Constructing the "Good Citizen": Discourses of Social Inclusion in Swedish Civic Orientation

Sweden has long been described as a beacon of multiculturalism and generous access to citizenship, with integration policies that seek to offer free and equal access to the welfare state. In this article, we use the policy of Civic Orientation for Newly Arrived Migrants as a case with which to understand how migrants' inclusion is discursively articulated and constructed by the different constituencies involved in interpreting the policy and organising and teaching the course. We do this by employing Foucault's closely interrelated concepts of technology of self, political technology of individuals, and governmentality. With the help of critical discourse analysis, we illustrate how migrants' inclusion is framed around an opposition between an idealised "good citizen" and a "target population" (Schneider & Ingram, 1993). In our analysis, we draw on individual interviews with 14 people involved in organising civic orientation and on classroom observations of six civic orientation courses. Firstly, we show how migrants are constructed as unknowing and in need of being fostered by the state. Secondly, we illustrate how social inclusion is presented as being dependent upon labour market participation, both in terms of finding work and in terms of behaving correctly in the workplace. Lastly, we show how migrant women are constructed as being problematically chained to the home and therefore needing to subject themselves to a specific political technology of self to be included

Responsibility for justice in action: commemoration, affect and politics at <i>Il Memoriale della Shoah</i> in Milan

In this article, we analyse Il Memoriale della Shoah, the memorial of the victims of the Shoah in Milan, which was inaugurated in 2013 and, in 2015, was turned into a night shelter for destitute migrants. To understand the rhetoric and politics of the Memorial, we bring together the notions of affective practices, découpages du temps (lit. slices of time) and multidirectional memory. This analytic approach allows us to examine the nonlinear shape of remembering, the dialectic relationships between the spatialisation of time and the temporalisation of space, the ways in which emotions are brought into being semiotically in context, and the ethical questions that these feelings raise. Through detailed multimodal and affective analysis of the affordances of the built environment and its soundscape, the curation of the Memorial, the contextualisation of three guided tours (two online and one insitu) and politicised commentary on the Memorial’s decision to shelter refugees, our paper illustrates the multi-layered character of the relationship between space and time–one in which the past, the present and the future partly overlap and mobilise political action

Space/place matters

This special issue of Multilingual Margins on the theme of “Space/ place matters” has its origin in a doctoral summer school organised in December 2016 by the Department of Linguistics and the Centre for Multilingualism and Diversities Research at the University of the Western Cape as part of a collaboration with the University of Oslo and three other South African universities – Stellenbosch University, University of Cape Town and University of the Witwatersrand – and financed by Research Council of Norway’s programme International Partnerships for Excellent Education, Research and Innovation (INTPART). Doctoral students based in Norway and South Africa attended the summer school, presented their research projects, and were encouraged to submit an article to Multilingual Margins. This was with a view to training budding scholars to deal with the peer-review process of academic publishing. This special issue is the material outcome of this process and includes three articles that have a common interest in unpicking the complex relationship between language and space/plac

Locating Sweden in Time and Space: National Chronotopes in Civic Orientation for Adult Migrants

The aim of this article is to use courses in civic orientation for newly arrived adult migrants in Sweden as the empirical entry point from which to investigate whether, and if so, how, civic values are tied to the Swedish nation through specific discourses and narratives. With the help of a framework that brings together theorisations of the discursive construction of the nation with the notions of the chronotope and ‘social narratives’, the article demonstrates how narratives within civic orientation are characterised by specific spatio-temporal moves that discursively construct Sweden as a nation-state. Such national chronotopes are not innocuous but are part of a rhetoric of nationalism that constructs a linear and comprehensive story of prosperity and superiority, not least vis-à-vis some other geographical areas in the world. As such, the analysis seeks to contribute to the burgeoning scholarship on civic orientation programmes by offering further empirical evidence of the shapes such programmes take, and how civic values become nationalised. With the help of the notion of the chronotope, the article also seeks to add some fresh perspectives to scholarship on nationalism and othering by showing mundane spatio-temporal moves in the production of a ‘national imaginary’ (Calhoun 2017)

Does gender matter? A cross-national investigation of primary class-room discipline.

