Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education

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The end(s) of inclusion: ungrounding globalization

and ‘the migrant’ in dialogue with hospitality

Christopher Kirchgasler

To cite this article: Christopher Kirchgasler (2020): The end(s) of inclusion: ungrounding
globalization and ‘the migrant’ in dialogue with hospitality, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics
of Education, DOI: 10.1080/01596306.2020.1836745

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/01596306.2020.1836745

Published online: 27 Oct 2020.

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DISCOURSE: STUDIES IN THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF EDUCATION
https://doi.org/10.1080/01596306.2020.1836745

The end(s) of inclusion: ungrounding globalization and ‘the

migrant’ in dialogue with hospitality
Christopher Kirchgasler
Department of Curriculum & Instruction, University of Wisconsin–Madison, Madison, WI, USA

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
This article reassesses globalization in light of research, policy, and Education reform;
reforms directed towards ‘the migrant’ during times of crisis. In globalization; hospitality;
dialogue with Derrida’s discussion of hospitality, the article migrant and refugee
education; migration
questions the grounds that figure ‘the migrant’ as a metonym for
globalization’s dangers – as excess mobility menacing the
foundational sovereignty of nation-states. With Sweden as a point
of reference, the article interrelates three seemingly distinct
techniques for evaluating notions of arrival – data visualizations
comparing ‘the migrant’ against those ‘without immigrant
background’, curriculum and pedagogy seeking to integrate and
include according to psychologized norms and values, and critical
qualitative research representing migrant voice. At issue in each
is how the gesture of hospitality seeks to render arrival calculable,
establishing the authority and beneficence of the host and
leaving ‘the migrant’ indefinitely at the threshold of
(non)belonging. Efforts to represent the migrant through notions
of experience and ‘voice’ risk naturalizing hospitality’s
asymmetries and exclusions, while impeding reflexivity toward
the conditions upon which hospitality remains tenuously granted.

We, the people of Europe? (Etienne Balibar 2004)

Is not hospitality an interruption of the self? (Jacques Derrida 1999a, p. 51)

A twenty-first century question of identity inverts an eighteenth century political thesis

of the nation-state in order to expose its hidden anxiety, an ambivalence of being and
belonging. The anxiety expresses itself in queries of origin and reasons for visiting
posed at passport controls, in regulations of overcrowded migrant camps, and in pro-
cesses for receiving and processing asylum. That anxiety is also directed at ‘the
migrant’ in curriculum and pedagogy offering to develop social competencies, reflective
practices, and job skills that are to facilitate integration and inclusion. It is, in short, the
anxiety of hospitality – of what hospitality shall comprise, of the terms and conditions
that shall regulate it, and, most crucially, to ‘whom’ it shall be conditionally granted.
This Special Issue’s invitation to reassess globalization offers an opportunity to examine
how hospitality is extended at a time of ‘migrant crises’, when crossings entangle nation-
state borders with boundaries of being and belonging. The concept of globalization and

CONTACT Christopher Kirchgasler chris.kirchgasler@wisc.edu

© 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 C. KIRCHGASLER

the figure of the migrant are, of course, deeply entwined. Globalization speaks to inten-
sifying mobility – of finance, commodities, and people – that have coincided with the
erecting of walls dividing who purportedly does and does not belong (Fassin, 2011).
Borders and boundaries are likewise tightly coupled in political discourses; ‘build the
wall’ is not merely a political slogan but speaks to the proliferation of surveillance appa-
ratuses that delineate regimes of exception, zones of detention, and protocols for depor-
tation, making possible depictions of masses fleeing, surging, and arriving. This ‘migrant’,
as a condition of being, is qualified by escape, newness, and unfamiliarity with their host.1
This article attends to the ways government institutions, civil society, research, and
policy seek to address migration to Sweden as a question of inclusion. A touchstone in
recent years has been the so-called migrant crisis occurring between 2015–2016, when
the Swedish Migration Agency (2020) reported a historically high number of asylum
seekers. Wide-ranging reforms in the legal framework and social welfare system followed
in the ensuing months. A recent Swedish educational policy statement demonstrates this
rapidly evolving attitude.
Today, a large number of people are coming to Sweden, escaping from war and oppression. It
is important for us to work together in order to make their first time in Sweden as good as poss-
ible in order to make their inclusion in society and the labour market easier. (Swedish Adult
Education Association 2016, p. 11; as cited in Fejes & Dahlstedt, 2017, p. 219, emphasis added)

The beneficent imperative to ‘make their first time in Sweden as good as possible’,
recalls the invitation ‘to make yourself at home’, discussed by Derrida as the paradox of
‘hospitality’ (Derrida, 2005; Derrida & Dufurmantelle, 2000). The invitation of hospitality,
in Derrida’s analysis, bids one to feel free to act as if one were at home, but to remem-
ber that one is not in their home but in the host’s, whose rules and property must be
respected (Caputo, 1997, p. 111).2 Hospitality, in other words, signals a conditional
welcome, establishing limits of what is proper to guest and host in which imbalance,
the fear of exclusion, and the potential for violence lurk at the threshold of arrival.3
Rendering hospitality calculable so as to manage arrival entails hopes and fears of what
differentiates successful integration from failure. Take, for example, the following report
on the ‘challenges and opportunities’ for the Swedish education system in light of
increased numbers of ‘unaccompanied children’ (Bunar, 2017, p. 3). The report claims
‘Many of those unaccompanied children who arrived in earlier years managed to find
their places in the labour market, proving their resilience and ambition’ (p. 13, emphasis
added), while noting ‘there are worrying signs that some unaccompanied young boys
are being involved in petty crimes’ (p. 13). As ‘challenges and opportunities’ suggests,
the gesture of hospitality is not the wall impeding arrival, but the threshold determining
it. Permitted to cross the border into the nation-state, hospitality erects antipathies
between guest and host that locate ‘the migrant’ as simultaneously inside and outside
the nation-state. Integration (i.e. to ‘find their place’) shares a horizon with the labor
market and the civil society of the nation-state, given form as desirable dispositions
and values, such as the migrant’s ‘resilience’ and ‘ambition’.
No arrival, then, without an outside. ‘The migrant’ is placed into relief with the presum-
ably primordial qualities of the citizen and nation-state.4 This primordialism links ‘the
migrant’ and globalization as externalized threats. This excerpt from a sociological critique
of migration is exemplary.
 DISCOURSE: STUDIES IN THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF EDUCATION 3

