Language Investment and Employability: An Introduction

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

“…My account is informed by a migration scholarship that has extensively documented how the acceleration of movement and access to language, citizenship and work co-exist with experiences of waiting, elongation, withdrawal and delay: processes that complicate our understanding of the temporal regimes that migrants are subjected to (Codó and Garrido 2014;Yeung and Flubacher 2016). Through a thick documentation of the experiences of unemployed migrants, job counsellors and other social actors I encountered in employability programmes in Rome, Italyand especially of their investments, reasoning and speculation around language learning (Duchêne and Daveluy 2015) and access to employment (Flubacher, Coray, and Duchêne 2017) -I argue 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, or rhythm and intensity, of migrants into the workforce and allow the performance of what Mezzadra and Neilson (2013) have come to call processes of differential inclusion.…”