Liz Adams Lyngbäck

This linguistic ethnography was conducted in accommodated language education in Sweden, aimed at adult learners with deafness, hearing impairment, post-traumatic stress disorder, migration stress, or intellectual disability, here, focusing on the latter group, who attended Swedish language learning courses. We empirically investigate a decolonial crip literacy, by connecting language education to epistemic reciprocity. The decolonial lens is understood with regard to the marginalized and dis-abled body, under-represented in Applied Linguistics. More specifically, we focus on teacher positionality and ethical stance-taking among three of the teachers, to contribute an in-depth and situated account of a decolonial crip literacy, as counteracts of ableism and linguicism, and an orientation toward epistemic justice. Based on our linguistic ethnographic data, we suggest that the decolonial crip literacy project engages with disability-as-difference, positioning the dis-abled body as knower, via epistemic reciprocity, which is communicated through a multiplicity of communicative resources, materialities, and creativity. The paper contributes both to the theorizing of injustice in language education and to alternatives in pedagogical practice.

The aim of this article is to critically examine ideas about language and integration in a non-governmental integration programme targeting parents of small children in Sweden. Through ethnographic and netnographic fieldwork of parenting experiences it is revealed that monolingual ideologies conflate with iconic figures reproducing and reinforcing language norms. Some parents – i.e. non-white non-Swedish speaking – are made into ‘language projects’ when the white Swedish parents take on the role of the ‘integration teacher’ acting as language and parenting role models. The Others' multilingualism is celebrated from within Swedishness, with multilingualism treated as a commodity. This contrasts with the risk of loss - experience of multilingualism by parents with migration background. The inscription of the harms of segregated society on non-white, non-Swedish mothers shows the powerful mechanisms obscuring that integration initiatives operate from monolingual norms within a neoliberal workfare model which creates programs which have unintended effects.