… [E]ven Sweden, habitually renowned for its generous welfare policies and inclusive policies
over asylum and multiculturalism, has eventually caught up with neoliberal globalisation and
the related processes of segregation, racialised exclusion and poverty concentrated in the dis-
advantaged neighbourhoods of European and North American cities. (Schierup & Ålund,
2011, p. 46, emphasis added)

In other words, arrival is not only about who but what arrives – given as dangers to
social and economic prosperity. ‘Poverty concentrated in disadvantaged neighborhoods’
and ‘racialized exclusion’ are the purported consequences wrought by excess amounts of
arrival and underscore the dangers of overly generous hospitality. Whether located in the
figure of the migrant or of globalization, threats to the integrity of the nation-state are
given external causality.
In order to reassess globalization during times of ‘migrant crises’, I investigate how
appeals to globalization – specifically as supranational flows and their overspill – implicate
research, policy, and reforms seeking the integration and inclusion of ‘the migrant’. In dia-
logue with Derrida’s notion of hospitality, the article takes the following itinerary. First, I
approach globalization and ‘the migrant’ as twinned concepts of externality whose arrival
establishes the timelessness and sovereignty of the nation-state, which goes questioned. I
then discuss how ungrounding globalization and ‘the migrant’ can turn attention from
who crosses the border to how borders are drawn – specifically, the ways that social scien-
tific norms and values associated with integration and inclusion establish ‘the migrant’ on
the side of globalization, and oppositional to the nation-state. Juxtaposing policy visual-
izations, curricula and pedagogies, and critical qualitive research representing migrant
voice, I consider how efforts to see, understand, and hear ‘the migrant’ paradoxically
impose asymmetries and oppositions that render migrant difference in opposition, thus
arresting ‘the migrant’ at the threshold of (non)belonging.

Ungrounding the concept of globalization

In many critical studies of migration, ‘the migrant’ and migrant crises have been analyzed
first and foremost as problems of misrepresentation – that is, as ideological rhetoric that
obscures the phenomena of real bodies crossing real borders. Taken in this light, the claim
of a crisis demands another more accurate explanation, whether located in the rise of
authoritarian populism or the effects of neoliberal globalization (Rydgren & Van der
Meiden, 2016; Schierup & Ålund, 2011). To call the crisis a misrepresentation is to evaluate
reality based on pre-given concepts, seeking to more adequately name both objects and
the criteria for their judgment. While important interventions have followed from this
formula, seeking to apprehend migration in terms of its real or proper grounds leaves
unquestioned he fundamental externality of ‘the migrant’.
Rather than approach ‘the migrant’ as a conceptual given, the analysis that follows
attempts a theoretical and methodological ungrounding to examine the conditions of
its emergence through practices that inscribe borders and boundaries. Ungrounding
entails a recognition of and sensitivity towards how concepts themselves act as the
origins of explanation (i.e. concepts as conceptions) (Deleuze, 1994; Derrida, 1995) or
what could be described as concepts’ performativity (Stoler, 2016). McKeown (2007)
argues that the concept of globalization has, since the nineteenth century, insisted
upon itself as marking a new age that irrevocably supersedes the past. For globalization
4 C. KIRCHGASLER

to proclaim an age of movement and interaction, it divides itself from a pre-globalized

