This paper investigates an encounter in a multilingual welfare setting where a child withmigration experiences is the rights holder. The empirical basis is a story told by theinterpreter Nour, about an encounter at a youth clinic. The analysis is guided by theconcept of linguistic (in)justice. Findings show that linguistic injustices are a result ofthe reproduction of monolingual mindsets and linguistic paternalism in the intersection oflayers of power asymmetries when welfare professionals do not let the child client talk,when adults talk on the child’s behalf, and the speakers give priority to the majoritylanguage on behalf of the language that the child speak. These findings suggest thatprofessionals and policymakers must recognise the special conditions of a multilingualsetting and children as a particular group of language rights holders.

This chapter examines the Cultural dialogue via interpreters project, which seeks to utilize public service interpreters’ professional experiences as a valuable societal resource. These interpreters’ encounters within public services provide insights into operational dynamics, linguistic power imbalances, discrimination, and racism. While interpreters are not responsible for resolving these issues, their perspectives can contribute to transformative change through engagement with professionals, policymakers, and clients. Unfortunately, interpreters’ experiences often go unheard, as they are not seen as professional partners in inter-professional exchanges, and rarely consulted by the media or involved in public investigations. To address this, the project trained 12 interpreters to deliver lectures on their experiences and expertise to public service providers and migrants in Swedish language classes. The challenge was to make interpreters’ knowledge explicit and tangible while upholding their professional obligations and ethical codes. The lectures were developed collaboratively with representatives from Swedish interpreting institutions and the public service sector (including education, health care, and social services). This chapter outlines the pathway for interpreters giving lectures and analyzes the controversies arising from conflicting expectations between stakeholder groups, exploring the tension between intercultural mediation and protectionism. The results highlight the invaluable nature of public service interpreters’ unique expertise.

This article explores the interactions between key actors in asylum interviews in South Africa and Sweden. It is based on forty-one interviews with asylum seekers, interpreters, state officials, and legal representatives. The analysis is guided by theories on professional encounters, bureaucratic violence, and interdependence. The result is presented in two themes: the emergence of mismanagement due to repressive policies and cost-cutting measures, and misinterpretation due to poor interpretation services and failure to recognize the hermeneutic aspects of asylum seekers’ claims. These issues lead to mistrust in the asylum system and in each other’s capacities, as key actors fail to take joint responsibility for the interview act and its outcome. The conclusion is that all key actors operate within a destructive process of mistrust, reinforced by an increasingly repressive political framework as its strongest driving force.

This chapter was published within the report Guide on conceptual and methodological issues in social work research in the field of human mobility, coordinated by R.T. Di Rosa, M.T. Gijón Sánchez, M.T. & G. Gucciardo, describes the migration and asylum policy in Sweden. The report is part of the dissemination of results from the EU-funded, Horizon 2020, Global-ANSWER, project Global social work and human mobility: comparative studies on local government andgood social work practices in the euro-mediterranean region (2020-2025).

The aim of this article is to write against normative discourses and interpretations of 'integration' by nominating social workers and social work as the main subject of 'integration' and find ways to overcome exclusionary and discriminating social work practices. To do that, we use material collected when observing public service interpreters giving lectures to social workers about their experiences from encounters in social work settings. In a critical analysis, we found two 'integration' problems, that is, certain problems that social workers have in making themselves accessible and where they risk reinforcing exclusion and discrimination. One problem is 'the failure of handling perceptions that social services take children'. The other is 'the failures of (re)producing bureaucratically driven social assistance'. These problems might lead to exclusionary practices towards migrant families, often with disastrous outcomes. The analysis shows that these problems appear due to social workers' lack of institutional self-awareness, language competencies, and emphatic ability. To overcome these shortcomings, the interpreters emphasized the impact of encounters that social workers were already involved in during their everyday work. The interpreters recognize that social services are unknown to most families who are newly arrived in Sweden and point out the importance of making more efforts to be clear, rephrasing questions, explaining, avoiding abbreviations, and becoming proactive in dialogue outside of the offices, i.e. recognizing that social work is language work.

This chapter explores ethnographic interviews as a method to document the experiences of public service interpreters working in Swedish welfare services. Service encounters are here theoretically defined in the context of postcolonial migration since, similarly to historical colonial encounters, they include administrative procedures, different and sometimes incompatible experiences and worldviews, and they are inherently unequal. Consequently, the in-between position of public service interpreters is ambiguous, as their mandate is to support the equal representation of all participants in an impartial manner. In order to explain the ethnographic interview method, this chapter mainly draws on two such interviews. In the first one, a public service interpreter positions herself as an outside observer and a witness of the encounters in which she performs and highlights what she sees as fatal shortcomings of the institutions concerned. In the second interview, the perspective of the interpreter is that of an insider, a co-participant in an ethically loaded and complex situation. In the conclusion, I argue that through the interpreter’s experiences, more can be learned about the ambiguity of their position. In a wider context, the experiences of public service interpreters offer insights into how authorities work, about how welfare institutions respond to global migration, and the consequences of a changing linguistic landscape.

Det här temanumret handlar om deltagande forskning inom socialt arbete samt det socialvetenskapliga fältet i en vidare bemärkelse. Deltagande forskning är en samlingsterm för forskningspraktiker som tar avstamp i socialt engagerad samhällsvetenskap, som eftersträvar mobilisering och förändring och som drivs av en ambition att göra forskning tillsammans med dem som är berörda av den. Deltagande forskningsansatser samlas under en rad olika benämningar, som till exempel aktionsforskning (Swedner 1982), samhällsarbete (Sjöberg & Turunen 2018), brukarorienterad forskning (Beresford 2021, även recenserad i detta nummer av Sara Hultqvist), deltagande aktivistisk forskning (lisahunter m.fl 2013) ), praktiknära forskning (Uggerhöj 2011), eller medborgarforskning (Kasperowski & Kullenberg 2018). Denna variation i hur deltagande forskningsansatser benämns återspeglas även i bidragen i det här temanumret. I flera av bidragen talar författarna även i termer av participatory action research (PAR). Det som förenar de olika benämningarna och ansatserna är just de deltagande dimensionerna, att det rör sig om forskningspraktiker som eftersträvar att kunskap och förståelse nås i samspel och ömsesidigt utbyte mellan forskare och forskningsdeltagare, med målsättning att forskning ska vara användbar för alla involverade. Signumet för sådan forskning är alltså att den görs tillsammans med och inte om människor.