(e)Health literacy brokering: bridging sociolinguistic gaps at the welfare office?

Abstract

Abstract This comparative case study illuminates communicative strategies arising in contact between two migrant clients, ‘Maria’ and ‘Suda’, and their caseworker at the Norwegian welfare office. Suda and Maria mobilize bureaucratic, digital, and linguistic abilities as part of their health literacies to manage in-person contact, institutional websites, letters, and digital bureaucracy. Additionally, they collaborate with their Norwegian spouses to navigate the complex communicative situation at the welfare office and actively bring up this brokering strategy to increase their social and linguistic authority vis-à-vis their caseworkers. Combining Bourdieusian symbolic power with epistemic stance, and drawing on observations and interviews, I investigate how power and responsibility are negotiated between the women and their caseworkers. In their interactions, brokering strategies function as social capital in several ways, enabling the women to access institutional services, and reassuring their caseworkers that the women have sufficient literacy resources to gain access. I discuss the dual nature of brokering strategies as capital, but also as a factor that may reproduce structural vulnerability, and argue for better understanding of brokering as a health literacy strategy.