupland (ed.). Handbook of Language and Globalisation. Oxford: Blackwell. 350-365.