Language Discordant Social Work in a Multilingual World: The Space Between

Based on ethnographic observations of encounters between social workers and people with whom they do not have a shared language, this book analyzes the impact of language discordance on the quality of professional service provision.

Exploring how street-level bureaucrats navigate the landscape of these discretionary assessments of language discordance, language proficiency, and the need for interpreting, the book focuses on four main themes:

• the complexity of social work talk
• the issue of...