Disrupting integration

This chapter critically examines the dominant paradigm of linguistic integration within the context of intercultural language education for adult migrants, arguing that it often operates as a technology of normalisation rather than inclusion. Building on critical migration and decolonial scholarship, it identifies several “pathologies” embedded in integration discourses that reproduce sociolinguistic hierarchies and limit the transformative potential of intercultural education. As an alternative, the chapter proposes a shift towards a relational paradigm, grounded in decolonial epistemologies, which foregrounds interdependence, reciprocity, and co-construction of meaning. This shift may imply conceiving intercultural language education as a laboratory of relationality, a creative disruption that destabilizes dominant narratives, challenges deficit assumptions, and recognizes adult migrants as epistemic agents and co-authors of shared social life. A contingent classroom experience from a Spanish language course for adult migrants in Barcelona is described and discussed, not as a model to be replicated, but as an exploration of how relationality can emerge when classroom interactions, roles, and agendas are reconfigured. Rather than offering prescriptive solutions, the chapter highlights the potential of such contingent moments to unsettle integrationist logics and to open spaces for collective meaning-making.