Negotiating belonging in multilingual work environments: church professionals’ engagement with migrants

1 Introduction

Through the social and global development related to migration and mobility the modern workplace has become multilingual. Hence employees’ realities are becoming increasingly multifaceted. The need for handling multilingualism is significant for professionals, who need to manage relationship-building talk and provide services to people with whom they do not share the same first language. The professionals in focus in the present article are working with pastoral care in multi-ethnic, suburban environments. The article focuses on three evangelical churches in Sweden and how they respond to the needs of migrants, one of the most pressing issues confronting contemporary society.^[1]

We live in an era shaped by migration and the movement of people who have been displaced across international borders by the currents of globalization. Migration is in fact the normal paradigm for many. More people are displaced in the world today than at any point since the end of World War II. Specifically, the number of people moving to Sweden has markedly increased during the last two decades. In 2015, the number of asylum seekers to Sweden was the highest ever, over 160,000 people (National Bureau of Statistics). This huge influx may represent a challenge for the receiving society, which is called to provide the newly-arrived migrants with shelter and food, and to offer some practical solutions for facilitating their integration. In 2015, when the state organizations in Sweden were overwhelmed with the number of migrants and could not adequately respond to the challenges at the time, the civic society, churches among others, helped the reception centres and eased the process of providing welfare services (Wagndal 2016).

The social engagement of churches with the public sphere, rooted in the gospel’s love command (Flescher and Worthen 2007), is well documented in the literature (e.g., Miller and Yamamori 2007; Ruiter and De Graaf 2006). Despite declining attendance, churches continue to play a crucial role as providers of welfare and charity (Prochaska 2006; Salmonsson 2016; Snyder 2012; Steensland and Goff 2013).

One of the social issues where church engagement is prominent and has a long history (Marfleet 2011) concerns the inclusion of migrants, which has to do with the call placed upon Christian churches by faith-based altruism (Flescher and Worthen 2007). This concept is rooted in biblical and theological traditions, such as the great command to remember aliens and strangers, and the challenge to see Christ in the migrant and the dispossessed. Indeed, as Zink (2019) puts it, themes of migration are threaded throughout the Bible. In line with faith-based altruism, the framework of practical theology (e.g. Graham et al. 2019) invites believers to accomplish faithful actions, also termed pastoral practices. Today, we can see how biblical commands are enacted by churches through creative pastoral practices in organized, multi-staffed and agency funded projects (see overview in Snyder 2012; for Swedish examples, see Salmonsson 2016). Many of these projects involve volunteers and respond to the practical and pastoral needs of asylum-seekers by offering language classes and cooking sessions, and by helping them to find accommodation and lawyers. During the last decade, the practices of those involved in this kind of settlement work (see Chao 2020 for citizenship preparation classes; Simpson 2020 for immigration legal advice; and Gregory et al. 2013 for faith literacy classes) have attracted the attention of applied linguists.

The majority of previous studies outlined above are conducted from a theological perspective, whereas only a few focus on language and communication (Chao 2020; Gregory et al. 2013; Simpson 2020). Specifically, the research field concerning the church role in the migrant context still lacks attention to the pastoral practices of parish leaders and other church professionals working in multi-ethnic environments and to their everyday interaction with migrants. We need more investigation on how the professionals envision their role as providers of spaces for social wellbeing in the migrant context, and how they utilize linguistic resources in constructing these spaces. This study investigates how professionals in three evangelical churches in Sweden engage with migrants in their everyday work. In order to explore how the professionals engage with migrants in their everyday work in a multilingual environment, data from interviews with church professionals are triangulated with video-recordings of their interaction with migrants. The article highlights the practices through which issues of diversity and vulnerability are addressed in an activity context where empathy is of great importance.

