Paper short abstract:

Increasingly, migrants are employed in public sector elderly care in Denmark. The paper explores how care workers’ struggles with the majority language influence their care training trajectories and the relations between the care workers, their colleagues and older adults in need of care.

Paper long abstract:

Increasingly, migrants are employed in public sector elderly care in Denmark. Due to labour shortage, municipalities are actively recruiting migrants residing in Denmark to social and healthcare training and skilled work in public sector elderly care. Much literature on migration and care work in the Nordic countries focus on constructions of care workers’ ‘otherness’, positively and negatively, and how such categorizations affect workers’ wellbeing and working conditions. However, how does care workers’ struggles with the majority language influence their care training trajectories and the relations between these workers, their colleagues and supervisors as well as older adults in need of care?

Based on ethnographic fieldwork, the paper explores the relational spaces that emerge when multilingual trainees work with older adults in their training to become skilled care workers. We focus on shifts in ‘care objects’ (Law 2010) and the productive practice (Buch 2018) that emerge from communication challenges and misunderstandings in care situations. Building on analytical insights on ‘direct’ care work in interactions between the trainees and older adults (Nielsen & Sparre, forthcoming), the paper explores practices and consequences of ‘indirect’ care work carried out by the students’ practice supervisors. As communication challenges are becoming an inherent condition of an increasingly multilingual workforce, supervisors develop strategies to facilitate ‘good’ care relations by matching multilingual trainees with particular older adults to enable the migrants’ training and language learning. Thus, the productive practice of care includes supervisors’ indirect work and ‘coordinated care’ (Navne & Svendsen 2018) to secure tomorrow’s care workers.