between childhood and adulthood can be described as "a life on hold." Arriving in a new country brings changes that they have not been able to anticipate. A prominent feature of several of the accounts is the feeling of being a stranger, both to one's surroundings and to oneself.

The purpose of this article is to analyze how reception practices and the meaning of a “worthy” reception of refugees and migrants are negotiated in encounters between various receiving actors in times of shifting Swedish migration policies. The analysis is grounded in ethnographic methodology and draws on data collected in 2016. The aim of the study was to document experiences of the so-called “refugee crisis” in Europe and Scandinavia from a bottom-up perspective among professionals and volunteers narrated during reference group meetings. The reference groups consisted of representatives from state and municipal agencies, the private sector, and civil society organizations. The actors represented in the mixed reference groups were diverse, but all were involved in reception activities. In the analysis we have combined political philosophy about willingness versus ability to receive refugees and migrants with postcolonial theoretical perspectives on concurrent claims and voices. We identified three themes that are central in the negotiation of the practice and meaning of a “worthy reception”: first, the overlooked existential needs of refugees and migrants; second, the lack of gender- and diversity-sensitive reception practices; and third, ambivalences in relation to various refugees groups in times of shifting migration policies. We recommend that in order to promote a worthy reception of refugees and migrants, existential needs must be taken care of and gender- and diversity-sensitive practices must be developed. Another recommendation is to recognize how migration policy limits a society’s ability to receive refugees and migrants, but also affects the willingness among those actors who receive.

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In focus of this article are two selective parenting programs, both developed locally by Social Services and by a Women´s Shelter organisation in Sweden. Parents with a foreign background is the target group. Their needs are formulated in terms of`change values based on patriarchal beliefs in honour´. In the article the programs are described in relation to universal evidence-based parenting programs and a also a three-part dilemma of 1; offering preventative but also normative interventions to 2; selected target groups and 3; based on the idea that migrant parents have special needs due to cultural differences. The aim is to investigate in what ways the practices of conducting parenting programs for this target group could be framed as cultural imperialistic practices or democratic practices in social work. Cultural imperialism leads to oppression while democratic practices are emancipatory. A conclusion is that both practices are apparent and concurrent. Yet the dualism dismantles the risk of reproducing oppression of the selected target group. Another conclusion is that instead of defining parents with foreign backgrounds as culturally different the target group could be defined as a group with migration experience e. g. experience of leaving the home country and family and finding ways of resettlement in a receiving country. Selective parent programs are relevant but an alternative definition would promote democratic practice, where authorities and social workers meet the demands of the participating parents on their own terms, and with the goal, not to change 'unwished cultural differences' but to support empowerment.

This chapter investigates the asymmetries associated to child language brokering in Swedish welfare institutions. Group interviews with (a) people who have experiences of language brokering as children and (b) public service professionals who have used children as brokers in encounters with non-Swedish speaking service users are analyzed. Results show that both groups consider that resorting to child language brokering is wrong but at the same time they reproduce this social practice and see benefits in it. This ambiguity leads interviewees to lay responsibility on several levels: the parents who place unreasonable demands on their children; the public service professionals who allow children to take on responsibility in precarious situations, and society at large that may be accomplice to structural discrimination of non-Swedish speaking service users. The responsibilities identified by interviewees in their narratives are critically discussed in relation to the concept of “structural complicity” showing how power relations and social structures create situations where individuals act with complicity even when they do something that they consider to be a good solution for an imperative problem and for which they do not see any alternatives.