world that it also assembles and activates. As a historicism, globalization forgets its
own conditions of possibility (p. 220). The claim that we are global now, requires a they
and before that mark a precursor stage of stasis and isolation, a sleight of hand that
denies the possibility of earlier globalizing histories. For instance, flows, processes, and
movement entailed by colonial empires, racist laws, and immigration controls that estab-
lished the geographic borders of the nation-state become the inevitable conditions of
globalization’s emergence (p. 226). In this manner, globalization’s forms of mobility – of
who belongs ‘here’ and ‘there’ tend to assume as foundational the form and logic of
the nation-state.
Inverting the question from what globalization is to how the concept has inaugurated
itself as the origin of movement and change implicates the boundaries presumed by ‘the
migrant’ alongside the borders of the nation-state as co-constitutive forms of belonging
and otherness. Their convergence – where the outside of globalization becomes the
inside of the nation-state – is a Judas hole that permits one to question the causality
given to globalization and the inevitability of ‘the migrant’ (Zheng, 2018). Attending to
what Derrida (1999b) terms ‘the rhetoric of borders’ (p. 3) is to acknowledge the inevitabil-
ity of borders while also questioning what is presumed as the nature of self and Other.
Theoretically and methodologically, the approach refuses to declare what is proper to
the individual and nation in advance. Instead, ungrounding entails an ontological indeter-
minacy – not to deny concepts’ salience but to permit a more careful trace of their
groundless grounds, approaching carefully how ‘the migrant’ simultaneously affirms
the authority of the nation-state while bespeaking the inevitability of its other, (in this
case, globalization).
Rather than seek truths that lie hidden beneath appearances, ungrounding questions
the priority of what is given as natural or factual that precedes analysis (i.e. that ‘grounds’
it). In this sense, ‘ungrounding’ globalization shares sensibilities with other critiques of
globalization, such as those decentering ‘the West’ as its origin of historical change (Chak-
rabarty, 1999; Cooper, 2005; Quijano, 2000), questioning its reduction of complex and
non-linear networks and systems into cause–effect relationships (Beck, 2000), or examin-
ing how relational flows and productive frictions are simplified within models of spread,
conflict, and resolution (Ferguson, 2006; Lowenhaupt Tsing, 2005). What ungrounding
shares with critiques of Eurocentrism, historicism, or coloniality is a concern with how glo-
balization inscribes borders and boundaries that that project self and Other at multiple
scales through implicit hierarchies of being and belonging.
As a reassessment, ungrounding exposes the fundamental relationship of globalization
and ‘the migrant’ through the practices that mark arrival. The drawing of borders and
boundaries between here and there, foreign and domestic, exterior and interior, and
self and Other makes visible how arrival is calculated, regulated, and interpreted
through research and reforms. Practices that establish ‘how much’ and to ‘what degree’
‘the migrant’ has arrived in Sweden, for instance, can be scrutinized not simply as
efforts to oppress marginalized populations but as themselves constitutive of the auth-
ority of the host. The gesture of hospitality is found in the very assignation of who ‘the
migrant’ ‘is’ – that is, through the ascription of needs, desires, and modes of conduct
that designate one’s relative distance from ‘Swedish-ness’. To unground globalization
and ‘the migrant’ through attention to arrival highlights how social scientific practices
 DISCOURSE: STUDIES IN THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF EDUCATION 5

themselves generate accidental ‘memories’ of timeless nation-state opposed to the exter-

nal (i.e. ‘global’) flows and forces ‘the migrant’ embodies.
As the discussion of arrival highlights, ungrounding is not a method applied to thepre-
given objects of ‘the migrant’. Rather, it isa strategically deconstructive sensibility impli-
cating social scientific research, policy, and practice as figuring‘the migrant’ at the
threshold of (non)belonging in a manner that acts to secure the sovereignty of the self
and the nation-state. These are, I will argue, the ‘end(s) of inclusion’.

Mapping globalization and ‘the migrant,’ visualizing arrival

To unground perceptions of being and belonging, I begin by examining how common
sense categories and concepts have acted historically to naturalize what is absolutely
proper to one or another ‘space’. In her historiography of a post-Columbian world,
Wynter (1995) proposed that ‘an ecumenical human view’ could be found through a
radical reinterpretation of European ‘discovery’ by historicizing racialized notions of self
and Other as the historical effects of colonization. While map making has long been
studied as foundational to empire, from William Petty’s surveying of Ireland (Poovey,
1998), to the cadastral mapping of Egypt (Mitchell, 2002), to British colonial surveys of
India (Edney, 1997), Wynter theorizes that early maps reveal shifts in the rules of percep-
tion, that is, a ‘reason’ distinct from the present that allows us to ask how national borders
and belonging have become naturalized as an origin of ontological difference that ‘the
migrant’ must oppose.
The pre-Westphalian rules of perception that organize a sixteenth century theologian’s
map, for example, highlights how the Christian trinity, rather than national borders, once
offered the categorical archetype for ontological difference. In The World in a Cloverleaf
(Bünting, 1581) (Figure 1), ‘you are here’ indicated your place in a Christian hierarchy of
being, in which ‘the Chrisitian’ was ontologically determinative and geographically coex-
tensive with the conceptual space of ‘Europe’. Wynter (1995) notes that ‘Asia’ and ‘Africa’
were imagined to house the ‘infidel’ and ‘idolater’ respectively, who had either refused
the Word (Muslims and Jews) and were enemies of Christ, or were ignorant of it
(pagan) and required conversion (p. 29). As a technology for comparisons, this map
recalls a moment in which borders indicated a Christendom coextensive with a doctrine
of salvation. Those who resided in other realms were rendered beyond subjective (i.e.
Christian) understanding; their deviance from accepted ways of life – give at the time
as indifference to trade, feudal land arrangements, or monotheism – marked the non-
Christian Other as fundamentally ‘inimical’ or ‘bestial’ (p. 22).
To think with Wynter, the (non)crossable borders dividing who can be seen as fully
human today may be more diffuse and less explicit, and yet still inscribe differentiations
and divisions that produce asymmetries and exclusions, now within the form and logic of
the nation-state. Take, for instance, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and
Development’s (OECD) Programme of International Student Assessment (PISA). On the
PISA website’s Data page (OECD, 2020), one can, in a click, evaluate participating
nation-states’ overall test performance in terms of ‘equity in reading’ for select demo-
graphic subpopulations, including ‘immigrant students’. Here, achievement measure-
ments locate arrival within a ‘sphere of calculability’ (Boersma & Schinkel, 2015;
Mitchell, 2002). Visualizing differences in achievement data allows PISA to compare
6 C. KIRCHGASLER

