Paper short abstract:

This paper provides an ethnographic account of the tensions, doubts and controversies around the 'neoliberalization of solidarity' and documents social workers' investments in language and communication to pursue the utopian projects of justice that they associate with their professional practice.

Paper long abstract:

This paper presents ethnographic insights from the everyday struggles of a group of social workers employed by Legame, a social cooperative based in Rome, Italy and who invest in a set of actions and activities to promote forms of social justice for migrants In Italy. In Italy, social cooperatives have historically been at the forefront of social movements promoting a new civil society based on utopian principles of justice, community, solidarity, redistribution and inclusion (Rei, 1998). Recently, however, these organization have gone through major processes of restructuration, professionalization and corporatization (Cameron, 2002) and have adopted market principles that are seen at odds with their histories of anarchism and internationalism as well as their struggles against corrupted state structures and economic exploitation (Muehlenbach, 2016). This paper draws on ethnographic fieldnotes, interactional data and It provides a linguistic-ethnographic documentation of the tensions, doubts and controversies around what we might call the neoliberalization of solidarity, and documents social workers' investments in language and communication (i.e. practices of language brokering, language training as well as the investment in translation and multilingual talk) to pursue the utopian projects of inclusion and justice that many of them associate with their specific professional practice.

Cameron, D. (2002). Globalization and the Teaching of 'communication skills'. In Globalization and Language Teaching, ed. by D. Block and D. Cameron. London: Routledge.

Muehlebach, A. (2012). The Moral Neoliberal. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Rei, D. (1998). The Social Cooperation. AIS, 127-136.