For many students with migrant backgrounds and newly arrived students, their mother tongue is not only a knowledge and a school grade issue, but also a reflection of their identity and a sense of belonging, which are shaped by political structures. In this article, we analyze the role of mother tongue in Swedish policy documents and the way teachers and students see the role mother tongue in two Swedish schools: how do school professionals and students view the importance of mother tongue? What measures are taken to encourage the mother tongues of students with a migration background and newly arrived students? What are the implications of and obstacles to studying one’s mother tongue? We will look at levers of integration where school staff, as well as policy documents, encourage modes of incorporation, but also do identify obstacles concerning the practice of mother tongue instruction. Our article shows that although students long for a double cultural belonging, the policy documents are ambiguous and create an unclear promise for migrant students and their mother tongue teachers concerning multicultural incorporation. In practice, they have little evidence that maintaining their cultural background represents a strong value in Sweden. Ambiguous attitude towards mother tongue can be seen as a symbolic response to Sweden as a country which took a turn regarding its migration policy. The integration of residents with a migrant background is constantly questioned in the media and became a central issue in political debates. The implementation of mother tongue instruction reflects Sweden’s current state of discussing migration concerning integration policies somewhere between recognition and stigmatization. The data are drawn from student interviews, interviews with mother tongue teachers, and field notes in two schools in one of the biggest cities in Sweden.

Previous research conducted in Swedish schools and beyond has shown how newly arrived migrant students are excluded by peers from the majority population and by longer-term residents. The novelty of the present article is its focus on the opposite: how peer interaction between newly arrived and other students arises in superdiverse school settings and what this interaction means for newly arrived migrant students. A multidimensional theoretical perspective with a focus on social interaction within school is utilized to illuminate the drama of social life. Ideals of the civil sphere, superdiversity, habitus and conviviality are combined, the goal being to create links between macro- and micro-levels. Peer interaction is analyzed as meaningful per se, rather than as an exchange value. This is valuable from a subjective perspective in relation to the notion that being ordinary is a key to belonging. The analysis shows the lived interconnectedness between ideals, institutions, practices, and individuals’ life experiences. The data are drawn from ethnographic fieldwork undertaken during one academic year in two middle schools [högstadiet] and 42 interviews with newly arrived migrant students and school staff in Sweden.

Through an ethnographic account of the ways that teenagers in a Stockholm school construct meaning through hard-hitting humor, that is, ‘pisstaking’, we investigate how collective representations play out in everyday life. This culture in interaction is analyzed as a form of ‘social art’ where participants sensuously negotiate visible and invisible power structures. The article depicts the interactions as embedded in a symbolic landscape of meaning, one where complex inequalities contained within bodies and played out in interaction can resist and (re)produce gendered and racialized orders and identities. Masculinities, femininities, sexualities, notions of the ‘right’ kind of modernity and being ‘the immigrant’ are put to use as cultural resources in an intersectional play around gaining and maintaining social value and self-worth. We show how ‘pisstaking’ works among teenagers: promoting situational solidarity while also allowing for differentiation and othering processes.

How should we understand the conundrum of love for the segregated school – a system built to keep you in your place? In Gone Home. Race and Roots through Appalachia, Karida L. Brown looks at African American teacher’s work in segregated schools and shows how desegregation could be felt in both gains and losses in the black community. Those teachers prepared their students for a world of integration without freedom. This essay proposes a counter-memory of segregation, a relational agency of teachers past that remains to this day. Former students’ commemoration of teachers, principals, and schools dating from the time of institutionalized racial exclusion works as a symbolic reminder in a still-racist world, representing not only the need to be prepared, but also to stay prepared.

Currently, Sweden is a society marked by growing anti-immigrant sentiments and residential stigmatization. As a result, the symbolic and social gaps between in-groups and out-groups are widening. Consequently, interactions that could foster empathy and solidarity across differences have become increasingly fragile. However, artistic initiatives that counter anti-civil forces are emerging. This article focuses on theater and social inclusion by examining three interconnected elements: meaning, communication, and social change-and how they can serve as a form of civil resilience through critical reflection and recognition processes. Thus, we illuminate how theater can become a venue for social inclusion for a young, ethnically diverse audience by activating symbolic structures of meaning and emotions that recognize the inequalities present within marginalized groups and their experiences. This is achieved by investigating the professional and dramaturgical strategies employed by an artistic team establishing a new theater in a stigmatized neighborhood north of Stockholm and their efforts toward social cohesion. The analysis identifies dramaturgical strategies involving emotions, authenticity, and bodies, along with other professional strategies that work transformatively within the theater and the community, resulting in theatrical communication that allows for psycho-social identification for the audience and critical self-analysis for theater professionals, thereby holding potential for civil resilience.