Before presenting my data, I briefly discuss the conceptual framework of the study. An overarching term used to conceptualize the professionals’ commitment as providers of social wellbeing in a migrant context is belonging. This concept is discussed in the background section below, together with translanguaging and empowerment. The latter are key analytical terms used to foreground the practices through which spaces of belonging are negotiated. In the analyses, I demonstrate how belonging is developed as a recurrent theme in the professionals’ accounts of how they envision their role as members of a faith community; specifically, the professionals aim to create spaces in which the migrants can experience community. Using extracts from video-recordings of naturally occurring interaction in the churches, I then illustrate how belonging is enacted in practice. Finally, I discuss the role of the church within the public sphere under the changing conditions of globalization.

2 Conceptual framework

The concept of belonging as used in previous studies is fluid (see Lähdesmäki et al. 2016 for a review). It has been used in multiple senses in contemporary research across disciplines, though some common denominators can be identified. According to Lähdesmäki et al. (2016: 242), the analytical power of belonging lies precisely in the multiplicity of dimensions that it can potentially cover. Belonging, the authors conclude, is best understood as situational relationships with other people and practises stemming from these relationships “which are fundamentally political and include emotional and/or affective orientations” (L ä hdesm ä ki et al. 2016: 242). In sociological studies the concept has been applied to describe the sense of attachment to a nation, a feeling of membership with a community (e.g. Bakkær Simonen 2017). It has also been used in the sense of attachment to a place, shaped by an illusion of being at home (Fauser 2020). This is how Chao (2020) uses the concept in her study of church-based citizenship pedagogy for adults with a refugee background in the U.S.

In this study, I use the concept in a similar sense, but with more emphasis on its interactional aspect; that is, I use belonging to describe the interactional work that is done in order to create or negotiate spaces in which one can experience social well-being and feel embraced by the community and empowered as an enabled citizen, as well as spaces in which one can form social relationships. Negotiating spaces for belonging to a community has been emphasised in second language (L2) studies as significant for the construction and maintenance of the migrant learners’ identity in new contexts (Lee 2015; Norton 2000; Pastor and De Fina 2005). These studies have shown how identity, place and belonging are constructed in and through narrative discourses. Lee (2015) describes how second language learners’ narratives in a lingua franca zone (Firth and Wagner 1997) show dynamic aspects of multilingualism and multiple belonging. The co-construction of experience through joint storytelling, the author maintains, not only provides them with the opportunity to participate in their L2 but also provides them with a space for belonging in which they form social relations and identities. In a multilingual community, Lee (2015) argues, where there are differences pertaining to language, religion and culture, participants’ interactions create new zones for belonging, a space (Kramsch 1993) out of which a group membership emerges or a community not necessarily involving only the new cultural environment. This line of reasoning is also applicable to the migrant context in the present study.

A key analytical term used in this article to capture how these spaces of commonality are negotiated across linguistic and cultural boundaries through participants’ creative practices is translanguaging (García and Wei 2014; Wei 2018). This concept, which has been applied to multilinguals’ interaction in a variety of settings, ranging from education (e.g. García and Wei 2014) to everyday social interaction (e.g. Blackledge et al. 2015), has radically updated the theoretical tradition of multilingualism (note however that the theoretical motivation for the need of this term has recently been debated; see Wagner 2018; Wei 2018). Specifically, from a translanguaging perspective, multilingualism is understood, by the very nature of the phenomenon, as a rich source of creativity that becomes manifest in the ability to break and push boundaries between languages (cf. Wei 2018: 23). In this article, it is argued that the concept of translanguaging provides added value when approaching the complexity and the nature of multilingualism in the linguistic reality of a contemporary workplace shaped by migration and globalization (Blommaert 2010). As will be shown in subsequent analyses, in a translanguaging space, multilinguals not solely go between languages, they also go beyond language(s) (cf. Wei 2018) in that their practices draw on history, memory and experience.