Figure 1. Bünting’s (1581) The World in a Cloverleaf. The map typifies a Christian cosmology of spa-
tialized domains in terms of Christian ‘Europe’, with Muslim ‘Asia’, and pagan ‘Africa’ as ‘infidel’ and
‘idolater’ Others, respectively. Adjacent to, but ontologically ‘above’ them is the holy city of Jerusalem,
subject not to earthly physics but to God’s providence. Source: https://ting+h+1581+the+world+in+a
+cloverleaf,online_chips:three+continents&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjJ47Ti7ZnsAhXI6zgGHRE
8AR4Q4lYoD3oECAEQJQ&biw=807&bih=745

nation-states’ success in promoting equity in achievement between those with and

without an immigrant background (OECD, 2018b, p. 19) (Figure 2).
The interactive visualization merges cartographic images with calculative power in
bringing together quantification, standardized assessments, populational reasoning,
and economic competition to narrate progress towards inclusion. Numbers make
arrival visible and directly comparable, generating classifications for further evaluations
of students with and without ‘immigrant background’, and for spotlighting national
winners and shaming losers.
The PISA map and its rankings are not merely statements of a subpopulation’s relative
achievement in a host country, but enunciate normative principles linking individual
capabilities with collective identity (Lindblad, Pettersson, & Popkewitz, 2018). In an analy-
sis of ‘immigrant student achievement’ following Sweden’s 2015 PISA results, the ‘newly
arrived young students’ are distinguished by their perceived ‘lack of prior knowledge
about the Swedish education system’ that renders them ‘even more dependent on tea-
chers and other school staff’ (Lundahl & Lindblad, 2018, p. 77). They are described as evin-
cing an ‘absence of “the Swedish” – that is, Swedish neighbors, Swedish classmates, and
the Swedish language’ (p. 77). As in the comparison of the ‘Christian’ against the ‘infidel’
and ‘idolater’, ‘the migrant’ is made oppositional to the norms of Swedish-ness in order to
 DISCOURSE: STUDIES IN THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF EDUCATION 7

Figure 2. OECD (2020) PISA Interactive Data Map. ‘The migrant’ is represented as a specific subpopu-
lation immigrant students) whose average achievement in a given nation can be compared and
ranked with that of other PISA nations as colors indicating desirable and undesirable performance
on equity metrics (green = ‘above average’, red = ‘below average’). Source: https://www.oecd.org/
pisa/data/

explain heightened individual needs and poor academic performance. This analysis of the
‘Swedish’ case dovetails with OECD’s explanations of the dangers of failing to include:
Without the right skills, people will languish on the margins of society … It will not be poss-
ible to develop fair and inclusive policies and engage all citizens if a lack of education pre-
vents people from fully participating in society. (OECD, 2018a, p. 10)

Low PISA achievement must be rectified to make inclusion possible, but achievement
is not all that is at stake (K. Kirchgasler, 2020). Inclusion of ‘the migrant’ is simultaneously
bound up in economic drag assumed to accompany migration. This economic fear is indi-
vidualized in the figure of the migrant who is supposedly lacking and dependent accord-
ing to the measured distance between ‘the migrant’ and host society. In this way, fears of
migration are posed in terms of individualized lacks, and are made conditions of migrant
inclusion.
Fears of migration – as visualized through achievement testing – are also brought
together with attempts at governing the inner life of ‘the migrant’. Consider OECD’s
(2018b) psychological profile of ‘students with immigrant backgrounds’, in which the
migrant’s subjective interior is made available to inspection through the combination
of achievement data and self-reported statements of identity and experience. In
Figure 3, the OECD draws upon PISA and the European Social Survey ‘to identify … the
risk factors that prevent … successfully integrating’ (p. 3).
Calculating integration is performed identifying filial foreign-ness, ranked from being
‘foreign-born’, to ‘native students of mixed heritage’, to ‘first-‘ and ‘second-generation’.
Calculating inclusion is attesting to one’s experienced foreign-ness, defined in terms of
‘belonging’, ‘anxiety’, and ‘motivation’. Subjectivity is fixed to ‘the migrant’ and made
visible through self-selected I-statements. ‘The migrant’s voice’ is heard by confirming
or denying statements such as, ‘I feel like an outsider at school’ (OECD, 2018b, p. 19).
Relationships between immigrant background and psychological ‘well-being’ are
8 C. KIRCHGASLER

Figure 3. OECD’s (2018b) academic and well-being outcomes, by immigrant background (p. 19).
Arrival is evaluated by comparing percentages of student subgroups characterized as experiencing
‘academic under-performance’, a ‘weak sense of belonging at school’, and ‘low satisfaction in life’,
demonstrating ‘statistically significant differences’ in how these are borne by students with ‘immi-
grant backgrounds’ (p. 19).

evaluated through correlated disparities of academic proficiency, motivation, belonging,

school-related anxiety, and overall life satisfaction (p. 13).
OECD’s visualizations link achievement data to phenomenological experience, merging
descriptive and subjective qualities of ‘the migrant,’ and thereby solidifying it as an object of
research, policy, and reform. ‘The migrant’ is made more subjectively ‘real’ than before while
remaining a calculable and comparable social scientific object. Distance from arriving is dis-
tance from the qualities given as proper to the host (i.e. being academically proficient,
feeling motivated, and having a sense of belonging), turning the indeterminacy of arrival
into a calculation of distance from norms of Swedish-ness. Yet, as a condition ofvisualized
arrival, the migrant cannot arrive. The calculation of arrival establishes and maintains dis-
tance between ‘the migrant’ Other and the self of the nation-state only changeable by
degree. Only those ‘without immigrant background’ are freed from the burden of arriving
by virtue of having already arrived. The gesture of hospitality, in other words, begins by
marking ‘the migrant’distinct and problematic in terms of experience, attitudes, and senti-
ments thatground programs seeking integration and inclusion. I turn now to examine how
these psychological distinctions of ‘the migrant’ seek to manage inclusion through curricu-
lum and pedagogy.
 DISCOURSE: STUDIES IN THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF EDUCATION 9

