Remeso Research

Despite achieving lower grades on average in lower-secondary school, children of immigrants have high aspirations and choose academic tracks in upper-secondary school at higher rates than their majority peers. Research on this ‘immigrant optimism’ has mainly explored its causes and assessed its impact on degree completion rates. This project adopts a wider life course perspective on this phenomenon and extends this literature in several ways. First, we go beyond degree completion by mapping out the broader educational and labour-market trajectories that these degree choices result in. Second, we advance the primarily quantitative work on the causes of this optimism by examining the socio-biographical forces and affective drives it depends upon. Third, we extend prior work on class and social mobility by studying the social psychological impact of the mobility patterns that this optimism results in. Methodologically, we use a sequential mixed-methods design combining longitudinal register data, survey data, and life history interviews. Theoretically, we innovate by applying recent post-Bourdieusian theory to the empirical challenges of this field and aim to refine this theoretical work in the process. The study also has major societal relevance as it will increase our understanding of the social factors underlying the polarized educational outcomes among children of immigrants and generate key insights into how to maximize the benefits of optimism while minimizing its risks.

This project focuses on top-down politically initiated measures for increased equality and bottom-up local initiatives to strengthen the compensatory capacity of schools in marginalised areas of large cities and in rural areas. We aim to study and compare initiatives for improvement in schools with low academic achievement, examining how they are initiated and implemented and the extent to which they both contribute to students’ knowledge development and create conditions for more-equal life opportunities. At present, there is little systematic knowledge about the effects of the different types of initiative and how they are designed and adapted to the contexts that constitute large cities and rural areas. The project uses a mixed-method approach combining i) a survey with staff members at a selection of schools from across the country in large cities and rural areas; and ii) ethnographic methods by which we study three schools in marginalised metropolitan areas and three rural schools that have improved their results over the past five years. A key contribution is the project’s ability to show how financial, organisational, social and educational initiatives can work together to create favourable conditions for learning.

An increasing share of Sweden’s foreign-born population is living in small towns and rural areas. Many of these immigrants are young, and many are recently arrived during the 2015 refugee reception that made rural areas into immigration destinations through dispersal policies. At the same time, there is also a general trend of rural emigration, particularly among young people who are drawn to the education and labour market opportunities of larger cities. Young people in rural areas, and immigrant youth in particular, are therefore confronted with conflicting norms and institutional opportunities and constraints to leave or stay, making their transitions to adulthood into negotiations of mobility and belonging. Against this background, the project will explore how spatial and social mobility intersect during transitions to adulthood among young adults in Swedish rural municipalities characterized by transnational immigration and internal out-migration. To do this, the project will combine a quantitative survey where young adults are asked about their mobility trajectories so far, and in-depth qualitative interviews and ethnographic observations. Through the project’s focus on a context where mobility and belonging is always contested, and by applying an innovative theoretical framework that combines mobilities and careership theory, the project will destabilize sedentariness as a norm and contribute to a deeper understanding of migration and integration processes.

The problem of exclusionary cities and the need to combat this is acknowledged internationally, within the European Union and in national policy documents. In the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) it is stated that “access to adequate housing is central to achieving inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable cities”. Yet the development visible in metropolitan areas across Europe, and in other places, illuminates that housing issues are becoming increasingly difficult for both policy makers and migrants themselves to combat. The problem of navigating these challenges, by policy makers and refugee migrants, is the focal point of this thesis that explores the nexus between housing and restrictive migration policies. The thesis contributes with a bottom-up approach to understand the interplay of the restrictive migration turn and an existing housing crisis at the local level.

In particular, this research project explores local level housing policies through the lens of a contemporary restrictive and impermanence-oriented migration regime in Sweden, to understand how housing policy relates to national migration policy and, how this in turn, shapes refugees’ experiences of settlement in Sweden in a situation of post forced migration. The project turns attention to three elements shaping settlement processes: i) restrictive ideologies on migration and migrants, ii) housing policies and planning for housing migrants, and iii) migrants’ strategies of attaining housing at the local level.

