{"title":"“We Kiss Everyone’s Hands to Get a Permanent Job, but Where Is It?”: The Failure of the Social Inclusion Narrative for Refugees","authors":"Hanna Svensson","doi":"10.17645/si.v11i4.6944","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Humanitarian migrants, while required to prove their vulnerability to gain entry to a country of settlement, rapidly become subject to an integration narrative where self‐sufficiency is the primary aim. In the integration narrative, language learning is conceptualised as an individual endeavour that will inevitably lead to employment, while linguistic fluency and social inclusion tend to be presented as the inevitable outcomes of engagement in the labour market. Lack of success is attributed to individual failures and is typically addressed through policies designed to incentivise the individual to try harder. Drawing on a qualitative study involving refugees, language teachers and settlement brokers in New Zealand and Sweden, this article critiques the integration narrative by contrasting it with the voices of those who have sought to conform to the ideal narrative yet failed to reach the idealised outcomes. Using M. M. Bakhtin’s notions of monologue and epic dis‐ courses, it challenges the view of language learning and integration as “a test of virtuosity” (Sullivan, 2012, p. 49) which the deserving are guaranteed to pass. Instead, it argues that a range of exclusions prevents successful language acquisition, labour market entry, and social engagement and that incentives, while potentially increasing the individual’s desire for success, are insufficient unless structural inequalities are addressed.","PeriodicalId":37948,"journal":{"name":"Social Inclusion","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2000,"publicationDate":"2023-07-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"1","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Social Inclusion","FirstCategoryId":"90","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.17645/si.v11i4.6944","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q2","JCRName":"SOCIAL SCIENCES, INTERDISCIPLINARY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 1
Abstract
Humanitarian migrants, while required to prove their vulnerability to gain entry to a country of settlement, rapidly become subject to an integration narrative where self‐sufficiency is the primary aim. In the integration narrative, language learning is conceptualised as an individual endeavour that will inevitably lead to employment, while linguistic fluency and social inclusion tend to be presented as the inevitable outcomes of engagement in the labour market. Lack of success is attributed to individual failures and is typically addressed through policies designed to incentivise the individual to try harder. Drawing on a qualitative study involving refugees, language teachers and settlement brokers in New Zealand and Sweden, this article critiques the integration narrative by contrasting it with the voices of those who have sought to conform to the ideal narrative yet failed to reach the idealised outcomes. Using M. M. Bakhtin’s notions of monologue and epic dis‐ courses, it challenges the view of language learning and integration as “a test of virtuosity” (Sullivan, 2012, p. 49) which the deserving are guaranteed to pass. Instead, it argues that a range of exclusions prevents successful language acquisition, labour market entry, and social engagement and that incentives, while potentially increasing the individual’s desire for success, are insufficient unless structural inequalities are addressed.
期刊介绍:
Social Inclusion is a peer-reviewed open access journal, which provides academics and policy-makers with a forum to discuss and promote a more socially inclusive society. The journal encourages researchers to publish their results on topics concerning social and cultural cohesiveness, marginalized social groups, social stratification, minority-majority interaction, cultural diversity, national identity, and core-periphery relations, while making significant contributions to the understanding and enhancement of social inclusion worldwide. Social Inclusion aims at being an interdisciplinary journal, covering a broad range of topics, such as immigration, poverty, education, minorities, disability, discrimination, and inequality, with a special focus on studies which discuss solutions, strategies and models for social inclusion. Social Inclusion invites contributions from a broad range of disciplinary backgrounds and specializations, inter alia sociology, political science, international relations, history, cultural studies, geography, media studies, educational studies, communication science, and language studies. We welcome conceptual analysis, historical perspectives, and investigations based on empirical findings, while accepting regular research articles, review articles, commentaries, and reviews.