© 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis GroupFewer than 15% of primary school teachers in both Germany and the UK are male. With the on-going international debate about educational performance highlighting the widening gender achievement gap between girl and boy pupils, the demand for more male teachers has become prevalent in educational discourse. Concerns have frequently been raised about the underachievement of boys, with claims that the lack of male ‘role models’ in schools has an adverse effect on boys’ academic motivation and engagement. Although previous research has examined ‘teaching’ as institutional talk, men’s linguistic behaviour in the classroom remains largely ignored, especially in regard to enacting discipline. Using empirical spoken data collected from four primary school classrooms in both the UK and in Germany, this paper examines the linguistic discipline strategies of eight male and eight female teachers using Interactional Sociolinguistics to address the question, does teacher gender matter?Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

Changes in upper airways microbiota in ventilator-associated pneumonia

Background: The role of upper airways microbiota and its association with ventilator-associated pneumonia (VAP) development in mechanically ventilated (MV) patients is unclear. Taking advantage of data collected in a prospective study aimed to assess the composition and over-time variation of upper airway microbiota in patients MV for non-pulmonary reasons, we describe upper airway microbiota characteristics among VAP and NO-VAP patients. Methods: Exploratory analysis of data collected in a prospective observational study on patients intubated for non-pulmonary conditions. Microbiota analysis (trough 16S-rRNA gene profiling) was performed on endotracheal aspirates (at intubation, T0, and after 72&nbsp;h, T3) of patients with VAP (cases cohort) and a subgroup of NO-VAP patients (control cohort, matched according to total intubation time). Results: Samples from 13 VAP patients and 22 NO-VAP matched controls were analyzed. At intubation (T0), patients with VAP revealed a significantly lower microbial complexity of the microbiota of the upper airways compared to NO-VAP controls (alpha diversity index of 84 ± 37 and 160 ± 102, in VAP and NO_VAP group, respectively, p-value &lt; 0.012). Furthermore, an overall decrease in microbial diversity was observed in both groups at T3 as compared to T0. At T3, a loss of some genera (Prevotella 7, Fusobacterium, Neisseria, Escherichia-Shigella and Haemophilus) was found in VAP patients. In contrast, eight genera belonging to the Bacteroidetes, Firmicutes and Fusobacteria phyla was predominant in this group. However, it is unclear whether VAP caused dysbiosis or dysbiosis caused VAP. Conclusions: In a small sample size of intubated patients, microbial diversity at intubation was less in patients with VAP compared to patients without VAP

'Black diamonds', 'clever blacks' and other metaphors: Constructing the black middle class in contemporary South African print media

South Africa (SA) has been undergoing a process of transformation since the end of White minority rule (apartheid) in 1994. During this period, various employment and lifestyle opportunities have given rise to a growing Black middle class (BMC). Against this backdrop, the article draws upon an intersectional approach to corpus-assisted discourse studies in order to examine the construction of the BMC in a 1.4 million-word corpus composed of 20 mainstream Anglophone South African newspaper titles published between 2008 and 2014. With the help of the corpus tool AntConc, the article investigates the collocates of ‘black middle class’, ‘black diamonds’, ‘clever blacks’ and ‘coconuts’, classifying results according to semantic categories in order to provide an idea of the multiple but nuanced representations of the BMC in contemporary SA. The analysis finds several lexically rich moralizing and paternalistic discourses that, in accordance with an intersectional perspective, enact a complex pattern of strategies that are simultaneously exclusionary and inclusionary

Debating Swedish : Language Politics and Ideology in Contemporary Sweden

This thesis is concerned with three language debates that reached their most crucial peaks in Sweden at the beginning of the twenty-first century: (i) the debate on the promotion of the Swedish language, (ii) the debate on language testing for citizenship, and (iii) the debate on mother tongue instruction. The main scope of the thesis is to take a theoretically multi-pronged approach to these debates trying to shed light on the following aspects: Why did such debates emerge when they did? Which discourses were available in those specific historical moments? Who are the social actors that intervened in these debates? What is at stake for them? What do they claim? What systems of values, ideas and beliefs – i.e. ideologies – underlie such claims? What are the effects in terms of identities, objects of political intervention, commonsensical knowledge and authority that these discourses and ideologies produce? Taking Sweden as a case in point, the thesis adds to the existing literature another example of how language debates are the manifestation of conflicts between different language ideologies that struggle for hegemony, thus attempting to impose one specific way of envisaging the management of a nation-state in a time of globalisation. In their outer and most patent facets, these struggles deal with the relationships between languages in today’s Sweden, and how the state, through legislation, should – or should not – regulate such relationships in order to (re)produce some kind of linguistic order. However, the thesis also illustrates that when social actors appeal to a linguistic order, they not only draw boundaries between different languages in a given society, but they also bring into existence a social world in which the speakers of those languages come to occupy specific social positions. These linguistic and social hierarchies, in turn, are imbricated in an often implicit moral regime of what counts as good or bad, acceptable or taboo in that society

Language, gender and sexuality in South Africa

No abstract availabl