Becoming legible: Migrant women’s situated narratives between skill formation, work and recognition

Skill development and language courses for migrants are often portrayed as neutral and empowering approaches that facilitate participation, employability, and social integration. In Italy, programs offering Initial Vocational Education and Training (IVET) and Italian as a second language (L2), often provided by CPIAs (in Italian, Centri Provinciali per l’Istruzione degli Adulti), are viewed as essential tools for fostering inclusion and civic recognition (Gabrielli et al., 2020). However, when analyzed through decolonial and critical pedagogical perspectives (Smith, 2012; Santos, 2014), language and vocational training emerge as ambivalent dispositifs that not only develop practical and linguistic competencies but also establish regimes of legitimacy, recognition, and conditional belonging. This paper conceptualizes vocational education and language training as pedagogical spaces shaped by normative and epistemic orders governing access to recognition and social intelligibility.