Drawing on theories of agency in LPP (e.g., Bouchard and Glasgow, in: Bouchard, Glasgow (eds) Agency in language policy and planning. Critical inquiries, Routledge, 2019) and educational governance (e.g., Ramiel and Lefstein in Camb J Educ 52(2):217–233, 2022), this study investigates the conditions under which heritage language schools operate outside national support structures. It is based on a linguistic ethnographic case study of a Greek community-run complementary school in Sweden that abruptly lost access to its premises in the spring of 2023. We examine the key stakeholders’ understandings of this period of turbulence, and the individual and collective agentive responses they enacted to secure the school’s survival and to overcome adversity. Data were collected over two years and include policy documents, interviews with key stakeholders, fieldnotes and recordings of classroom interactions, as well as fieldnotes from board, parent and teacher meetings. The findings exemplify how bottom-up governance practices, individual and collective agency and emotional investments contribute to the Greek school’s organisational sustainability, and enable it to persist in the face of acute challenges and the changing political conditions in Sweden. Ultimately, we discuss how these findings can inform language policy more broadly to strengthen support for heritage language education and multilingualism in society. © The Author(s) 2025.

This article explores how narratives of geographical place are constructed and negotiated in interpreter-mediated asylum interviews in Sweden. Drawing on a case study of one asylum seeker’s account, it examines how negotiations of place function as narrative resources under institutional constraints. Combining concepts of polycentricity, orders of indexicality, and interactional positioning, the analysis shows how narratives about place are co-constructed, contested, and evaluated in interaction. The data consists of two recorded interviews conducted by the Swedish Migration Agency. The study demonstrates how place is narrated relationally and experientially by the asylum seeker, yet institutionally interpreted through a narrow, cartographic lens, often via interpreter-mediated formulations. The analysis highlights the narrative consequences of this disjuncture, showing how credibility is negotiated, undermined, or reconfigured as participants engage in ongoing interactional and indexical work. In doing so, the article contributes to our understanding of narrative as shaped by institutional interaction and competing spatial frameworks.

Today, many children grow up in transnational families with a variety of migration experiences. The Greek-Swedish migration is characterized by a number of migration waves starting in the late 1960s, followed by a period of re-migration to Greece, and then a new migration wave due to the financial crisis in Greece in 2010. This paper investigates seven Greek-speaking families in Stockholm with children from 5 to 17 years old who moved to Sweden after 2010 and in which some of the parents had previously lived in Sweden. Based on ethnographic interviews, we investigated how the families reason about their linguistic choices and linguistic aspirations. Migrant families face the task of caring for both learning the language of the new country of residence and maintaining and developing the family’s mother tongue. While we found several similarities in the way the families ascribed value to knowledge in Swedish and Greek, the parents positioned themselves differently with respect to their perceived agency in their family’s multilingual development. These differences were grounded in the parents’ present and past migration experiences and their current professional and socio-economic situations. When reflecting upon the linguistic choices within the family, migrant parents related the family’s linguistic practices to their own linguistic needs. Making a connection between linguistic practices and migration experiences, we argue, is crucial for understanding how migrant families reflect upon their language learning aspirations and their multilingual lives. 

This study investigates two distinct ways of organising heritage language education within one national context. More specifically, we investigate the teaching of Greek in Sweden through: (a) mother tongue instruction provided by the national education system and (b) a complementary school run by a parental organisation. Drawing on Archer's morphogenetic approach (1995), where structure, culture and agency are seen as separate but interrelated analytical layers, we investigate key actors' agentive responses to structural and cultural enablements and constraints. The study includes a historical overview and a linguistic ethnography conducted in both contexts. The data encompass policy documents, classroom observations and interviews with teachers, board members, parents and students. The findings show that the educational contexts have different legal statuses and are governed at different policy levels (national vs. transnational), while sharing many structural constraints at the level of praxis, such as being based on voluntary participation, limited instruction time and inconvenient scheduling. However, the key actors navigate the constraints of each setting in different ways, thus pointing to distinctive differences between them. Ultimately, the study shows how both educational systems complement each other and serve important roles in supporting the maintenance and development of heritage language and culture in Sweden.

