Public defense: Hilde Fiva Buzungu

This thesis explores how language discordant social work transpires. Resulting from an ethnographically oriented approach, the thesis is based on data from participant observation, informal conversations, and qualitative interviews with social workers and minority language speakers. Contributions to research on language discordant social work are as follows:

First, I claim that social work meetings are so communicatively complex and demanding that a high level of language proficiency is required for effective participation. When that proficiency is lacking, unresolved language discordance severely hampers social workers’ ability to work effectively with clients: service-user participation is difficult to achieve, communicative interaction tends to become problematic, and issues often remain unresolved. Moreover, when meetings are carried out in a language in which clients are not proficient, minority language speakers tend to use communicative strategies that partly cover up these communicative difficulties. Similarly, when insufficiently competent interpreters attempt to carry out interpreter-mediation, their impact on communication is detrimental. In these situations, language discordance and power asymmetry are interrelated, with the potential of silencing and muting minority language speakers. 

Second, I argue that the language practices in social welfare offices are communicatively oppressive and marked by linguicism. Contrary to the policy guidelines of NAV (the Norwegian Employment and Welfare Agency), interpreting is not consistently provided when needed, and those who are appointed as interpreters often lack the qualifications that the guidelines require them to have. It is of paramount importance to have in place structures that ensure adequate interpreting when needed. Such structures must not place the burden of requesting or demanding interpreting on the individual minority language speaker, and they must not leave it to the individual social worker to assess whether interpreters have sufficient skills and qualifications. Policy makers have, for at least a decade, been fully aware of research documenting the abysmal quality of interpreting services provided by external interpreting agencies, particularly private for-profit agencies. Despite this awareness, no measures have been taken to organize services to ensure that interpreters with sufficient skills and qualifications are appointed when there is language discordance.

Finally, I suggest that certain attributes of the social work profession have contributed to why these issues with language discordance have not been effectively resolved. In my observations, the combination of communicative complexity and structural shortcomings in managing language discordance frequently left social workers unable to achieve adequate communication and uphold the rights and dignity of their clients. Social workers tended to do their best to “get by” in these situations, rather than oppose or protest against these structures. To compensate for the insufficient communication, they reflected on various matters, analyzed, discussed with other social workers, and tried to imagine the needs and preferences of service users. By absorbing structural shortcomings in these ways, social workers inadvertently contributed to upholding structures that were communicatively oppressive. 

Drawing, as this thesis does, on conceptualizations of communication and communicative interaction may serve to re-frame debates about social work with minorities and, more broadly, social work in linguistically diverse societies. In particular, the thesis centers issues of communication, professional practice, power relations, and linguistic domination and subordination. One of its central aims is to call attention issues of linguicism embedded in the very structures of welfare state service provision.