Another prominent dimension covered by the concept of belonging in this article is empowerment. The term empowerment is defined by Cummins (2000) as “the collaborative creation of power” (p. 44). Cummins, who applies the term to the pedagogical context of educating culturally diverse students in bilingual schooling, maintains that empowerment is generated through interaction with others. This implies, according to Cummins, that students whose sense of identity is being affirmed in their interaction with educators can participate confidently in instruction. In the present article, the term is applied to the migrant context, where it is inherently linked to issues of vulnerability. It conceptualizes the practices through which migrants are positioned as being enabled or empowered to seek knowledge and participate in networks, and to act as legitimate participants in the course of their settlement (e.g., making social contacts, self-supporting through employment) and citizenship (e.g., exercising civic rights; see Bech et al. 2017).

3 Setting

The setting analysed in this paper consists of three evangelical churches which I name the Hill Church, the South Church and the North Church. The churches are located in suburban municipalities, which welcome many migrants and provide support with settlement to asylum-seekers. The municipalities where the South Church and the North Church are located are long-standing migrant communities established in the 1960s and 1970s. Ethnic residential concentration is prevalent in these communities, which has resulted in the formation of minority cultures and languages rather than inclusion in the greater society. The South Church has a rather long history of migrant and settlement work (since the 1970s), whereas the two other churches have a shorter history (since a decade ago).

At the time of the fieldwork, all three churches were part of an integration project called “Tillsammans för asylsökandes egenmakt och deltagande” (‘Together for asylum seekers’ empowerment and participation’). The project was funded by government grants from the County Administrative Board (project period 2018–2019). A regional missionary evangelical organization, which has provided support to socially vulnerable people since the late eighteenth century, is the head of the project. The overarching goal of the project is to “strengthen asylum seekers’ empowerment and participation by bringing knowledge, enabling mutual exchange of experiences, offering community and networking” (quote from the churches’ application for funding^[2]). Since the churches analysed here are so called “free churches” (i.e., churches whose economy relies on donations from their members), these funds have been vital for the scope of the churches’ activities. The pastors describe their congregations as “poor” with a restricted economy. The churches have used the funds in somewhat different ways. The South Church has invested in language classes and teaching, whereas the North Church and the Hill Church have developed a variety of social activities beside language classes, such as language cafés organized as drop-in sessions for language training, cooking and baking sessions, health enhancement, interpreting and guidance with settlement in the migrants languages. These social activities are primarily based on voluntary help.

The language classes in the North Church and the South Church are conducted as study circle activities taught by teachers with pedagogical training. The classes take place in the social gathering room in the church. Participation in these classes does not qualify towards the certificate in Swedish for immigrants (or “sfi”); that is, these classes are not part of the state-funded sfi program. As such, they are not framed by curriculum and national tests. Nevertheless, in the South Church, the teachers are language teachers working in sfi schools, while in the North Church the teacher is a church member who is employed as a parish educator.

The migrants who attend the activities organized by the churches are asylum-seekers, undocumented migrants without residence permit who have not access to state-funded sfi programs, and migrants with various lengths of residence in Sweden who have run into long-standing unemployment after attending the state-funded sfi-program. The activities organized by the churches, including the language classes, are in many cases the only opportunities the migrants have to practice their Swedish and to establish and maintain social contacts with the local community (here understood as all people living in a restricted area).

4 Method and data

The method used in this study combines an ethnographic approach with conversation analysis (CA; Sidnell and Stivers 2013). Long-term ethnographic fieldwork provided knowledge about routine activities and especially about the practices of the church professionals. Specifically, I embrace the concern for ecological validity through ethnographically contextualized data sources (Cicourel 1985, 1992).

The study is part of a larger project^[3] exploring the interactional ecology of language cafés. Fieldwork was carried out by the author and her two collaborators in 14 language cafés and a language class located in churches and libraries in Sweden. The present study draws on interviews, participant observations and video-recordings in the three evangelical churches mentioned above (i.e., the Hill Church, the South Church and the North Church). The fieldwork was carried out from February 2018 until June 2019 and comprises 40 visits in the churches. The researchers gained access to the field after ethical approval from the churches. All data were collected following the ethical guidelines established by the Swedish Research Council and with the approval of the Regional Committee for Research Ethics.

