Nordic Research Environment on Language, Justice and the Welfare State (Swedish Research Council)

This research environment sets out to explore challenges to linguistic justice
in Nordic welfare state institutions in a context of global migration and look
for new ways to understand and respond to peoples’ needs, rights and current
barriers to participation in the multilingual everyday realities of a large
segment of the population in the Nordic countries.

The environment will fill a significant research gap by situating
contemporary Nordic welfare institutions in a global migration context to
understand and conceptualise linguistic (in)justice from an intersectional
perspective as it appears in the interactions between the welfare state and
service users who do not master the majority or official languages. Through
interdisciplinary exchange and collaboration, we can identify obstacles,
explore and promote solutions, and theorise on the empirical findings in a
welfare institutional context, and contribute to broader knowledge building
and new theoretical and methodological insights on challenges of linguistic
and social justice in the Nordic welfare states.

The collaborative research team represents four Nordic universities and two
Nordic countries. The findings will be shared in a wider Nordic context
through participation and exchange in Nordic research networks and forums;
Nordic Migration Research NMR and Nordic Association for Schools in
Social Work NASSW. The key impact of the research environment is
building a platform for a Nordic research profile on language, justice,
migration, and the welfare state that will be of scientific and societal
significance nationally and internationally.