Linguistic justice, global migration and Nordic welfare states

The research environment sets out to investigate linguistic justice in Nordic welfare institutions in a context of global migration.

Demographic transformations and a changing linguistic landscape test the Nordic model´s ideals of inclusion and equal access topublic services.

The research includes studies in Finland and Sweden focusing interaction between migrant service users and welfare institutions. The target groups are families and older people who have certain dependency on social services. Thus, the areas of social care, work and policy become particularly important to examine.

The research design is based on Institutional Ethnography and Linguistic Ethnography. These methodologies are inclusive and used to look at welfare institutions as composed of language and text.

Theoretically the environment builds new ground by conceptualising linguistic justice in the area of social welfare services.

It expands established conceptualisations of social justice to include linguistic diversity and links this to current economic, moral, political and pragmatic dilemmas of Nordic welfare state transformation. We build on three analytical concepts capturing contexts within which linguistic justice can be analysed.

These are superdiversity, linguistic power asymmetries and authority literacy.

The long-term goal is to identify obstacles, explore solutions and contribute to innovative theoretical and methodological insights on challenges of social justice in the Nordics.