Audio-recorded semi-structured interviews with five employees (three pastors/parish leaders and a deacon, all ethnic Swedes, and a parish educator with Spanish heritage) in the three churches were carried out by the author. The length of the interviews varies between 30 and 70 min. The employees were asked to describe their perspectives concerning the goals of their engagement with migrants; that is, what they envision as their Christian community’s most important commitment in the migrant context. Interview data are combined with field notes taken during participant observation and with video-recordings of three of the employees’ interaction with the migrants, one employee from each church (the pastor in the Hill Church, the parish educator in the North Church and the deacon in the South Church, for a total of 66 h), in order to provide a rich understanding of the sites. The interactional data provide primary, observable evidence to the claims I make about the research sites based on my interpretation of ethnographic data. At the same time, ethnographic details enrich the analytical rigour of empirically based accounts of the professionals’ observable conversational behaviours. Ultimately, data triangulation can shed light in particular on how the professionals construct their workplace practices and orient to them.

For the purposes of the present article, the interviews were transcribed and then analysed with a thematic approach. This approach involved the identification of instances in which the professionals comment on two specific topics: their mission as members of a faith community in a migrant context and their practices when coping with a multilingual work environment. Through repeated reading of the transcripts and listening to the interviews, “negotiating spaces of belonging” arose as a recurrent, overarching theme throughout the professionals’ accounts. Data excerpts from the interviews illustrating this theme were thus selected for this article.

Subsequently, the analysis focused on sequences of multilingual interaction involving: (i) the pastor in the Hill Church and a migrant from Syria; and (ii) the parish educator and the attendees in the language classes in the North Church. The video-recordings were analysed from an emic (participant-relevant) perspective with the methodological tools afforded by CA. After watching the video recordings in their entirety, sequences that show how the commitment to belonging was enacted in the pastor’s interaction with the café attendees and in the language classes were identified and roughly transcribed. Data excerpts illustrative of the professionals’ practices were selected for this article.

The data for the present article are presented in the form of transcripts. Data excerpts from the interviews have been translated from Swedish into English by the author; the English translation appears below the Swedish original. For the sake of readability, a middle form between written Swedish and verbatim pronunciation is used.

Data excerpts from the video-recordings have been transcribed following CA conventions for multimodal transcription (Jefferson 2004); transcription conventions are provided in Appendix 1. Each Swedish utterance is given an English translation in italics beneath it; an attempt was made to make the translations comprehensible, albeit not always altogether idiomatic. Conversational video-recorded data in Arabic have been transcribed and then translated into English by a proficient speaker of Arabic. When needed, two translation lines are provided under each line in Arabic: the first line is a gloss that follows the transcribed talk word-by-word (a list of morphological abbreviations is provided in Appendix 2); the second gloss is an idiomatic English translation.

5 Results – creating spaces for belonging

In the analysis below, I demonstrate how different dimensions of belonging, the overarching theme in the professionals’ discourse, are invoked in their accounts of how they envision their role as members of a faith community in a migrant context. These different dimensions are empowering the vulnerable and negotiating belonging beyond linguistic and cultural boundaries. Using extracts from video-recordings of naturally occurring interaction in the churches, I then illustrate how these dimensions of belonging are negotiated and enacted in practice.

6 Concluding discussion

In this article, I have explored how professionals in three evangelical churches in Sweden engage with migrants in their everyday work in a multilingual environment. The practices of three pastors, a deacon and a parish leader and their everyday interaction with migrants in various activity contexts have been examined. The concern for ecological validity (Cicourel 1985, 1992), involving a triangulation of ethnographically contextualized data sources resulting from long periods of observations and recordings, has provided knowledge about routine activities and practices in the churches. Using seven data excerpts from interviews and video recordings, analysed through an emic perspective afforded by the methodological tools of CA (Sidnell and Stivers 2013), I have shown how the professionals envision their role as providers of spaces for belonging (Lee 2015; see also Bakkær Simonen 2017; Fauser 2020) in which the migrants can experience social well-being and feel embraced by the community, and how they creatively utilize different modalities and languages in negotiating these spaces in and through interaction (e.g. Lee 2015).

