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.

The aim of the project (MI-GLOBE) is to investigate the development of an emerging global governance of migration (GGM) and the space, role, strategies, alliance making, and impact of a composite transnational civil society organisation (TCSOs) in pushing for an accountable rights-based approach to migration. In 2006 UN initiated a High Level Dialogue (UN-HLD) on International Migration and Development, and in 2007 the Global Forum on migration and development (GFMD).
Against the background of a critical review of the UN-HLD, GFMD meetings (2007- 2021), the factoring of migration into 2030 UN Development Agenda and the adoption of the UN Global Compacts for Migration (GCM), the research team will follow and analyse:
a) Global governance policy framing, focusing, on principal positions on and conflicts between with business-friendly migration management approach and the rights-based GGM;
b) Processes of deliberation, conflict mitigation and consensus making between governments, multilateral organisations and TCSOs, business actors within global and regional settings;
c) TCOs mobilisation, internal negotiations, strategies to challenge the marginalization of a rights-based GGM.

In their essay,  Paula Mulinari and Anders Neergaard examine the role of white and male- dominated trade unions in shaping the racial capitalism of the so-called Swedish Model. Inspired by W.E.B. Du Bois’s re-writing of U.S history, where white (and male) trade unions play a central role in producing and reproducing racial labor and social inequalities, the chapter points to the role of Swedish labor unions in reproducing racial capitalism and an ethno-racial welfare state. The chapter ends with the questiona discussion of to what extent and how trade unions—which are central to the Swedish model—may challenge racial capitalism.

This article, published in Critical Sociology, discusses empirical evidence and theoretical perspectives on a structurally and spatially ingrained racial capitalism, dispossession, and precarisation in what is identified as “neo-apartheid” Sweden. Theoretically the argument rests on a critical re-engagement of the notions of “racial capitalism” and “neo-apartheid” in contemporary critical research, inspired, by research on racial capitalism in South Africa. The argument is illustrated, empirically, by a scrutiny of processes of segregation, racial stigmatisation, and “the return of primitive accumulation” reflected in predatory housing policies and super-exploitation of labour, conditioning livelihoods and opportunities of sub-altern Others in disadvantaged urban neighbourhoods. Through a local case in the region of Järvafältet in metropolitan Stockholm,  the paper addresses subaltern struggles contesting racial capitalism in a society that used to be an international showpiece of social equality (link below, open access)

This article explores affectivity, temporality, and their interrelation in patients who contracted COVID-19 during the first wave of the pandemic in Sweden and with symptoms indicative of post-COVID-19 Condition (PCC) that remained one year after the infection. It offers a qualitative phenomenological philosophy analysis, showing how being ill with acute COVID-19 and with symptoms indicative of PCC can entail a radically altered self-world relation. We identify two examples of pre-intentional (existential) feelings: that of listlessness and that of not being able to sense what is real and not real, both of which, in different ways, imply a changed self-world relation. We offer an analysis of intentional feelings: how the fear of not “returning” to one’s previous self and the hope of such a return weave together the present and the absent, as well as the past and the future, in ways that make the future appear as constricted, disquieting, or lost. We argue that a phenomenological differentiation among experiences of living with symptoms indicative of PCC—through attention to the way intentional affectivity and pre-intentional affectivity help shape the embodied self’s attunement to the world—is apt to yield a better understanding of the variations within these experiences and contribute to clinical practice.

This symposium explores the relationship between international migration and economic informalization, with a particular focus on labor–capital power dynamics. In recent years, both political attention and policy actions in the countries of the Global North have increasingly concentrated on the ‘informal economy’ at international and national levels. Despite this heightened attention and intervention, economic informalization continues to expand, alongside the growth of atypical and precarious working conditions in the labor market. Common understandings and discussions of these phenomena often attribute them to fraudulent activities of (primarily self-employed) individuals and organizations, and to international migration. However, the contributions to this symposium challenge such simplistic interpretations by illustrating various ways in which contemporary capitalism is incorporating economic informalization, and how international migration is utilized as a component of this dynamic.
The purpose of this introduction is to present the historical context for the processes and relationships that will be discussed in the contributions to this symposium, as well as the way in which social scientists have historically conceptualized and interpreted the socioeconomic and political phenomena of the informal economy and international migration.