This project explores how, and to what extent municipalities in Sweden have strengthened their autonomy in the policy fields of migration and labour market integration, despite recently increased centralisation and stricter hierarchies of governance in this policy field. Focus will be put on local efforts to attract, accommodate, and retain migrants, and how this is achieved within the context of an ostensibly anti-migration state, pursuant to austerity politics. In seeking to understand policy divergence between local and central levels of governance, the project aims to explain both why and how it occurs. The former relates to how different levels of governance understands the issue at hand, and the policy frames, institutional logics, and political rationalities that inform it. The latter concerns the material constraints and possibilities associated with local policy implementation, in terms of funding, strategic and operational support, as well as bureaucratic control. Here, subnational cooperative networks and their role in mediating, suppressing, or supporting local policy efforts will be of particular interest. Through a mixed-methods design, including nation-wide survey data and municipal case studies, the project seeks to produce both extensive and rich, detailed data on the Swedish migration and integration regime, laying bare its internal variation.

Connecting artistic research and practice to aesthetics, sociology and computational modeling and visualization, this project asks: What is a crowd in the 21st century? We explore how collective protests, migration and authoritarian populism shape today’s politics while also being modelled by digital infrastructures and automated systems.
Aims:

To understand the impact on democracy of collective protest, authoritarianism, migration and computational modeling.

To investigate how collective behavior generated by digital technologies align crowd behavior with political programs and market strategies that defy democratic values.

To investigate how embodied subjective agency and collective assembly interrupts such processes of collective automation.

To show the ability of artistic research to spark conceptual development, innovative methodologies and theoretical insights into the relation of aesthetic expression and democracy.

The project assembles photography, film, digital aesthetics, literary essay, choreography. It will organize workshops, performances and theoretical debates. Output is a collaborative film essay, a literary essay and anthology, and exhibition.

At the beginning of November 2022, the Swedish Transport Workers’ Union (hereafter referred to as Transport) lost a legal battle as the Swedish court decided that it is illegal to exclude politically active Sweden Democrats from union membership (Frisk, 2022). A representative of the Sweden Democrats (SD) appears happy and content on the TV screen and claims that no one is to be excluded because of political affiliation. The union’s role is to represent workers, continues the SD representative (SVT, 2022). Transport’s argument for exclusion was based on the SD not accepting its fundamental values concerning the equal value of all people. Transport also argued that freedom of association gives unions, as well as other civil society organisations, the right to choose who can be members. The legal battle also highlights one of the many forms of resistance that LO and its unions have employed through more than thirty years of organised racist successes, which is to confront a party that is perceived by many as a threat to democracy. Transport’s attempt to prevent the presence of SD activists in the union reflects the continuous, sometimes successful and occasionally courageous work that trade union activists, some women and/or racialised people have done and do to maintain and develop a socially critical ideology and practice for social justice, in which issues of feminism and more recently anti-racism have to some extent become visible.

This conflict illustrates an aspect of the dilemma faced by Swedish trade unions today, with more than 20 percent of the population voting for the ethno-racist party the SD in 2022. Regarding LO members, 27 percent voted for the SD in 2022, an increase from 24 percent in 2018 (the corresponding figure for those who identified as workers and voted for the SD was 29 percent in 2022 and 24 percent in 2018).¹ The SD, which despite normalisation, as most clearly expressed in the Tidö Agreement,² from its Nazi and racist roots, sometimes ideologically and politically exhibits an explicitly racist (and, according to some, proto-fascist) worldview. In it, migrants are to blame for virtually all of Sweden’s problems, with support from a “culturally Marxist” establishment (Thorén, 2015, p. 33, citing Jonsson, 2015). At the same time, the SD’s parliamentary voting record and cooperation with traditional right-wing parties show how the party has in practice increasingly abandoned its care-racist welfare policies, maintained its ethno-racism (the construction of racism through a combination of ethnicisation and racialisation) and embraced (though not fully) more and more neoliberal economic policies (Mulinari & Neergaard, 2022).

