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

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

Engineering commodifiable workers: language, migration and the governmentality of the self

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

When linguistic capital isn’t enough: Personality development and English speakerhood as capital in India

Discourses of development, as well as popular understandings, hold that access to education in English is essential for alleviating inequality. As such, since the neoliberal reforms of the 1990s, India has witnessed a boom in not only private English coaching, but also NGO educational institutions. However, drawing on ethnographic data from an English and soft-skills training NGO in Delhi, this chapter argues that the conceptualization of linguistic capital does not fully capture how students invest in English in the hope of achieving future success. Besides the speculative capital (Tabiola & Lorente, 2017) that the language represents, and the shaping of neoliberal subjectivities through soft-skill training (Urciuoli, 2008; Allan, 2013) and “personality development”, students equally invest in the cultural capital of English speakerhood, that is, the “doing” and “being” of an English speaker, a notion deeply intertwined with class and caste, and which extends to encompass students’ bodies and “personalities”

Serving people

In this article, we explore the imbrication of service work with consumer markets and larger structures of inequality, including gender and class divides as well as social and economic differences. In line with current sociolinguistic scholarship on language and work, we are interested in the activity of serving people – both in the sense of being or becoming people who serve as well as in the practice of providing services to people. To do so, we offer an ethnographic account of the regime of labor surveillance as well as the daily work practices of female workers at a Starbucks coffeehouse in London, UK. We wonder about how employers organize the bodies of workers into signs, codes and messages that appeal to customers’ class expectations of this type of consumption. By documenting the regimentation and surveillance of labor at Starbucks, we inquire into the prescribed rules that guide ‘proper’ presentations of physicality; further, we ask questions about the mechanism through which the body at Starbucks is made to express its positioning within a structure of labor and its relationality to others, especially customers

Hard Work, Growth Mindset, Fluent English: Navigating Neoliberal Logics

A prominent feature of the shift to neoliberalism within education is the notion of neoliberal governmentality (Foucault, 1991), which positions individuals as autonomous, entrepreneurial selves. According to this logic, in the domain of education, students become responsible for their own success, which they ostensibly attain by acquiring commodifiable skills (Urciuoli, 2008). Such discourses, as many have documented, are particularly pervasive in Higher Education, but can also be observed in state-led or NGO educational institutions for job seekers. While the ways in which these discourses are reproduced by institutions – notably through the mobilisation of ‘buzzwords’ such as ‘growth mindset’– is imperative to explore, this chapter argues that it is equally important to address how students navigate them. Drawing on ethnographic data from an English-teaching educational NGO for disadvantaged students in Delhi, India, this chapter demonstrates not only the reproduction of neoliberal discourses within the institution, but also the cracks or ‘fissures’ (Gershon and LaDousa, 2019) in the logic that arise at certain moments. Importantly, it explores how students negotiate the contradiction between the neoliberal interpellation of the autonomous, enterprising self and their perception of the structural barriers to their success. Noting many scholars’ warning to avoid theorising neoliberalism as a totalising logic (Bell, 2019; De Korne, 2017) this chapter highlights the importance of observing the various practices of neoliberalism on the ground – the ‘uptake’ (Urla 2019a) of neoliberalism – paying attention to how they claim justification through an alliance with discourses of emancipation, and how students reproduce and potentially contest them

Frontal Functional Connectivity of Electrocorticographic Delta and Theta Rhythms during Action Execution Versus Action Observation in Humans

We have previously shown that in seven drug-resistant epilepsy patients, both reaching-grasping of objects and the mere observation of those actions did desynchronize subdural electrocorticographic (ECoG) alpha (8–13 Hz) and beta (14–30) rhythms as a sign of cortical activation in primary somatosensory-motor, lateral premotor and ventral prefrontal areas (Babiloni et al., 2016a). Furthermore, that desynchronization was greater during action execution than during its observation. In the present exploratory study, we reanalyzed those ECoG data to evaluate the proof-of-concept that lagged linear connectivity (LLC) between primary somatosensory-motor, lateral premotor and ventral prefrontal areas would be enhanced during the action execution compared to the mere observation due to a greater flow of visual and somatomotor information. Results showed that the delta-theta (<8 Hz) LLC between lateral premotor and ventral prefrontal areas was higher during action execution than during action observation. Furthermore, the phase of these delta-theta rhythms entrained the local event-related connectivity of alpha and beta rhythms. It was speculated the existence of a multi-oscillatory functional network between high-order frontal motor areas which should be more involved during the actual reaching-grasping of objects compared to its mere observation. Future studies in a larger population should cross-validate these preliminary results

Football players do not show "neural efficiency" in cortical activity related to visuospatial information processing during football scenes: an EEG mapping study

This study tested the hypothesis of cortical neural efficiency (i.e., reduced brain activation in experts) in the visuospatial information processing related to football (soccer) scenes in football players. Electroencephalographic data were recorded from 56 scalp electrodes in 13 football players and eight matched non-players during the observation of 70 videos with football actions lasting 2.5 s each. During these videos, the central fixation target changed color from red to blue or vice versa. The videos were watched two times. One time, the subjects were asked to estimate the distance between players during each action (FOOTBALL condition, visuospatial). Another time, they had to estimate if the fixation target was colored for a longer time in red or blue color (CONTROL condition, non-visuospatial). The order of the two conditions was pseudo-randomized across the subjects. Cortical activity was estimated as the percent reduction in power of scalp alpha rhythms (about 8-12 Hz) during the videos compared with a pre-video baseline (event-related desynchronization, ERD). In the FOOTBALL condition, a prominent and bilateral parietal alpha ERD (i.e., cortical activation) was greater in the football players than non-players (p &lt; 0.05) in contrast with the neural efficiency hypothesis. In the CONTROL condition, no significant alpha ERD difference was observed. No difference in behavioral response time and accuracy was found between the two groups in any condition. In conclusion, a prominent parietal cortical activity related to visuospatial processes during football scenes was greater in the football players over controls in contrast with the neural efficiency hypothesis