Making ‘the migrant’ Swedish from day 1

‘The migrant’ is a figure presumably opposed to the norms and values governing inte-
gration and inclusion. These oppositions, as I have explored, are not only those measured
in test-based achievement; they are also differences in the subjective qualities given as
one’s inner life and experience. The amalgamation of achievement data and psychological
factors associated with psychological well-being is made the basis of curriculum and
pedagogy that seek to respond to migrants’ needs by locating pathology in the subjec-
tivity of ‘the migrant.’ The qualities of subjectivity—experience and voice—ground
migrant needs as the basis of curriculum and pedagogy for inclusion.
The fashioning of migrant Otherness can be explored in the logic of one set of E.U.
reforms, the Refugees and Migrants Inclusion Toolkit (REMINT).5 Its classificatory practices
link legal status, subjective experience, and learning needs to generate ‘profiles’ that are
to provide the basis for curriculum design. These profiles are drawn from a typology of
legal classifications, such as ‘migrant worker’, ‘asylum seeker’, and ‘refugee’. Take this
example offered by REMINT project partner, Studieframjändet Sodra Dalarna (SSD) in
their curriculum they call ‘Swedish from day 1’:
Migrant workers and asylum seekers have a different profile in terms of motivation, psycho-
logical situation, economic capacity. Migrant workers have a much more defined project: they
leave their country to seek an improvement in living standards because the living conditions
or job opportunities in the migrant’s own region are not sufficient. On the other hand, the
majority of asylum seekers seeking entry to Europe are fleeing conflict and violence in
their home countries. They are uprooted, homeless and lack diplomatic protection. They
need to overcome traumatic experiences, rebuild an entirely new social network and
acquire the personal, professional or cultural resources required to feel comfortable in
their new environment. This is an extremely complex process that fails or succeeds according
to many factors amongst which is the will and capacity of the host society to include new-
comers in all aspects of community life. (REMINT, 2017, p. 24)

Differences in a migrant’s ‘profile’ are formulated as needs to be reconciled by the ‘host

society’, whose knowledge of subjective conditions (given in a psychological discourse) is
necessary to properly administer the processes of inclusion. Knowledge of the subjective
condition of ‘the migrant’ grounds the hospitality of the host, given here as Sweden’s ‘will
and capacity to include’. The ‘will’ to include, means acting responsively in accordance
with the knowledge of a migrant subject’s pschological profile.
The desire to know the inner world of ‘the migrant’ has unique historical precedent in
Sweden. The premise of ‘the migrant’ as possessing a uniquely deviant psychology rose to
significance during World War II, during which the arrival of ‘Finnish war children’
increased concern about the state’s role in child welfare and required expertise in identi-
fying standards for diagnosing their well-being. The resulting humanitarian discourse
located the ‘war child’ as particularly vulnerable owing to the causes of their exile, impres-
sionability, separation from their parents, and traumatic experiences of war and transit
(Zetterqvist Nelson, 2018). These factors were said to inform the child’s psychological
makeup and demand specialized forms of care from institutions and organizations dedi-
cated to their welfare (p. 345).
Similar to the ‘war children’, including ‘the migrant’ today requires invoking the
psychological attitudes, dispositions, and sensibilities presumed to fundamentally
10 C. KIRCHGASLER

divide guest and host even after the border has been crossed. REMINT’s (2017) experien-
tial learning theory, for instance, identifies dangers in terms of the ‘cognitive structures
that have given rise to learners’ ‘stereotypes and prejudices’ (p. 38). The facilitator is cau-
tioned to engage these as ‘false perceptions’ by actively reworking learners’ ‘concrete
experience’, which is ‘fundamental to changing behavior and opinions’ (p. 38). In
Sweden, this is accomplished through the creation of learning groups (what REMINT’s
Swedish partner, SSD, terms ‘study circles’), which are hoped to activate ‘reflective obser-
vation’, ‘abstract conceptualization’, and ‘active experimentation’ and rework the givens
of the learner’s unreflected experience (p. 38). The use of study groups is seen as
especially important for ‘facilitating the interaction between individuals coming from
deeply different social and cultural models’ (p. 39).
The study circle’s learning theory demands turning learners from passive to active par-
ticipants, through forms of listening, experimentation, and reflection (REMINT, 2017,
pp. 38–39). SSD extols a curriculum that increases the learner’s ‘motivation’ by providing
opportunities to apply what they learn to ‘everyday life’ (p. 122) such as childrearing. For
instance, SSD’s sample lesson, ‘My Darling Child’, is comprised of three 2-to-4-hour meet-
ings, which include study circles, seminars, and cultural events to raise awareness of
Swedish norms and values regarding parenting expectations (e.g. identifying and sup-
porting children’s needs) in facilitated ‘open-ended’ discussions (p. 126). In contrast to
the OECD PISA and its insistence on standardized, predetermined, and measurable indi-
cators of well-being, ‘inclusion’ in REMINT is iterative and open-ended by design. Both,
however, presume a similar end: ‘the migrant’ must be raised from a passive to an
active state as an outcome of the pedagogical intervention. In PISA, this was implied as
‘motivation’ as a desired outcome of well-being (OECD, 2018b, p. 19). In REMINT, the
end is more explicit: ‘the development of his [sic] autonomy’ (p. 39). The flexibility and
open-endedness of SSD’s curriculum, in this sense, is itself a design principle to instill
in the learner a sense of control and self-determination assumed to correspond with a
subjectivity given as ‘Swedish’.
Defining ‘Swedish-ness’ in terms of subjective experience, knowledge, and attitudes is
also present in reforms that presume ‘the migrant’ as peculiarly distant from a relationship
with ‘nature’. As Ideland (2019) has explored, the curriculum, Multicultural Nature, pro-
duced by the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency [Naturvårdsverket], makes
nature as a ‘competence’ to be learned and to be learned from. Projects seeking to incul-
cate a subjective relationship with nature specifically target children and adults ‘with
immigrant backgrounds’ for excursions to nearby forests in order to experience a roman-
tic sense of idyll and to learn values of cooperation (pp. 93–94). The curriculum warns that
‘premodern’ and ‘traditional’ attitudes often evince indifference towards nature and need
to be supplanted by ‘modern’ forms that demonstrate an appropriate aesthetic sensibility,
in which nature is linked to healing both the body and soul and that maintaining this
relationship is the hallmark of a modern, reasonable person (pp. 94–95).6
The gesture to be ‘Swedish from day 1’ or to be included in Multicultural Nature both
locate ‘the migrant’ as a psychologically distinct subjectivity simultaneously within the
national borders but outside national belonging, defined by their opposition to the
desired forms of experience, knowledge, and attitudes given as ‘Swedish’. Integration
and inclusion cannot be understood simply as ‘about’ language proficiency or the acqui-
sition of social skills as assumed in the reforms discussed here. The gesture of hospitality,
 DISCOURSE: STUDIES IN THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF EDUCATION 11

