‘Eat bread with every meal, preferably wholemeal bread’: Governmentality, normativity and the management of migration in Sweden
Prof. Tommaso M. Milani
Professor of Multilingualism
University of Gothenburg
Abstract:
The aim of this talk is to present some preliminary results from a larger interdisciplinary policy ethnographic project that investigates courses in civic orientation for newly arrived adult migrants in Sweden. Offered in the main languages spoken by migrants (e. g. Arabic, Farsi, Tigrinja), courses in civic orientation are geared to facilitating newly arrived adult migrants’ entrance into the labour market and Swedish society by providing ‘basic understanding of Swedish society’ with the help of ‘dialogue and reflection’ (Regulation 2010:1138). With the help of ethnographic data, we illustrate how civic orientation is not simply an educational provision that gives migrants information about Swedish laws and regulations or that presents different perspectives on, say, food practices as equally valid. Rather, we show the presence of a subtly normative element, one in which what Swedes eat is something that migrants need to acquire and emulate. More specifically, drawing upon Foucault’s (1991) notion of governmentality and biopower, we illustrate how adult migrants are encouraged to undergo an internal overhaul, abandoning their unhealthy habits, changing their routines, eating and drinking differently, and adopting a different lifestyle through which they can become healthy ‘Swedish’ citizens. Ultimately, through an analysis of civic orientation, it is possible to give a granular description of the ways in which Swedish biopolitics play out in relation to the management of migration.
Bio:
Tommaso M. Milani is Professor of Multilingualism at the University of Gothenburg; he also holds visiting professorships at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg and Umeå University. He is interested in the ways in which power imbalances are (re)produced and/or contested through semiotic means. His main research foci are: language ideologies, language policy and planning, linguistic landscape, as well as language, gender and sexuality. He is co-editor of the journal Language in Society.