Learning to be Swedish: governing migrants in labour-market projects

This article focuses on adult learning in labour-market projects targeting unemployed migrants in Sweden. Drawing on a Foucauldian analysis of governmentality, the results of the study problematize the ways that such projects produce individualizing discourses – targeting individuals, constructing them as responsible for their position as unemployed. The project’s target groups are generally defined not on the basis of ethnicity as such, but rather using terms such as non-Nordic background, foreign born and immigrants. However, two groups considered especially problematic are constructed through ethnicity: Somali and Roma people. The notion of social competency is analysed here as a way of constructing the unemployed migrants as not yet employable. Another significant result concerns the notion of gender equality, which makes migrants governable because it constructs boundaries between Swedishness and Otherness. In line with this rationality, the targeted migrants are governed towards Swedishness through learning gender equality. These results raise a number of issues of great concern for the inclusion of migrants in the labour market, as they highlight a paradoxical relationship between the inclusive ambitions of interventions targeting unemployed migrants and the ethnicized discourses of ‘Othering’ that imbue these learning practices.