Shadowing reproductive labour: alienation, commodification, and emancipation among mother tongue teachers in Sweden

Abstract This article explores how the neoliberal subsumption of heritage language education in Sweden upsets an entrenched sociolinguistic regime in which the labour of language transmission has historically not had economic value. Since the 1970s, Sweden has funded mother tongue instruction (MTI) to protect minority identities through redistributive support for language maintenance. Today, MTI serves 180,000 students in 187 languages through approximately 3,050 full-time equivalent teaching posts. Recently, MTI teachers have increasingly been employed by profit-driven “free school” companies funded by the state, transforming their labour into a source of surplus value. The effects of this neoliberalisation were explored through an ethnographic case study shadowing three private and four public MTI teachers. Drawing on theories of alienation and emancipation, public and private teachers’ strategies for minimising exploitation were found to lead to different outcomes. Public teachers made recourse to the protectionist framework of the MTI eligibility criteria to limit challenging heterogenous teaching situations, while private companies were motivated to include as many students as possible and ignored these frameworks. Private MTI sees the labour of teaching and learning languages expropriated as a profitable arena, presenting a challenge to MTI’s traditional status as conservator of extant minority groups.