contained in defining language proficiency and social skills, in fact establishes the auth-
ority of the host to decide what shall comprise being and belonging. In so doing, hospi-
tality is rendered conditional according to psychological norms and values at work in the
curriculum and pedagogy of migrant inclusion.
With these sensitivities in mind, I turn now to examine how efforts to speak back to the
social scientific discourses described in OECD PISA or curriculum reforms in order to lib-
erate ‘the migrant’ from marginalization in the social field may yet risk affirming a liminal
subject position.

Speaking ‘with,’ not ‘for’: how methods make ‘the migrant’

Critical scholarship on migration has long raised concerns about narrow, one-sided or
stereotypical representations of the figure of the migrant. This literature directs scrutiny
at the reluctance of prior social science research to engage with howpower – defined
as structures of oppression, such as racism, classism, and sexism – intersects with and mar-
ginalizes minoritized subjectivities in the social field, thus perpetuating social asymme-
tries and exclusions (Mohanty, 1984; Rouse, 1991). Recent critical migration scholarship
in Sweden has drawn upon these theoretical and methodological interventions in
efforts to elevate the knowledge, perspectives, and experiences of ‘the migrants them-
selves’ (Kaukko & Wernesjö, 2017; Stretmo, 2014). These critiques take issue with the
terms upon which integration and inclusion have been premised, such as evaluative
metrics (e.g. PISA) that prioritize the prerogatives of the state and figure ‘the migrant’
as a passive object of planning and coordination. With the problems of power located
in the questions posed, the perspectives privileged, and the knowledge generated
about ‘the migrant,’ the aim of critical research is to liberate ‘the migrant’ as the original
source from which knowledge grounded in the experience (Scott, 1991) of arrival can
speak back to present-day formulations of integration and inclusion – and offer pathways
to their reconceptualization. This turn by the critical researcher is given the methodologi-
cal shorthand of speaking ‘with’ and not ‘for’.
Contained in the prepositions of speaking ‘with’ is the hope that ethnographic
methods – observations, field notes, and interviews – provide the basis for a more auth-
entic form of intersubjectivity (C. Kirchgasler, 2017). Narratives of ‘lived experience’ and
‘everyday strategies’ of survival seek to make visible what is otherwise hidden to research
and researchers at the same moment that they ground demands for more just forms of
political representation. Globalization maintains an important if obscured role in these
ethnographic accounts as an externality to which the researcher appeals to help
explain the causes and conditions of arrival. A recurring feature of migrant studies has
been appeals to global economic, geopolitical or climactic processes as crucial to under-
standing the structuration of migrant experience (Schierup & Ålund, 2011). Within these
studies, globalization acts outside and above ‘the migrant’. Determined to a certain
degree by global ‘push and pull factors’ (e.g. economic, political, and cultural forces),
‘the migrant’ remains a subjectivity whose liberation requires testifying to experienced
oppression and survival strategies.
In ‘speaking back’ in a dialectical fashion against prior misrepresentations, such as
those discussed earlier that understood ‘the migrant’ as a passive subjectivity distant
from Swedish-ness, critical ethnographic methods seek to expose various forms of
12 C. KIRCHGASLER

racism and xenophobia encountered, often narrated as ‘voice’. Unaccompanied children

