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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 231

Part of Session 125: The legitimate speaker in a transforming political economy (Other abstracts in this session)

The Neo-liberal Subject of Immigrant Language Training Programs in Canada

Authors: Haque, Eve
Submitted by: Haque, Eve (York University, Canada)

With an official national history firmly embedded in immigrant settler narratives, Canada has always grappled with questions of regulating migration and settlement.  Since Prime Minister Trudeau’s celebratory declaration that Canada was “multicultural within a bilingual framework” (1971), and the corresponding shifts in immigration patterns – particularly the shift south for migrant source countries – language has played an increasingly important role in the regulation of migrants and borders through Canadian immigration and language training policy.  Within the current context of global neo-liberal governmentality, the Canadian state has turned decisively to language as a technology for the regulation of immigration and settlement.

In this paper, I want to apply Foucault’s notion of governmentality as the “conduct of conduct” to examine two things (Foucault, 1982).  First, how the government has used language to control immigration patterns through, for example, an increase in migration points awarded for official language competency.  And second, to examine how immigrant language training policy, benchmarks and curriculum implementation documents serve to “responsibilize” the immigrant language learner as a “technology of the self” (Burchell, 1996).  Thus, the immigrant language learner is subject not only to institutional processes of management, but are also constituted as responsible immigrant language learners in terms of how they self-manage their own learning and mastery of benchmarks and ESL curriculum.  In addition to an analysis of these policies and documents which organize immigrant language training programs, the data for this paper also includes 25 interviews with immigrant language training program ESL teachers as well as observations of their classrooms.  Ultimately, this paper argues that governmentality provides a productive analytical approach which can foreground how technologies of institutional power interact with technologies of the self to constitute the neoliberal subject of global migration through language.

References:

Burchell, G. (1996). Liberal government and techniques of the self.  In, Andrew Barry, Thomas Osborne & Nikolas Rose (Eds.), Foucault and Political Reason: Liberalism, Neo-liberalism and Rationalities of Government (pp. 19-36).  Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Foucault, M. (1982). The Subject and Power.  In, R. Dreyfus & P. Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond structuralism and hermeneutics (pp. 208-226).  Chicago: University of Chicago Press.