Bakgrund: Migrant women in Sweden may encounter language barriers, limited health literacy, and cultural differences in antenatal care, which can contribute to misunderstandings and unequal care. To support communication with Arabic-speaking women, the Swedish-Arabic digital dialog support tool Sadima was developed.

Aim: To describe challenges in development of the digital dialog support tool Sadima and to explore user´s experiences, perceptions, and interactions in communication using Sadima in antenatal care. 

Methods: This thesis comprises four qualitative studies. In Study I, documented field-notes from the development process of Sadima were collected from a co-design team comprising six researchers and eight midwives. Study II included individual interviews with 12 Arabic-speaking women attending antenatal care. Data from Studies I and II were analyses using qualitative content analysis. In Study III, 14 midwives working at antenatal care participated in individual interviews, which were analysed using phenomenographic analysis. Study IV used a focused ethnographic approach, with video-recorded observations of ten antenatal care visits, analysed using ethnographic analysis.

Results: The developement The development of Sadima required balancing evidence-based national guidelines with local clinical routines, cultural adaptation, and time constraints in antenatal care. Arabic-speaking women perceived Sadima as a reliable and accessible source of information that enhanced understanding, safety, and access to care. Midwives described the tool as facilitating communication, reducing language barriers, and supporting more equitable care. However, Sadima functioned most effectively as a complement to interpersonal communication and interpreter services rather than as a replacement. Observations demonstrated that communication in antenatal care remained dynamic and relational, requiring dialog, clarification, and individualized support. Implementation was also influenced by digital competence, organizational conditions, and integration into clinical routines.

Conclusion: Sadima has the potential to support accessible, culturally sensitive, and equitable communication in multilingual antenatal care settings. However, meaningful communication depends on interpersonal interaction, trust, and individualized support; therefore, digital tools should complement rather than replace relational care practices. Sadima may thereby strengthen conditions for equitable and woman-centred antenatal care in multilingual settings.

In this dissertation I explore how schools address cultural diversity among students. In particular, I focus on intercultural education as an approach in which cultural diversity – including a variety of norms, values, habits, and traditions – is recognized as a resource and where minority culture is emphasized, which may be of special importance for students with migration backgrounds.

I highlight a dilemma that schools face when addressing cultural diversity. On the one hand, emphasizing minority cultures as part of an inclusive approach can risk labelling minority students as different. On the other hand, avoiding attention to cultural differences and instead socializing all students into a dominant majority culture risks reproducing a monocultural form of education that primarily transmits majority norms and values. In both cases, students with migration backgrounds risk being perceived as ‘different’ or ‘other’. 

This raises the question of how schools can adopt an intercultural approach – one that values minority cultures as resources in education – without reinforcing marginalization. What possibilities and challenges do such an approach involve? 

To dig into this question, I use an ethnographic approach to investigate a school that works with intercultural perspectives and methods. Over the course of half a school term, I observe students and school staff in their everyday activities and interactions. I note how they, through interactions and interpretations, collectively construct a shared understanding of themselves, their school and the world around them – forming what can be described as a school culture. This school culture, in turn, shapes the outcomes of the intercultural approach, as it provides the interpretive frame through which school practices and interactions are understood. 

The dissertation thus shows that the conditions for successful intercultural education are influenced not only by broader structural challenges – such as marginalization and stigmatization associated with monocultural forms of education – but also by dynamics within individual schools and their local cultures. It therefore highlights the importance of paying attention to and addressing the everyday interactions and pedagogical practices within schools themselves to avoid reinforcing marginalization when implementing approaches such as intercultural education. 

This dissertation examines how principals in Swedish schools interpret and develop strategies for action within the tension between the ideal of inclusion and the demands of organizational and pedagogical differentiation. Grounded in a systems and neo-institutional perspective, the dissertation conceptualizes principals' leadership as a meaning-making and institutionally embedded process, in which interpretation, negotiation, and action are shaped in the encounter between structural conditions and professional values.

The dissertation draws on five sub-studies that illuminate how principals' leadership is constituted across different levels of the education system: policy and text analyses, conceptual-historical policy analysis, systematic literature reviews, and interviews with principals and other actors within governance arenas. Students with autism serve as an analytical example, foregrounding how the tension between inclusion and differentiation takes concrete shape in practice and why both school leadership and special education perspectives must be held together.

The cover essay applies institutional logics and sensemaking as analytical lenses to examine how policy signals and governance expectations are interpreted and made meaningful in principals' everyday leadership. The findings show that leadership can be understood as a continuous process in which policy and governance are translated within local contexts, forming the basis for developing strategies for action. These strategies constitute ways of managing competing institutional demands while simultaneously reshaping the conditions and scope for principal agency. Leadership thus emerges not as individual choice, but as an ongoing process of interpretation and negotiation within, and in response to, institutional frameworks.

The dissertation makes two interconnected contributions. First, it advances understanding of how systemic and institutional conditions shape principals' interpretive work and strategic action. Second, it bridges school leadership research and special education research, two fields that have largely developed in parallel despite addressing the same organizational challenges. By analyzing inclusion and differentiation as questions of leadership as much as pedagogy, the study demonstrates that decisions about placement, resource allocation, and school organization cannot be adequately understood without attending to the institutional logics and governance conditions within which they are made.