Delayed, Accelerated, Racialized: Exploring Neoliberal Temporal Encounters in Language Learning across Institutional Boundaries

Abstract

Drawing on ethnographic data from eight adult learners partaking in a Swedish for Immigrants class, this article demonstrates that institutional practices are shaped by two neoliberal rationalities: market orientation and self-speakerism. The school’s market-oriented logic is materialized through regulated and accelerated access to work. At the same time, the ideology of self-speakerism operates through the slowing down of learners’ institutional time in the name of linguistic improvement. I argue that acceleration and slowing down both function as “technologies of temporal management” (Del Percio, 2021), governing not only migrants’ learning trajectories, but also the regulation of the Swedish labor market. These neoliberal temporal logics produce lived experiences of uneven temporal mobilities, which are materialized in waiting and feelings of being stuck. Lastly, I argue that the learners’ differential access to and navigation of these regimes produce lived experiences of racial time (Mills, 2020), through which racialized hierarchies of access, mobility, and belonging are reproduced.