Marketing university students as mobile multilingual workers: the emergence of neoliberal lifestylers

ABSTRACT

Under the conditions of the globalized new economy, European universities have become profit-making institutions. They envision students as mobile workers-to-be whose employability chances depend on self-enterprising and on self-responsibilization for foreign-language command, and they now compete in the educational marketplace by targeting them with an increased offer of internationalized English-mediated ‘multilingual’ degrees. This paper explores attitudes towards these marketed/marketable studenthood identities by 30 Catalan/Spanish-speaking students enrolled in four Multilingual Studies degrees in Barcelona. The data include students’ audio-recorded life-narrative interviews and online ‘life-after-graduation’ stories collected during a two-year ethnography (2011–2013). The results show that students engage in institutional neoliberal regimes which train them in the academic/professional, linguistic and personhood profiles required in global employment niches. They inhabit unique ‘multilingualized’ identities, with English as their professional/socialization lingua franca, and they self-attribute open-minded ‘civic-citizenship’ values, with an ‘innate’ capacity to engage with Otherness. They also invest in ‘cosmopolitan’ trajectories which blend ways of being, working and enjoying leisure in the transnational arena. This reveals how students position themselves in the precarious job marketplace, in autobiographic accounts of experience, which contributes to understanding youth identity projections as elite entrepreneurial lifestylers pointing to newer practices of socioeconomic competition, distinction and stratification at university.

KEYWORDS:

• Higher education
• employability regimes
• multilingual policies
• neoliberal identities
• cosmopolitan lifestyles

Acknowledgements

I’m thankful to the informants who participated in this study, as well as to Michael Kennedy, for his help with it. Many thanks too, to Maria Rosa Garrido-Sardà and for the two reviewers for their insightful feedback on previous versions of this article. Any shortcomings are mine.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Maria Sabaté-Dalmau (MA in Linguistic Anthropology, UofT; MA and PhD in English Philology, UAB) is associate professor at the Universitat de Lleida (Catalonia), where she conducts critical sociolinguistic ethnographic research on mobility, multilingualism, and transnational linguistic identities. She is a board member of the Catalan Sociolinguistics Society. Her work includes Migrant Communication Enterprises: Regimentation and Resistance (Multilingual Matters, 2014).

ORCID

Maria Sabaté-Dalmau http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6058-7227

Correction Statement

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

Notes

1 No confidential information has been displayed. The informants’ data was gathered with informed consent. All names are pseudonyms.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness, under Grant MINECO FFI2016-76383-P; and the Catalan Agency for Management of University and Research Grants, under Grant AGAUR 2017 SGR 1522.