This article investigates the role of language cafés as venues where newly arrived migrants to Sweden can socialize and practice the target language. More specifically, we aim to explore how café organizers and volunteers orient to social inclusion as they are interviewed about the goals of the local café and engage in talk‐in‐interaction with the visitors during video‐recorded café sessions. At the methodological level, we rely on ethnomethodologically informed ethnography and conversation analysis, through which we adopt an emic approach to data analysis by taking into account the members’ interpretation of their social world and the actions they accomplish in it. Our analysis uncovers the organizers’ and volunteers’ conceptualization of social inclusion, which they articulate in terms of fostering a sense of belonging and empowerment; they also perceive the mutual benefits derived from the encounters with the migrants at the local café. Overall, the migrants’ views dovetail with the concept of “everyday citizenship,” which highlights the dimensions of belonging, rights, and access to resources for social participation as constitutive of social inclusion. These findings highlight the perceived role of language cafés as a way to act on the existing social reality to transform the local community into an inclusive, equal, and integrated society.

The study presented in this paper focuses on three evangelical churches in Sweden and their engagement with migrants. The goal of the study is to explore how professionals engage with migrants in their everyday work in a multilingual environment. To this end, data from interviews with church professionals are triangulated with video-recordings of their interaction with migrants in a variety of church settings. The analyses demonstrate how different dimensions of belonging are enacted in multilingual encounters through practices that allow the professionals to perform social work in an activity context where empathy is of great importance. These findings highlight the role of the church within the public sphere under the changing conditions of globalization.

This article explores translanguaging practices and the different communicative functions achieved through these practices in two residential elderly care facilities in Sweden. Translanguaging here is used as an overarching term for multilingual practices that encompass translation practices, code-switching across linguistic and cultural boundaries, and embodied modes of communication. The data consist of video- and audio-recordings of interactions in two care encounters involving two migrant-background residents, two care workers and a physiotherapist. The analysis focuses on the communicative practices enacted by the care workers who go between and beyond different languages in order to create social spaces where they can accomplish care tasks and manage relational work. These findings highlight the transformative potential of translanguaging to create new configurations of communicative practices, here understood as a change in the care workers’ flexibility to mobilize a broad repertoire of linguistic resources that involves functionally integrated use of different languages and modalities (speech and gestures). At the same time, the functional use of translanguaging practices is contingent on the availability of a translator, and on the linguistic and cultural sensitivity of the care workers

The present article examines how an older person, a late-in-life migrant woman from Iran, and two migrant care workers negotiate their power positions relative to each other. The data are drawn from ethnographic research combined with detailed analyses (conversation analysis and membership organization) of audio- and video recordings of morning care sessions in a residential home for older people in Sweden. The aim of the article is to demonstrate (i) how power hierarchies in the care institutional environment and in the historical context are evoked and challenged in the care encounter (ii) how identity categories and characterizing descriptions associated with language, ethnicity, race and social class are mobilized as part of this process. I analyse four excerpts containing narratives told by the resident. Within this article, I show (i) how the resident invokes narratives from her pre-migration life in Iran to portray an upper-class identity; (ii) how she discloses talk about her suffering in the care facility (iii) how the care workers collaborate to restore social order in the institutional hierarchy, for instance by invoking their institutional identities as caring service providers and using a jovial discourse. Finally, I discuss the implications of these findings for care work and for future research, arguing that a care facility is a cultural arena that plays a part in the general reproduction of cultural identities in our contemporary globalized, social world.

This article explores multilingual practices and normative work in intercultural encounters in a language café set up as part of an integration project promoted by The Equmenia Church in Sweden. The method used in the study combines an ethnographic approach with two research methodologies used for studying interaction: conversation analysis and membership categorisation analysis. For this article, I have selected two examples extracted from video-recordings of interactions when volunteers and migrants at the café are engaged in normative work concerning sensitive, culture-related topics. The article zooms in on the mediating work of a multilingual facilitator, who is assigned the role of assisting as an interpreter in the integration project. It was found that the facilitator does something more than simply translate. Specifically, she also addresses moral issues through (i) explaining and clarifying; (ii) adding information; (iii) expanding on the agenda of the primary party; and (iv) expressing stances and taking sides. Based on these findings, I discuss the implications of this study, highlighting the role of lay multilingual speakers’ mediating work for intercultural communication and for migrants’ early process of integration.