ABSTRACT
In a world that has become “more open to flows of goods and capital but more closed to the circulation of human bodies” (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013: 19) even as migration is increasingly characterized by multiple chains of movement and transnational interconnections, language-in-education policies have become powerful mechanisms by which states govern, manage, and calibrate increasing and ever more diverse global flows of people to and from their borders. Current articulations of language-in-education policies are underpinned by the tensions between two distinct and overlapping forces: the fixity engendered by the endurance of the monolingual and monocultural nation-state as the ideal model of political organization where recognition as a legitimate speaker (Heller 2010) of a standard national language is a gatekeeper to citizenship; and the fluidity espoused by neo-liberalization where the individual and self-dependent learning of commodifiable language skills – whether these be the standard variety of a national language, English, and/or a ‘foreign language’ – is considered to be a desirable quality of a globally competitive, flexible and mobile citizen (Bernstein et al. 2015; Perez-Milans 2015a). These tensions between fixity and fluidity and the discursive processes that brings the two together have produced language-in-education policies that maintain the monolingual habitus of nation-states while at the same time promoting particular forms of multilingualism. In effect, such inconsistent policies spatialize linguistic diversity by zoning off the national territory as monolingual while locating multilingualism in the individual (as skills) or in international communication (Jaspers 2015: 110).
