Language and Power: Exploitation and Injustice

University teacher education provides an important source of income for its host institutions, and a responsibility to guarantee that staff can provide students with a solid foundation of research-based knowledge. However, three national inquiries from 1997 onwards and several national quality audits at individual institutions over the past five years show that many of Sweden’s higher education institutions have had difficulty meeting these requirements. This chapter explores this problem ethnographically at three institutions. It identifies a politically driven fragmentation and ‘erosion’ of the scientific content of the professional knowledge of Sweden’s initial teacher education programmes, together with a long history of economic exploitation and institutional contempt toward teacher educators and students on the part of academic management. The emergence of neoliberal academic capitalism and new public management have intensified these failings. There are also voices of resistance and discourses of resilience among academics which is highlighted toward the end of the chapter.