Integrating cultural and social policy through family home visits in suburban areas of exclusion: examining the rationalities of Bookstart Göteborg

Abstract

This article explores the rationality of the Bookstart home-visiting programme in Gothenburg, Sweden, concerning its general ambition to provide social inclusion through mixing cultural-and welfare policy. Through the Bookstart programme, librarians visit families in their homes to inform and instruct parents about reading books for their children to enhance language learning. The areas of the city chosen for intervention were described as socially vulnerable, typically with a majority of citizens born outside Sweden. The analysis outlines the rationality and technologies formed in a philanthropist tradition, targeting the moral potential of parenting and creating the subjectivities of the reading parent and child. Different welfare professionals employ slightly different discourses but all base their legitimacy on the benign power of knowledge about what is best for children in the city. Through this analysis, we contribute to the knowledge of how cultural policy is integrated into social policy in the contemporary advanced liberal welfare state.