are cited as being ‘critical of the care they were given as children’ (Kaukko & Wernesjö,
2017, p. 14) or of having to ‘pass’ or to narrate ‘a legitimate presence’ (Stretmo, 2014,
pp. 222–223). Critiques narrated by ‘the migrant’ also extend to the ways that ‘the
migrant’ has been represented as problematic by official discourses ‘about’ them, such
as the ‘vulnerable/resilient’ dyad (Kaukko & Wernesjö, 2017). ‘Voice’ promises to reveal
a more nuanced narrative reflecting the complexities of lived experience, and to flatten
the hierarchy between researcher and researched. To do so, ‘the migrant’ is asked to
speak of an experienced sense of ‘belonging’ (Kaukko & Wernesjö, 2017, p. 17), and
‘the experiences of being categorized as unaccompanied’ (Stretmo, 2014, p. 265).
‘Voice’, in short, seeks to valorize the ‘daily lives’ and ‘everyday life strategies’ (Stretmo,
2014, p. 32) that arise in response to globalization.
The attempt to narrate an experience of oppression, on the one hand, but evince of
agency on the other, becomes the new conditions for migrant subjectivity. No longer
classified as more or less motivated, or reflective, the desire of critical research is to
restore a trammeled agency of ‘the migrant’ who has survived and forged an identity
within oppressive structures. Stretmo (2014), for instance, divides her analyses between
the social positions ascribed to ‘the migrant’, such as ‘unaccompanied minor’, ‘refugee’,
or ‘newcomers’, and the ‘experiences of being categorized as such’ (p. 46). Kaukko and
Wernesjö (2017), meanwhile, describe the need for an intersectional approach:
Intersectional approaches contribute to the existing knowledge on unaccompanied children
not only by highlighting the importance of focusing on the assumed trauma or victimhood of
unaccompanied children but also by emphasizing the need to take into account not only
other difficulties but also the strengths and resources of these children. (Kaukko & Wernesjö,
2017, p. 17, emphasis added)

At the level of producing knowledge about ‘the migrant’ that takes into account both
trauma and resources, these critical studies are difficult to distinguish from those that
focus on the ‘salutogenic effects of trauma’, such as ‘post-traumatic hopefulness and
growth in refugees’ (Umer & Elliot, 2019, p. 1). Likewise, in the attempt to hear the unfil-
tered, unmediated experience as ‘voice’, the open-ended interview structure of critical
ethnography isnot so distant from study circle discussion topics of ‘Swedish from day
1’, or self-reported I-statements of OECD well-being items. The threshold of arrival
shifts to the dialectic itself, in which ‘the voice’ speaks somewhere between the poles
of structure (globalization and its traumas) and agency (strengths and resources). The dia-
lectic mediating the migrant voice installs its own limits that shape what is elicited and
what can be heard as an authentic experience of migration. The assumption that the
words themselves are transparent overlooks how discursive rules precede and regulate
what can and cannot be said as ‘the migrant’.
Speaking ‘with’ not ‘for’ ‘the migrant’ retains an ambivalence where a change in pre-
position does not overcome what is presumed by the noun. It expresses a theoretical
and methodological idealism by invoking a space prior to or beyond power’s effects.
That ambivalence is the commitment to representing a migrant subjectivity that, ironi-
cally, confirms the originality and authority of the nation-state as well as the tenuous
status of ‘the migrant’ within it. This is not to argue that critical ethnographic studies
of migration are equivalent to those discussed earlier as OECD well-being or as
 DISCOURSE: STUDIES IN THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF EDUCATION 13

‘Swedish for day 1’. As I have sought to illustrate, each is distinct in their problematization
of ‘the migrant’ and the relationship to globalization; Likert-scale well-being statements,
for instance, cannot easily indict the care that the nation-state has provided, nor speak
against various forms of xenophobia. At the same moment, any effort to render a more
authentic or original migrant subjectivity is not to act outside of or against the power
embodied in ‘the migrant’, but confirms it, while also protecting the originary identities
and notions of belonging of the nation-state to which it remains perpetually opposed.
Belonging, agency, and voice remain qualified as a migrant’s belonging, a migrant’s
agency, and a migrant’s voice that translate the threatening externality of globalization
into a phenomenological register and risk maintaining ‘the migrant’ perpetually at the
threshold.

At the threshold: the migrant’s voice or a migrant ‘voice’?

At this point, we can distinguish the gestures of hospitality, such as those that inhere in
visualizations of, curriculum and pedagogy for, and critical qualitative research with
‘the migrant’, from what Derrida (2005) describes as the absolute promise of hospitality.
Whereas the gestures of hospitality are conditioned by the rights and obligations
granted within the gesture itself, they cannot exhaust hospitality’s unconditional poten-
tial (Derrida, 2005). The relationship between the gesture and promise of hospitality,
therefore, is not opposed, but converges in heterogeneous, irreducible relations that I
have discussed as moments of arrival. This arrival is when and where the promise of limit-
less hospitality finds its object and is constituted by the gesture of welcome. That is, con-
ferring hospitality upon a name, a status, or an identity is, in the same gesture, securing a
relationship of fixity, arrest, and immobility.
In relation to globalization and ‘the migrant,’ I have analyzed how various gestures
of hospitality establish the nation-state as primordial and as eliding the trace of arrival
from the host itself. In this way, ‘the migrant’ grants the nation-state its authority as
origin, located in the demand to identify, classify, surveil, and evaluate the psycho-
logical, sociological, and phenomenological opportunities and threats posed by the
forces ascribed to externalities named ‘the migrant’ and globalization. The gesture
of hospitality, then, is not the xenophobic wall that bars entry, but the threshold
wherein the gesture ‘to make oneself at home’ regulates self and Other through
the dispositions, values, and norms that mark ‘the migrant’ as the host’s perpetually
external inside.
An upshot of reassessing globalization and ‘the migrant’ as an ensemble is that curri-
cular and pedagogical reforms seeking to integrate and include ‘the migrant’ cannot
begin after the border has been crossed. Rather, they need to examine the moment
when the border is supposed, assumed, or demanded. While efforts to give ‘the
migrant’ ‘voice’ are crucial to theories of liberal political representation, I have shown
how they can participate in muting the historicity that has made the classification of
‘the migrant’ intelligible as a political subjectivity. Invited to enter as ‘the migrant’, one
is in a perpetually deferred arrival that Derrida (1995) has termed ‘house arrest’ [assigna-
tion à residence] (p. 162) in which one resides with the host yet beneath the sign, ‘the
migrant’. Just as ‘the migrant’ carries a circumscribed set of rights and responsibilities
subject to reversal, refusal, or withdrawal, so the host is obliged to monitor and supervise
14 C. KIRCHGASLER

