A ‘legitimate penalty’ in the labour market? Language barriers, linguicism, and racialisation
21 October 2026 13:00 until 14:30
University of Sussex Campus - Progressive Futures Room (Ground Floor Library)
Speaker: Clara Holzinger, Institute for Sociology and Social Research
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On 21 October, the Sussex European Institute (SEI) and Sussex Centre for Migration Research (SCMR) are holding a special joint seminar on 'A ‘legitimate penalty’ in the labour market? Language barriers, linguicism, and racialisation'
Featuring Clara Holzinger, Institute for Sociology and Social Research, Vienna University of Economics and Business
Venue: Progressive Futures Room (Ground Floor Library) and online: https://teams.microsoft.com/meet/348473857021901?p=lVxUc12yDCQqdmXdLq
Abstract:
The talk addresses readily assumed ‘language barriers’ in the labour market leading to ‘deskilling’ experiences of migrantised workers. Drawing on a sociolinguistic conceptualization of multilingualism as relational, I understand language ‘skills’ not as a binary variable, but as highly contextual, embedded, and socially constructed. Scrutinizing the imbrication of racism, nationalism, and class, I thus examine (the construction of) language barriers as a ‘technology of migranticization’. I thereby foreground an understanding of language as a potential site of inequality, relating the workings of multilingualism to the unequal distribution of resources. The contribution is based on longitudinal qualitative interview research with tertiary educated EU citizens from Europe’s ‘East’ working in Austria. I analyse incidents where language is a resource on the one hand and constitutes a (racialised) marker of difference on the other. Grounded in the empirical analysis, I propose a distinction between symbolic and manifest language barriers, both materialising in structural inequalities. While empirically entangled, the analytic distinction reveals the tension between meritocratic discourses emphasising individual language learning and the reproduction of racialised labour hierarchies through language practices.
The speaker:
Dr Clara Holzinger is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer in Sociology at WU Vienna University of Economics and Business and at the University of Vienna. Prior to earning her PhD in Social Sciences, she studied Sociology, German as a Foreign and Second Language, and History in Austria and France, and worked for many years as a language teacher. Her research examines the intersections of migration, societal multilingualism, street-level bureaucracy, and work/labour. Across these fields, she is particularly interested in how social inequalities are (re)produced, especially along linguistic and racialised lines. She currently leads a research project on how migration-related multilingualism is addressed within public institutions and non-profit organisations in Vienna. A further focus of her work lies in qualitative methods for multilingual research contexts.