Mid Sweden University

Following legal and welfare restrictions imposed on asylum seekers in Sweden after 2015, new alliances emerged within and beyond professional social work and welfare institutions. This article examines how welfare professionals, in collaboration with civil society actors, have developed strategies to ensure that young asylum-seeking people have access to rights and welfare interventions that secure livelihoods. The data are based on interviews with welfare professionals and other actors involved in solidarity practices within civil society and asylum rights movements. The analysis draws on Joan Tronto's political ethics of care to conceptualise solidarity as a democratic, political and relational practice. It also engages with scholarship on transversal solidarity to describe how forms of care, resistance and collective responsibility emerge across institutional and civic boundaries in response to increasingly restrictive asylum law and practice. Drawing on Tronto's concept of 'caring with', we conceptualise ethical care as a practice shaped through cross-boundary organising and collective responsibility under restrictive migration policies. We analyse three strategies that welfare professionals have developed to counter the effects of increasingly restrictive asylum policy: open strategies from the inside, undercover strategies from the inside and becoming double agents of solidarity, through which care is enacted as a political stance. 

 This study aims to describe and understand the mission and enactment of public care in rural schools, to prevent students’ wellbeing and equality in education. The legal framework reinforces the school’s role in public care. According to Sweden’s new Social Services Act, all professionals working with children (including school staff) are legally required to report concerns to social services if they suspect that a child is being harmed or is at risk.  In rural areas, where external support may be sparse, school leaders play an important role in ensuring that this duty is understood and acted upon. But rural school leaders often lead across multiple sites, engaging in peripatetic leadership practices that challenge conventional expectations of presence and proximity. The physical absence from the school site, due to geographic dispersion, shapes how leadership is enacted and experienced. Rural school leaders and heads in Sweden face challenges in providing equitable education. Limited access to both educational and social support services, long travel distances, and constrained resources complicate efforts to fulfil the compensatory mission of education. Additional to the lack of support there is a phenomenon where individuals facing psychosocial challenges and dependent on income support are relocated to municipalities with lower housing costs.  In order to understand these complex leading practices practice theory is used. Rural school leaders develop situated leadership practices that are relational, contextually responsive, and ethically attuned. At the same time, rural schools often benefit from strong local engagement, high staff continuity, and close relationships, which contribute to a heightened sense of place and the development of social capital. These qualities can be strategically mobilized by educational leaders to foster structures of public care around students. In this study, we explore how school leaders in rural areas enact leadership that supports public care, based on school visits and interviews with teachers, social workers, and school leaders, as well as collective reflections from gatherings of school counsellors and school leaders. Preliminary findings indicate significant challenges: a lack of formal competence in both schools and social services, long distances that hinder collaboration, and limited institutional capacity. Despite these constraints, there is a strong commitment to children’s well-being among multi discipline welfare professionals, and the enactment and autonomy of civic care—locally driven, informal support structures developed within villages, schools and the social service. Instead of fragmented expert service and support there is a holistic general and informal support and care. This is a critical study that foregrounds the rural in relation to urban norms shaping policy frameworks. These norms are intended to be implemented in rural contexts that are frequently portrayed as deficient by urban standards yet possess alternative strengths that remain undervalued in an era dominated by metrics and formally accredited competencies.  

Waiting remains an under-explored dimension of research on municipal labour-market programmes. Previous studies indicate that such programmes seldom shorten young people’s periods of unemployment and in some cases may reinforce a sense of distance from working life. This article examines young adults’ (18–29) narratives of participation in a Swedish municipal activation programme. Drawing on eight ethnographic interviews and a thematic analysis informed by Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis, we explore how institutional temporalities shape lived experiences of waiting, stasis and (occasionally) progression. The findings show that everyday life in the programme is structured around repetitive, standardized activities that participants perceive as only tenuously connected to tangible routes into employment. Despite the programme’s stated aim of enhancing employability, waiting becomes a central, regulated feature of participation. At the same time, a slower tempo allows for meaning-making through social interaction, relational stability and self-reflection. We argue that municipal activation programmes should be understood not only as instruments of social control but also as potential sites of care, repair and personal transformation. The study calls for a broader understanding of ‘progression’, attention to participants’ relational and subjective needs, and the incorporation of structural reflection into everyday practice.

