{"id":22188,"date":"2020-12-14T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2020-12-14T07:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/swissmig.wordpress.com\/?p=22188"},"modified":"2020-12-14T08:00:00","modified_gmt":"2020-12-14T07:00:00","slug":"welcome-work-hospitality-and-the-mediation-of-migrant-mobility-in-swiss-integration-policy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/swissmig.unine.ch\/?p=22188","title":{"rendered":"Welcome Work: Hospitality and the Mediation of Migrant Mobility in Swiss Integration Policy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Author(s) : Shirley Ceensem Yeung<\/h3>\n

Source : https:\/\/knowledge.uchicago.edu\/record\/2614<\/a><\/h3>\n

Abstract: <\/strong><\/p>\n

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“Since 2005, Switzerland\u2019s federal Integration policy has structured the social inclusion of (im)migrants in the country; legal settlement, access to social aid, and naturalization itself are contingent on discretionary judgments as to whether a migrant is linguistically and culturally \u201cintegrated\u201d into Swiss society. While public and policy discourse frame the concept of \u201cintegration\u201d as a more inclusive departure from Switzerland\u2019s historically \u201cassimilationist\u201d migration policy, discussion has too often overlooked how the shifting and productively vague notion of \u201cintegration\u201d constitutes a terrain of social practice\u2014one where the tense, mutually constitutive relationship between reception and regulation, ethics and politics, is negotiated by a host of mobility mediators. Positioned in between migrant and citizen, these persons, often humanitarian volunteers (b\u00e9n\u00e9voles) and \u201cmigrants\u201d themselves, teach and broker the cultural-linguistic competences of integration while bridging, too, the ethical and economic dimensions of cross-border mobility. This dissertation draws on 14 months of ethnographic research, conducted in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, among volunteer workers, French language teachers, and undocumented persons distributed across a network of migrant aid agencies, NGOs, and centers of migrant-education in Geneva. The dissertation asks: How is the concept of \u201cintegration\u201d in Geneva constructed and practiced? How does its practice enable or foreclose migrant legality? How do situated mediators broker migrants\u2019 economic and social mobility through acts of teaching and linguistic-cultural socialization? What forms of hospitality or solidarity do these envisage? And, in particular, what semiotic processes render the differences\u2014the categories of mobility, person, and (in)hospitable practice\u2014by which integration is imagined and performed? In analyzing everyday practices of migrant socialization, this dissertation advances the concept of “welcome work”\u2014the forms of ethically-charged interstitial brokerage and mediation that aim to articulate migrant with state and citizen. Exploring the ironies and ambivalences of Swiss Integration policy, the dissertation chapters track varied scales and terrains of (in)hospitality: the social and policy distinctions between various types of national strangers\/guests (and their relationship to the state\u2019s integration criteria); the moral-economic imagination of the French language in night classes for precarious migrant job-seekers; the cultivation of migrants\u2019 aesthetic sensibilities via pedagogies of \u201cculture\u201d; and practices of legal mediation by which migrant legality, presence, and Swiss jurisdiction itself are brokered and made. By examining the work of intermediaries on the integration front-line, this dissertation contributes to scholarship on mobility and migration by attending to the interstitial spaces of reception\u2014the space between migrant and state that allows for their articulation to become conceivable in terms of \u201cguest\u201d and \u201chost.\u201d In this space, \u201cwelcome work\u201d becomes a salient terrain where mediators and migrants alike attempt to reconcile hospitable aspirations and ethics with a national politics of crisis management and border closure.”<\/div>\n
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Keywords: <\/strong>Ethics; Hospitality; Integration policy; Language ideology; Migration Brokerage; Undocumented Mobility<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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