– as ‘the teacher’, ‘the sociologist’, ‘the data analyst’ – that indicate ‘the will and capacity of
the host society to include’ (REMINT, 2017, p. 24, emphasis added).
Ungrounding globalization and ‘the migrant’ entails rethinking how these twinned
concepts necessarily confirm what is proper, indigenous, and original. Hospitality is not
only inclusion of the Other but a ‘strategy of living’ through which the host protects
what is proper to the self through the divisions contained in the gestures to supervise,
calculate, and regulate (Derrida, 1995, p. 147). These calculations establish ‘the migrant’
at a distance from the host, secured through visualizations, curriculum and pedagogy,
and critical qualitative methods as a formalized economy of arrival; they protect what
must not be globalized and that cannot be allowed to disappear amidst unpredictable
and uncertain flows, processes, and movement.
Rather than ensuring a path to migrant emancipation, the desire to hear the ‘voice’ of
‘the migrant’ in terms of their knowledge, experience, and perspective is another query of
arrival. The demand that one attest to a liminal political identity and experiences, whether
as the necessary skills for the labor market, the values and practices related to child
rearing, or the lived strategies of resistance and trauma recovery, are demands to bare
one consciousness, self, body, or soul (Derrida, 1995, p. 163). Rather than speaking as lib-
eration, the ‘voice’ of ‘the migrant’ is already conditioned by laws governing its exercise.
This voice must pass through, across, or in a pre-existing space defined in opposition to the
nation-state and must submit to the laws of that space that commands, supports, and
borders it (p. 160). Consigned to the margins of the political field, the migrant voice is
menaced by the demand that it must continually account for its own liminality. It
speaks in fear of the hand that would, at any moment, stifle it.
Rather than demand that ‘voice’ speaks within a pre-given space, identity, status, or
position, perhaps a task for education is to uncoil the polyphony of ‘voice’. That is, to ask
the question of ‘voice’ that would not already be representative of something else, nor
that it be made to reside under the dialectic that reduces difference to opposition. As
Derrida (1999a) posed the question of arrival: ‘Is not hospitality an interruption of the
self?’ (p. 51). To escape the house arrest that hospitality fixes in its gesture of
welcome, a migrant ‘voice’ would be one that wanders from pre-figured classifications
of ‘refugees’, ‘migrant workers’, or ‘unaccompanied children’. This unrepresentable
voice would be of ‘pure differential vibration’ (Derrida, 1995, p. 136) – no longer
resounding with the echoes of national myths, surveilled borders, and problem
populations.

Notes
1. Throughout this article, I set common sense terms such as ‘migrant’ and ‘voice’ in scare
quotes to disrupt perceptions in research, policy, and reforms that presume subjectivity as
the basis of representation. Instead, I examine how these phenomena are formed through
social scientific practices that, I argue, are themselves conditioned by and conditions of
what Derrida terms the gesture of hospitality.
2. Derrida (Derrida & Dufurmantelle, 2000) notes that hospitality is etymologically related to
hostility; ‘pit’ connotes potis, potentiality, and the power of the sovereign to enact violence,
exclude, and banish.
3. In the French, Derrida uses the term l’arrivant to indicate the indeterminacy of the ‘arriving’
and ‘whoever arrives’. Where this double nuance is implied, I italicize arrival.
 DISCOURSE: STUDIES IN THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF EDUCATION 15

4. My use of ‘primordial’ differs from Appadurai’s (1996) historically specific usage of the term.
For Appadurai, primordialism refers to modernist theories of the nation-state in which kinship
comprised the base unit of affinity and extends in larger and larger units in a developmental
evolution (p. 14), I suggest, following Derrida, to consider how arrival locates the nation-state
in a spatial and temporal space that precedes arriving; thus the declaration of arrival grants
authority to the host to evaluate risks and specify conditions of welcome.
5. During a 3-year period, the EU’s Erasmus+ Programme funded the development of a Refu-
gees and Migrants Inclusion Toolkit (REMINT) for use among EU member states, bringing
together five EU member states, including Italy, Spain, UK, Greece, and Sweden, with
partner organizations chosen on the basis of their expertise with ‘creation of educational/
training courses, knowledge on experiential methods approach [sic], asylum seekers, refugees
and migrants’ inclusion, languages teaching, cross-cultural activities’ (REMINT, 2017, p. 5).
6. While the focus has been on Sweden, the reforms discussed here resemble problematizations
of Otherness familiar to liberal democratic nation-states since the turn of the twentieth
century. US educational reforms, for instance, have drawn upon racialized taxonomies to
identify so-called backwards subpopulations, whose beliefs, attitudes, and dispositions alleg-
edly made them dangerous to the future of the republic. The early social sciences sought to
provide natural laws for ‘assimilation’ that premised civilization as a racial achievement and at
risk of being lost due to externalized forces threatening the pastoral, republican ideal (e.g.,
industrialization, immigration, capitalism) (see Ross, 1992; in education, see C. Kirchgasler,
2018). Populations identified as ‘backwards’ (e.g., African Americans in the US South,
Native Americans, and immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe, China, and Mexico)
were targets of projects promoting ‘Americanization’ (see, e.g., Claxton, 1918).

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

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