Shifting discourses of migrant incorporation at a time of crisis: understanding the articulation of language and labour in the Catalan non-governmental sector

Abstract

In this article, we investigate the discursive transformations that occurred at a migrant-support non-governmental organisation (NGO) located in the outskirts of Barcelona (Catalonia, Spain) and how they intersect with broader sociopolitical and economic processes. In particular, we focus on the revamping of the key notions of language and labour in the institutional imagination of migrant incorporation processes. Our data was collected over the course of a six-year period (2007–2012) and consisted of in-depth interviews with multilingual NGO users and institutional agents, ethnographic narratives and institutional documents. We trace a discursive shift from ‘integration-through-labour’ during the economic boom to an official ‘integration-through-language’ to gain access to paid employment in the early years of the recession, and recently, with the worsening of the crisis, a paradigm that focuses on language-cum-affective labour to craft relational and moral selves through voluntary work in local NGOs.

Keywords:

• institutional discourse
• non-governmental and voluntary organisations
• migrant incorporation
• language ideology
• neoliberal subjectivities

Acknowledgements

We heartily thank the informants who have shared their everyday lives and biographical trajectories with us over the years. Without them, this article would not have been possible. Moltes gràcies! We would also like to acknowledge the insights offered by the editor Miguel Pérez-Milans and two anonymous reviewers. Any remaining shortcomings and errors remain, of course, our own.

Funding

This work was supported by the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación [grant number HUM2007-61864/FILO], [grant number FFI2011-26964]; Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona [grant number 2008UAB 2015]; and Agència de Gestió d'Ajuts Universitaris i de Recerca [grant number 2007ARAF1 00018].

Notes

1. Throughout the article, the names of informants, organisations and cities have been changed in order to ensure confidentiality.

2. Data source: www.idescat.cat. Retrieved 6 May 2014.

3. Data source: www.idescat.cat. Retrieved 6 May 2014.

4. Data from Idescat.cat. Retrieved 30 April 2014.

5. This was the focus of funded research project ‘The management of multilingualism in institutional spaces’ (HUM2007-61864/FILO), headed by Dr Melissa Moyer at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.

6. During the dictatorship and early democracy, many of these Catholic activists filled the gaps of a weak social state and campaigned for welfare rights in a Keynesian-type of state (see Casañas, 1989 for more).

Additional information

Funding

Funding: This work was supported by the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación [grant number HUM2007-61864/FILO], [grant number FFI2011-26964]; Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona [grant number 2008UAB 2015]; and Agència de Gestió d'Ajuts Universitaris i de Recerca [grant number 2007ARAF1 00018].