Conference Program

Skill development and language courses for migrants are often portrayed as neutral and empowering approaches that facilitate participation, employability, and social integration. In Italy, programs offering Initial Vocational Education and Training (IVET) and Italian as a second language (L2), often provided by CPIAs (in Italian, Centri Provinciali per l’Istruzione degli Adulti), are viewed as essential tools for fostering inclusion and civic recognition (Gabrielli et al., 2020). However, when analyzed through decolonial and critical pedagogical perspectives (Smith, 2012; Santos, 2014), language and vocational training emerge as ambivalent dispositifs that not only develop practical and linguistic competencies but also establish regimes of legitimacy, recognition, and conditional belonging.

This paper conceptualizes vocational education and language training as pedagogical spaces shaped by normative and epistemic orders governing access to recognition and social intelligibility. The study is based on a qualitative analysis of 33 semi-structured interviews conducted in person with adult migrant workers living in Italy as part of the SKILLS4JUSTICE Horizon Europe project. Data were analyzed using thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2014), employing a hybrid deductive–inductive approach (Swain, 2018). Within this broader dataset, the paper foregrounds six narratives of migrant women, approached as situated epistemic positions (Haraway, 1988).

These narratives reflect diverse life trajectories. A young Tunisian woman, recently a mother, migrates from an economically unstable background and views language learning and employment as pathways to stability, yet finds herself confined to domestic labor. An Albanian widow with two children, after years of financial dependence within her marriage, migrates seeking autonomy but is limited to cleaning work. A young Cameroonian woman leaves her homeland with her girlfriend due to social and personal constraints, seeking to live and love freely while pursuing recognition and professional fulfillment. Additionally, three older women from Eastern Europe (Moldova and Ukraine) migrate to support transnational families and enter long-term care work.

Despite their varied backgrounds, these women’s paths predominantly converge in feminized and socially undervalued sectors of employment. This convergence should not be read as a direct outcome of IVET and L2 education, but as a pattern shaped by broader institutional and normative frameworks within which skill formation and language training may participate in aligning migrants’ trajectories with socially devalued labor niches. Findings indicate that educational and training pathways are experienced as both necessities and regulatory thresholds. Institutional norms privilege standardized linguistic performances while marginalizing plurilingual repertoires and embodied communicative practices, thereby reinforcing dominant constructions of legitimacy (Haraway, 1988).

Participants’ narratives reveal experiences of linguistic inadequacy, self-discipline, and conditional recognition. These dynamics align with Benasayag and Schmit’s (2003) analysis of the internalization of normative expectations. Rather than representing individual failures, these stories illustrate patterned processes of gendered incorporation (Itzigsohn & Giorguli-Saucedo, 2005), where legal precarity and survival imperatives constrain educational participation and occupational mobility.

By emphasizing the situated voices of migrant women, this paper contributes to decolonial debates on education, migration, and epistemic justice, highlighting how language education functions as a political and pedagogical site where recognition (Dusi, 2020), legitimacy, and exclusion are continuously structured and negotiated.