In this paper, we conduct a critical discourse analytical study of asylum interviews in order to contribute to knowledge and awareness of (a) how asymmetrical power relations are discursively (re)produced as well as manoeuvred and negotiated during the interaction and (b) what this means in terms of positioning of the participants. Focusing on a number of metacommunicative sequences characterised by a notably high degree of interpersonal complexity, we examine how participants are positioned and how positioning is discursively realised. We draw on eight observed and recorded asylum interviews conducted in Sweden 2018–2021. Metacommunicative positioning is analysed mainly with a focus on speech functions and modality. We show that metacommunication is used by all participants largely as a means of constructing an asylum narrative within the framework of an institutional discourse. The participants can position each other in (dis)advantageous ways in their attempts to deny, or sometimes claim, responsibility for miscommunication. The applicants generally obey the metacommunicative instructions given by other, more powerful participants. However, we also show an example of an applicant who makes resistance to the institutional discourse. Furthermore, all participants use metacommunication as a tool to guide each other in the conversation, thereby positioning themselves as responsible for the co-construction of the asylum narrative. Finally, we underline the benefits of conducting critical discourse analysis in the study of asylum interviews, although such studies can barely change the fact that the asylum determination process is unequal and asymmetrical in its core.

The aim of this study is to demonstrate how the presence of an emerging written record may affect the content of an asylum narrative, based on which a decision concerning the asylum claimant's right to receive protection eventually is taken. The lion's share of studies on interpreter-mediated asylum interviews to date focus on risks involved with assigning non-professionals to perform the interpreting. This study draws specifically on a 3.5 min-long sequence taken from an asylum interview involving a professional interpreter, working between Russian and Swedish, and the corresponding paragraph of the Swedish-language written minutes, produced in parallel by the caseworker at a Migration Agency office. The study demonstrates something that hasn't been highlighted much in the literature on asylum interviews, namely the mutual impact of the interpreter-mediated communicative format-the specific turn taking order and the restricted linguistic transparency-and the parallel record keeping; the intricate passage from two spoken languages to an asylum narrative in the form of a text written in one of these languages.

I ett protokoll fört under en asylintervju återfanns en obegriplig mening som den asylsökande inte kände igen. I denna artikel undersöker vi vad som ledde fram till denna mening. Med sam­talsanalys som teoretisk och metodisk ansats går vi igenom en 3,5 minuter lång sekvens hämtad från den ljudinspelade, tolkade asylintervju där den obegripliga meningen fördes till proto­kollet. Språken som talades var svenska och ryska. Protokollet skrevs på svenska. Under­sök­ningen visar hur flera faktorer och samtliga deltagare i asylintervjun, på olika sätt, styr och for­mar framväxten av den asylberättelse som manifesteras i protokollet.

Generellt för tolkade samtal gäller att tolkens återgivningar av det som sagts på det andra språket möjliggör parternas delade förståelse – samtidigt som de skapar ett icke-konventionellt turtagningsmönster. Specifikt för asylintervjuer är att ett detaljerat protokoll av det som sägs förs, samtidigt som intervjun pågår. Hur det samtidiga protokollskrivandet påverkar turtag­nings­­mönstret har inte undersökts i någon större utsträckning i tidigare forskning.

Artikeln visar på svårigheter som kan uppstå när en institutionell berättelse samkonstrueras när den parallellt dokumenteras i ett protokoll. Kunskap om detta är av vikt för såväl praktiker inom asylprocessen, som för vidare studier av tolkning i offentlig sektor.

Asylintervjun är förmodligen den mest kritiska delen inom asylprocessen, och de allra flesta intervjuer sker med hjälp av tolk. När tolkningen inte fungerar är det djupt problematiskt. Det drabbas inte minst den asylsökande och är ett hot mot rättssäkerheten i asylprocessen.

Kunskapsöversikten avser att ge en bild av den forskning som finns om tolkfunktionen i asylprocessen, med särskilt fokus på de intervju- och förhandlingssituationer som förekommer när myndigheter handlägger och beslutar i frågor om asyl, alltså mötet mellan migrationsmyndigheter och asylsökande. Översikten bygger på forskning om tolkning i institutionella miljöer i allmänhet och forskning om tolkning i asylprocessen i synnerhet.

Den mynnar ut i ett antal övergripande slutsatser och rekommendationer, varav den viktigaste är att det finns ett akut behov av att stärka och professionalisera tolkfunktionen i asylprocessen.

Vilka hinder, möjligheter och förbättringspotentialer finns när det gäller tolkning i asylprocessen? I denna artikel delar berörda personer med sig av sina erfarenheter. Framför allt kommer asylsökande och offentliga biträden till tals, men även Migrationsverkets handläggare. Artikeln bygger på en intervjustudie.