The findings from this study highlight the role of the church within the public sphere under the changing conditions of globalization. The analysed data excerpts provide insight into the church as an increasingly multilingual work environment. The three churches in focus in this study illustrate the way migration affects how church professionals engage the world around them in agency-funded projects (cf. Salmonsson 2016; Snyder 2012).

A crucial finding in this study concerns how commonality between the participants as human, social beings is negotiated. Advocating for a pedagogy that fosters the development of multilingual individuals like the parish educator in this study does is not new. Moreover, there is a growing body of research that shows how multilinguals in a variety of settings go between languages and modalities. It has been shown how the professionals in this study make use of multilingual resources to enhance empowerment and promote inclusion (see e.g. the parish educator’s switch to English in Excerpt 3). At the same time there is a need for critical awareness of language practices. Whereas moving between languages can be used as a resource to secure inclusion, the same practices can also lead to the exclusion of (a) physically present person/s (cf. Jansson et al. 2017).

The participants in this study do something more than going between languages: they also go beyond languages (Canagarajah 2018; García and Wei 2014; Wei 2018). The practices of the pastor, and perhaps most importantly the parish educator, convincingly show how belonging is negotiated beyond linguistic boundaries, thereby establishing a community that goes beyond language. Two different dimensions of belonging are invoked in the empirical data: empowering the vulnerable and negotiating belonging beyond linguistic and cultural boundaries. Specifically, through their practices, the church professionals enhance the participants’ experiences as language users, but also their commonality as human, social beings and enabled citizens, who create for themselves a social space for belonging. We have observed examples of the professionals’ practices as they highlight the migrants’ civic rights as Swedish citizens (Excerpt 3), as they display understanding of the migrant’s situation as problematic while taking stance against an unfair age policy that puts a skilled worker out of the job market (Excerpt 4), and as they praise interconnectedness (Excerpt 7). The participants in the language class are in fact using different languages (see Excerpt 7), albeit in order to identify connections among them. The parish educator utilizes these connections between languages to enhance belonging. Viewed through the theoretical lens of translanguaging, the participants thereby transform the present, i.e. the existence of large, seemingly unbridgeable differences, and by so doing reinscribe their historical commonality as thinking human beings (cf. Wei 2018: 24).

The professionals’ enhancement of belonging in this study is worth considering given the fact that Sweden is moving towards an ever-tougher asylum policy since the 2015 crisis, when the country received a great influx of refugees. An increasing anti-immigrant sentiment has created a hostile environment, which has led migrants to feel insecure about their settlement status and to question their sense of belonging. This casts the parish educator’s rhetorical plea concerning everyone’s right to Swedish citizenship (Excerpt 3) as a counter discourse to public hate speech against asylum-seekers. There may of course be other views on the parish educator’s extreme case discourse; for example, some might point out how such a discourse could create false pretensions about civic rights in Sweden and therefore cause possible problems. Nevertheless, the parish educator’s plea resonates well with the migrants’ perceived vulnerability to marginalization and social exclusion (e.g. Fauser 2020), as shown in Excerpt 1. Settlement, not least in terms of housing and employment, but also with respect to education and language, was a great concern among the migrants.

Ultimately, the findings from this study provide evidence for how church professionals creatively enact their biblical commands to remember aliens and strangers through faithful actions (e.g. Graham et al. 2019; Snyder 2012; Zink 2019), and how they thereby engage with migrants in their everyday work in a multilingual environment. Their practices illustrate how they respond to the needs of migrants in vulnerable positions, but also and most importantly how they adopt practices of empowerment to strengthen the vulnerable.