In Sweden, as elsewhere, migrants’ language knowledge has become a debated topic and a cornerstone in restrictive migration policies. In this paper, we investigate how the metaphor ‘language as a key’ to society is used by migrant language learners and how it relates to the participants’ experiences of learning Swedish. The study draws on interviews with 174 migrants enrolled in three different state-subsidized language educational contexts providing tuition in basic Swedish. The results highlight how the metaphor was recurrently used and how it constructed certain time-space relations. It positioned migrant language learners as outsiders to a national imaginary, and the temporal aspects of the metaphor both pointed to what was needed to be done in the present, that is, learning Swedish, and how language learning was associated with future-oriented possibilities. While the migrant students reproduced a simplified discourse on the relationship between language learning and integration, their language learning experiences simultaneously subversively challenged the simplified metaphor.

Detta rundabordsamtal tar sin utgångspunkt i ett pågående antologiprojekt i socialt arbete, vars olika bidrag kretsar kring det sociala arbetets roll i att både navigera inom och påverka samhällsförändringar. Det sociala arbetets praktik karaktäriseras i många sammanhang av en spänning mellan att å ena sidan verka för social förändring för mer jämlika, rättvisa och levbara samhällen och å andra sidan kontroll och disciplinering för att motverka sociala problem. Genom att tala om levbara samhällen betonas socionomers etiska arbete för en värld där människor, såväl som mer än mänskliga livsformer och kretslopp, inte bara lyckas överleva dagen utan även förmår leva ett gott liv med framtidsutsikter. I samtalet utforskas det sociala arbetet och förändring genom att ta sig an följande frågor:

-Hur förstås förändring inom socialt arbete?

-Vem kan bidra till förändring och hur?

-Hur kan socialt arbete bidra till en mer inkluderande och levbar framtid?

- Vilka pedagogiska utmaningar uppstår i utbildning med koppling till ovan nämnda spänningsfält?

Frågorna diskuteras med utgångspunkt i kapitelbidrag som bland annat aktualiserar normkritisk undervisning och pedagogiska utmaningar för ett socialt arbete bortom cisnormen, hur socialarbetare förhandlar olika typer av diskurser inom ramen för en restriktiv migrationspolitisk kontext, samt grönt socialt arbete i ljuset av globala kriser; såsom klimat- och ekonomiska kriser, krig, ofrivillig migration och rättigheter som rullas tillbaka.

Artikeln syftar till att undersöka hur föreställningar om integration ges betydelse vid rekrytering av fosterhemsfamiljer och placeringar av barn i fosterhem i den svenska fosterhemsvården. Det empiriska materialet är baserat på intervjuer med familjehemssekreterare som rekryterar fosterhem och socialsekreterare med erfarenhet av att placera barn i fosterhem samt etnografiska observationer, samtliga genomförda 2015–2016. Genom att visa hur föreställningar knutna till integration dels fungerar sorterande för vilka familjer som ses som lämpliga för uppdraget, dels ligger till grund för argument att placera barn med annan etnisk bakgrund än svensk i svenska familjer, utkristalliseras fosterhemsvården i denna artikel som en gränspraktik som upprätthåller nationens gränser på långt geografiskt avstånd från dess territoriella gränser. I analysen ges exempel på hur den politiska diskursenom integration utgör en central dimension i denna gränspraktik och på hur detta producerar processer av såväl inkludering som exkludering.

This article aims to investigate how ideas about integration are given importance in the recruitment of foster families and the placement of children in foster home care in Swedish foster home services. The empirical material, conducted in 2015/2016 is based on interviews, with both social workers who recruit foster homes and socialworkers with experience of placing children in foster homes. The material also includes ethnographic observations. By showing how notions linked to integration partly function as a sorting and instrument for assessing which families are considered suitable for the mission, partly constitute arguments for placing children with a different ethnic background in Swedish families, the foster care services’ will be crystallized as a border practice in this contribution. That controls and maintains the borders of the nation at a far distance from its territorial boundaries. The analysis gives examples of how the political discourse of integration constitutes a central dimension in this bordering-practice, and how this produces processes of both inclusion and exclusion.

Trajectories of inclusion: A longitudinal study of lived experiences among people seeking protection in Sweden

This study examines how people migrating to Sweden in 2014/2015 for protection are oriented in a new space, and how their orientation and meaning-making changes over time. Based on a longitudinal design, where we interviewed the participants on two occasions a few years apart (2018 and 2022), we use Sara Ahmed’s concept of orientation to analyze the participants’ lived experiences of agency and inclusion in Sweden. The analysis shows a strong orientation towards learning Swedish and find employment, but also difficulties and a range of obstacles. Language learning and language education makes it possible to organize one’s hope for a better future but may also create institutional stops. Participants’ experiences also illustrate the importance of study associations’ inclusive arrangement, which creates accessible social spaces. Against the background of recent repressive migration policies in Sweden, the article discusses how public discourses on “failed integration” tends to render invisible efforts and strategies among people seeking protection in the country, in pursuit of inclusion and a better future.