Organising Integration Support for Recent Immigrants in Sweden as a Spectacle: Practices and Consequences
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.19245/25.05.pij.8.1.5Keywords:
organizing, spectacle, recent immigrants, integrationAbstract
This paper explores organising outside organisations in the context of the labour market integration of recent immigrants in Sweden. More specifically, it examines integration support events organised as a means of facilitating the efficient employment integration of recent immigrants. It draws on Guy Debord’s ideas of the spectacle in modern society and practice-based approaches to organising to explore how these events function as part of an integration spectacle as they produce and reproduce images of change and renewal where immigrants become employed and employers hire them, obscuring an otherwise sombre reality of inequalities. I use this lens to critically engage with field material collected as part of an ethnographically inspired field study of two annually held integration support events in Sweden, the Your Day! event and the Finally a Job! recruitment day, aimed at facilitating recent immigrants’ employment integration.
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