This chapter has two central aims. First, we argue for the relevance of racial capitalism in the studies of the Swedish model in general and trade unions (TUs) specifically. Second, in doing so, we argue that racial capitalism could be captured in three different but connected dimensions: within the national state, human mobility and the border of the national state, and North–South trade of commodities and foreign direct investment. We explore these three dimensions through exemplifications from Swedish TU movement discourses, capturing both blue- and white-collar TU s and TU confederations (TUC s). One way of expanding the analyses of racism in the Swedish context, is by exploring how labour intersect with Sweden without the confinements of methodological nationalism (Anderson, 2019; Sager, 2016). In this chapter, we approach one aspect of this: the discourses of TU s and TUC s through the lens of racial capitalism. While this perspective is attracting considerable interest these days (Ali & Whitham, 2021; Bhattacharyya, 2018; Gilmore, 2021; Robinson, 2000; Taiwo et al., 2021; Vickers, 2021), it is almost invisible both in the analyses of TU discourse and, more specifically, of Swedish labour market relations. To some extent, this latter absence is linked to the idea of Swedish exceptionalism (McEachrane, 2014; Palmberg, 2009; Schierup et al., 2022), which, among other points, argues that Sweden has been outside both colonialism and imperialism and that race and racism are external to labour market relations. The Swedish model of industrial relations has been highly influenced by the ideas of Swedish exceptionalism and has generally been analysed as autonomous and isolated from global relations of power (Johansson, 2008; Mulinari & Neergaard, 2022; Sjölander, 2005; see also chapters 1 and 11 in this volume).

A concept increasingly used in analysing the intersection between class, race, and gender is racial capitalism. While rooted in Marxist debates in and about South Africa’s apartheid regime (Levenson & Paret, 2023), it is Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (1983) that, through critical dialogue with several social justice movements, has become the general reference point today.

We bring racial capitalism to bear on the archetype of welfare capitalism – the Swedish model, referred to as the ‘Nordic Model’. We do this with the aim of qualifying and challenging some institutionalised understandings of welfare capitalism represented by Sweden and, to a lesser extent, Finland – two welfare states with small populations in the northern peripheries of the Global North.

This edited volume explores the relevance of the concept of racial capitalism in analysing ‘Nordic exceptionalism’ (Keskinen et al., 2009; Loftsdóttir & Jensen, 2012) in general and, more specifically, for an analysis of the Swedish model (Ålund et al., 2017; Ålund & Schierup, 1991). In the last decade, there has been an upsurge in research, spurred by the republication of Robinson’s (1983) book in 2000 and 2020. Much of this work, however, has had a strong Anglo-US inflection. Few studies have focused on continental Europe or the Nordic region. In this edited volume, the focus is on theoretically inspired and empirically grounded analyses of Sweden in the Nordic context, exploring the Swedish capitalist welfare model from a perspective that places processes of racialisation and racial regimes at centre stage.

The anthology brings racial capitalism to bear on the archetype of welfare capitalism – the Swedish model, referred to as the ‘Nordic Model’. We do this with the aim of qualifying and challenging some institutionalised understandings of welfare capitalism represented by Sweden and, to a lesser extent, Finland. Few studies have focused on continental Europe or the Nordic region. In this edited volume, the focus is on theoretically inspired and empirically grounded analyses of Sweden in the Nordic context, exploring the Swedish capitalist welfare model from a perspective that places processes of racialisation and racial regimes at centre stage.

In the recently published open access volume “A New Wave of Anti-Racism in Europe? Racialized Minorities at the Centre” edited by Ilke Adam, Jean Beaman & Mariska Jung, Diana Mulinari and Anders Neergaard contribute a chapter reflecting on the continuities in counter-hegemonic struggles for racial justice in Sweden . They focus  on the continuity of different forms of silencing subaltern anti-racist struggles. Mulinari and Neergaard point to the presence of racialized minorities as not belonging to the Swedish nation in three critical events of Swedish anti-racism, and highlight how their presence and anti-racist frames were silenced in media and scholarly research or by mainstream anti-racist organizations in all three instances. They moreover illustrate the important highlighting of powerful forces “the magic”, seemingly beyond rationality, that supported, inspired and protected them in their engagement in the anti-racist struggles. The authors use the concepts of “ghosts”, by Avery Gordon (2008), referring to the ancestors in the anti-racist struggles to illustrate and better understand this form of continuity in anti-racist activism.

This study aims to examine how post Covid-19 condition as a diagnosis is viewed and interpreted by Swedish stakeholders, showing how these understandings carry a range of epistemological tensions. The study also seeks to understand the implications of these epistemological tensions for treatment and care organisation.

The study draws upon qualitative interviews with 36 experts and key individuals in Sweden have been conducted. The experts agree that post Covid-19 condition is a complex syndrome and that persons who suffer are in need of care. However, several tensions in post Covid-19 condition as a diagnosis can be discerned. Most experts agreed on the gender and racial disparity where white women with Swedish background were a majority of post Covid-19 sufferers, while migrant patients and the elderly are largely absent. In relation to social categories, the question if children can have post Covid-19 condition is here a highly contested question. There is also disagreement on the aetiology of post Covid-19 condition, with some experts viewing it as a new, unique condition requiring specialised treatment, while others see it as similar to other post-viral conditions, treatable in primary care.

