Community-driven language education: Navigating inclusion and exclusion among Ukrainian forced migrants in Macedonia

Abstract

This publication looks at which role individual and collective agency of community actors have played in the implementation of language education programmes under the umbrella of the Macedonian Red Cross/Red Crescent. Further, it aims to clarify along which positional lines inclusion/exclusion is negotiated in practice and which role social and cultural capital play in this process. This is achieved by using an explorative ethnographic research design. The data set consists of semi-guided interviews with language teachers, course participants, volunteers and other responsible people in the organisation and extensive field notes taken during the duration of the field stay, containing accounts of diverse informal and semi-formal conversations with members of the Ukrainian Community as well as civil society activists in the field. Language courses for Ukrainian migrants in Macedonia rely heavily on community-driven efforts, particularly by a key individual with high social capital acting as a representative of the Ukrainian community. These classes are exclusively for Ukrainians, fostering ethno-national solidarity and cultural capital within their community. Access is informally structured by social and cultural capital, with participation depending on connections to informal networks which concentrate cultural capital. While these community-based initiatives potentially offer tailored learning, they risk reinforcing nationalism and class-based inequalities.