The slowness of language, the speed of capital : conflicting temporalities of the "green transition" in the Swedish north

• Published in: Multilingua
• Main Author: Nuottaniemi, Andreas
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: UmeÃ¥ universitet, Institutionen för geografi 2024
• Subjects: Human Geography; Kulturgeografi; General Language Studies and Linguistics; Jämförande sprÃ¥kvetenskap och allmän lingvistik; Norra Sverige; Northern Sweden
• Online Access: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:umu:diva-227637; https://doi.org/10.1515/multi-2024-0076

Following substantial investments in battery production and fossil-free steel, a few select places in northern Sweden are currently undergoing rapid economic and cultural changes. The aim of this article is to explore the role language education plays for three different groups of (im)mobile subjects – refugees, labor migrants, and cosmopolitan elites – in the ongoing social transformations. By using the time-consuming and ideologically charged social practice of teaching and learning languages as a lens, it is argued that although framed as a sustainability project, the pace of the transformation is set by the accelerating logic of capitalism, posing a challenge to the democratic planning of inclusive local communities, as well as to societal subsystems characterized by much slower temporal regimes. Hence, although Sweden is committed to a “just transition†as part of the Paris Agreement, some are obviously benefiting much more than others from this transition. This paper further highlights the potentially high costs for the local communities that “win†the bids for the new green industries. Apart from considerable economic costs in the present, another result might also be increased social stratification and weakening social cohesion in the long term. Ett fåtal utvalda plats i norra Sverige upplever nu hastiga ekonomiska och kulturella förändringar till följd av omfattande investeringar i batteriproduktion och fossilfritt stål. Syftet med den här artikeln är att utforska vilken roll språkundervisning spelar för tre olika grupper av (im)mobila subjekt – flyktingar, arbetsmigranter och kosmopolitiska eliter – i den pågående samhällsomvandlingen. Genom att utgå från de tidskrävande och ideologiskt laddade sociala praktikerna undervisning och lärande av språk visas här att även om samhällsomvandlingen ofta ramas in som ett hållbarhetsprojekt så bestäms hastigheten av kapitalismens accelererande logik, vilket innebär utmaningar för demokratiska planeringsprocesser, likväl ...