Conference Program

Across Europe, supplementary higher education programmes and other forms of recognition of foreign qualifications for migrant academics have emerged as key policy instruments within agendas of integration, employability, and widening participation in higher education (https://education.ec.europa.eu/education-levels/higher-education/inclusive-and-connected-higher-education/higher-education-for-migrants-and-refugees ). In Sweden, such programmes that are often framed as short, targeted, and profession-oriented pathways, aim to facilitate rapid transitions into regulated professions in, for instance, the educational or medical sector (Messina Dahlberg, Vigmo & Surian, 2021). This paper examines how these ambitions are articulated and negotiated in policy through a narrative analysis of (intern)national and institutional documents governing supplementary higher education, with a particular focus on the Swedish teacher training program (ULV). This particular programme, which targets immigrant teachers and academics is by far the largest supplementary program, with 74 percent of registered students (Odelberg & Viberg, 2022; UKÄ, 2019). The ULV program is designed for individuals with a foreign teaching degree or an academic degree in a subject area that corresponds to school subjects included in the Swedish school curriculum.

The study is situated within the broader context of widening participation and integration policies in higher education, where inclusion is often framed in instrumental terms linked to labour market efficiency and to address shortages of professional skills. Drawing on intersectionality as an analytical lens, this study explores how policy narratives construct “the migrant academic” or the “scholar at-risk” through intersecting dimensions of migration status, language competence, professional identity, and institutional belonging (Hancock, 2016). These constructions are further examined through a decolonial perspective, which foregrounds questions of epistemic authority, recognition of prior knowledge, and the asymmetrical process of recognition of professional and academic competences acquired in the so-called “third countries” (non-EU/EEA).

Methodologically, the paper adopts a narrative approach to policy analysis (Bansel, 2015, Fenwick et al. 2015), treating policy not as static text but as a situated practice that produces particular subject positions, expectations, and trajectories. In dialogue with sociomaterial perspectives (Gherardi, 2017; Nicolini, 2013), the analysis attends to how policies assemble human and non-human elements (language requirements, assessment policies, documentation practices, and time/space framings) into sociomaterial configurations that enable some forms of participation while constraining others. Preliminary findings show how this relational focus shed lights on the tensions between a focus on rapid labour market entry and on integration, belonging, and professional recognition but also between standardisation and diversity. Even though supplementary programmes are framed as inclusive solutions, they often rely on narrow imaginaries of employability and professional becoming as the only narrative for successful integration of migrant academics. By foregrounding intersectional and decolonial critiques, the paper contributes to debates on the democratization of postmigrant societies, arguing for policy approaches that move beyond deficit-oriented and time-compressed models of integration. Such a shift, we argue, calls for relational and epistemically just policy framings of supplementary higher education and qualifications recognition, that tell the story of migrant academics not only as employable future workers, but as knowledge-bearing subjects within higher education.