Transnational trajectories of multilingual workers: emerging geographies and spatialising practices of mutant sovereignty

ABSTRACT

This article discusses Volume 17 (1) where the editors (Garrido and Sabaté-Dalmau) push for a sociolinguistic, discourse-analytic and linguistic anthropological agenda in the study of transnational trajectories of multilingual workers and emergent entrepreneurial selves. I review this lens as suitable to document how language both mediates and becomes object of explicit attention/talk in institutionalised arrangements and subject-formation processes that enable such arrangements. In doing so, I focus on the alignments of market rationality, sovereignty, and citizenship that emerge across the articles in the volume, with focus on how they mutually constitute distinctive milieus of labour and life at the edge of emergence. I propose to think of these alignments via Ong's (2006. Neoliberalism as exception: Mutations in citizenship and sovereignty. Durham: Duke University Press.) analysis of variegated modes of neoliberal governmentality to articulate the set of paradoxes and contradictions identified by the authors of such articles. This, I argue, necessitates a kaleidoscopic framing of neoliberalism whereby the analysis of semiosis goes hand-in-hand with attention to dynamics of mutations in citizenship and sovereignty. I also suggest that such an exploration may also benefit from in-depth engagement with developments stemming from the spatial turn, for they help us map specific trajectories onto the patterns of global circulation of professionals, ideas about language, and resources.

KEYWORDS:

• Multilingual workers
• entrepreneurial selves
• citizenship
• sovereignty
• neoliberal governmentality
• spatial turn

Acknowledgements

This text emerges out of joint discussions and explorations within the Language, Space & Political Economy Group at UCL Institute of Education. Special thanks to Peter Browning, Yu (Aimee) Shi, and Yunpeng (Dery) Du.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Miguel Pérez-Milans http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6421-5180

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.