Voices of authority in conflict: The making of the expert in a language debate in Sweden

The present paper aims to investigate an aspect of a recent public debate about bilingual education in Sweden. Focusing on the textual exchanges between some of the academics who intervened in the debate in the columns of one of the leading Swedish dailies, Dagens Nyheter, the paper will draw upon performativity theory to argue that expertise in language debates is a complex phenomenon which is constantly enacted and contested through discourse. Rather than pre-positing who is the expert and therefore speaks with authority in a given matter, the paper will try to tease out some of the strategies that social actors, under certain discursive constraints, deploy to construct their competence in a specific issue, thus investing their statements with authority.