This article examines how the U.S. ‘inclusion-and-difference paradigm’ translates to the Swedish context. According to Steven Epstein (2007), this paradigm combines health equity arguments for racialised minorities and women with a biological understanding of racial and gender differences in medicine. Drawing on interviews with experts, policymakers, and clinicians involved in international clinical trials in Sweden, we argue that critical elements of the U.S. paradigm – notably the ‘categorical alignment’ of race-and-ethnicity taxonomies between the social worlds of medicine, government bureaucracy, and political discourse – are absent in Sweden and, more generally, Europe. Consequently, there is no coherent framework for interpreting the existing ‘niche standardisation’ of certain medicines based on race and ethnicity, such as racialised treatment recommendations. In conclusion, we discuss possible future scenarios and highlight a recent collaboration between the pharmaceutical industry and EU institutions. Despite the challenging context, this collaboration aims to establish a European standard for race and ethnicity data in clinical trials. However, we argue that such attempts warrant caution: with racism being so widespread in contemporary Europe, emphasising racial differences in medicine may unintentionally reinscribe harmful notions of race.

The fall of 2022, with the election success of a coalition of right wing and ethnoracist parties marks the transition from a racialized to a racist state in Sweden. We analyse the discourses of three welfare projects in Swedish racial capitalism, Keynesian, Neoliberal and ethnoracist, in relation to safety/security.

Methodologically, we use CDA analysing elite institutional texts (party documents, government, and media texts), supplemented with references to previous research, thereby linking and comparing historical and modern discourses.

Departing from Althusser’s distinction between repressive and ideological state apparatuses, we demonstrate how a re-interpellation of welfare has shifted focus to repression, targeting the racialized other. The discursive combination and word associations used, while avoiding the category of “race,” create a vernacular of racism without race.

Recognizing the structure of Sweden’s racial capitalism as fluid and complex, the migrant “other” has become the shorthand for racialization in popular and academic vernacular, while the Muslim other becomes the nucleus of threat. It foregrounds the racialized “others” as an ethno-biological category and shifts the discourse and policy toward securitization, signifying a discourse that purports the impossibility of social inclusion.

In the last decades, the term digital sovereignty, together with technological sovereignty and strategic autonomy, has become common vocabulary within the EU. While originating in discussions about global computation and the erosion of national sovereignty, the discourses underpinning the use of digital sovereignty resonate with earlier colonial notions of ‘rescuing Europe’ and the ‘balance of powers’ recurring throughout the history of European integration. The discussions about EU digital sovereignty and its infrastructuring remind us of the EU’s colonial past by re-inserting so-called European values into the expansion of digital infrastructures in Europe and beyond. While the literature studying the emergence of European digital sovereignty showcases how the use of the term underlines and confirms a geopolitical turn within the EU, it has not yet discussed its historical colonial connections. This article demonstrates, first, that the sociotechnical imaginaries attached to the infrastructuring of the EU’s digital sovereignty re-actualise an earlier nexus between the European integration project and colonial extractive infrastructures predating the creation of the EU. Second, with the case of the Global Gateway, this article shows how this nexus gains new life through the infrastructuring of digital sovereignty, again unfolding in the Global South.

This article explores how race and processes of racialization – as social, cultural and historical constructs – manifest within the global football industry, focusing on Ghanaian migrant players in Sweden. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, it examines how racialization is practiced, negotiated and reproduced through the experiences of Ghanaian footballers, the discourses of those working with them and portrayals in the media. In contrast to official narratives of diversity and equality, the article shows how saviorism, everyday racism, racialized athletic notions, commodification, and racist abuse persist on and off the pitch. These narratives are circulated by Swedish actors, Ghanaian representatives and sometimes the players themselves, who view racism as normal. They respond by ignoring it, laughing it off or focusing on the game – strategies that reveal an awareness of being observed – while acknowledging its harm. Protest is rarely an option when careers and livelihoods are at stake. Indeed, subordination is both a precondition and a shaping force of their international careers.

Lindberg, E. (2025). Race on and off the field: Ghanaian footballers in Sweden. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2025.2524026