This chapter, in Raul Delgado Wise, Branka Likic-Brboric, Ronaldo Munck & Carl-Ulrik Schierup (eds) Handbook on Migration and Development (Edward Elgar, 2024, pp.367-385), addresses the corporate hijacking and redesign of the migration and development agenda, as an essential dimension of the critical understanding of a neoliberal global governance project. It identifies the challenges that this managerial approach—centred on ‘economic growth, individual resilience’ and the business actors as main development agents—presents for the promotion of a comprehensive, solidarity-based approach to migration and development. The main question is if and how can CSOs meet this challenge and promote migrants’ rights and international solidarity?

This Handbook presents a comprehensive overview of the interaction between migration and development from a range of critical and counter-hegemonic perspectives. Exploring the strengths and weaknesses of existing practices connected with the migration and development nexus, contributing authors provide a clear understanding of their complex dynamics.

Divided into three thematic sections, the Handbook opens with a range of cutting-edge theoretical insights and methodologies that seek to establish the current state of the art. Following this, chapter authors use exploitation and dispossession as overarching concepts to frame key aspects of migration and development from a labour and class perspective. The Handbook then looks ahead, considering the opportunities and dilemmas illustrated by the various initiatives aimed at framing a multi-level governance regime for migration and development across the globe.

The Handbook on Migration and Development is an invaluable resource for students, academics and researchers in migration, development studies, sociology and social policy. Bringing together a wide range of underrepresented voices, this Handbook is also of benefit to policymakers working in international migration.

This chapter unpacks the complex and contested nature of ‘irregular labour migration’ and explores the meaning and analytical rigour of this conceptualization. We discuss four social positions: 1) authorised migrant regular worker, 2) authorised migrant irregular worker, 3) unauthorised migrant irregular worker and 4) unauthorised migrant regular worker. Using the distinctions between informalization from above and below, respectively, and the notion that irregular work can be the effect of exit as well as exclusion we discuss enabling and restraining factors in relation to these four positions. In entering a dialogue with the distinction between irregular labour and unauthorised migration we focus (ir)regularity of work and (un)authorised status.

The chapter is part of the edited volume Guglielmo Meardi. (2024). Research Handbook on Migration and Employment. Edward Elgar. 

The Institute for Research on Migration, Ethnicity, and Society (REMESO), IKOS, Linköping University, will organize an international conference from the 3rd to the 5th of September 2024. The conference, titled “Legal Status, Temporality, and Integration – Changing Migration Regimes and Precarization of Citizenship,” is being organized by REMESO, Linköping University, in collaboration with The Canada Excellence Research Chair in Migration and Integration (CERC) at Toronto Metropolitan University. The event, which will take place in Norrköping,  aims to gather approximately 30 migration researchers from Sweden, the EU, and Canada. The project is financially supported by the Research Council for Health, Working Life, and Welfare (FORTE – Decision No: GD-2023/0034).

The primary responsibility for organizing the conference lies with Professor Zoran Slavnic of REMESO, Linköping University, who, alongside Professor Anna Triandafyllidou of CERC, Toronto Metropolitan University, oversees the academic content of the conference.

The conference is planned for four sessions. The first two sessions will focus on the structural roots of new restrictive immigration policies and how policymakers in receiving countries deal with these problems (Session 1), and the ability of individual and collective agency of migrants to act independently despite these structural limitations (Session 2). Sessions 3 and 4 will address empirical cases from Sweden and Canada in this context.

Each session will open with an introductory keynote speech by leading scholars in these fields, followed by the presentation of four papers per session. The conference will conclude with a panel discussion featuring all keynote speakers.

Filmed Interview, The Market Exit.
I’m Andres Acevedo and this is The Market Exit. During the migration crisis of 2015, the small country of Sweden admitted a very large number of refugees. What effects did this surge of migrants to Swedish have on the Swedish economy? To find out, I met professor Peo Hansen, author of the book “A Modern Migration Theory” and from our conversation, I realized that many of the economic models we use for assessing our economy and society are deeply flawed. In the conversation, we talk about the field of research called the fiscal impact of migration. We talk about the difference between real resources and financial resources. We talk about the so-called brain drain within the European Union. We talk about why politicians are so afraid of speaking the truth about migration.

Filmed interview with Neutrality Studies, Chaired by Pascal Lottaz, ​Kyoto University, Faculty of Law.
“The EU to this day treats Africa as a colonial backyard that must be ‘managed’ rather than engaged with on equal footing. At the same time, Josep Borrell begs China to recognise the EU as a fellow great power—something no self-respecting power would ever even dream of. All of this is symptomatic not only for the EU commissions current mental state, but the history of the Union, a history it often downplays or forgets about all together. My guest today is a Swedish academic; Professor Peo Hansen of Linköping University. His research focuses among other things on European integration, migration, political economy, and geopolitics. Dr. Hansen is the author of several books, including “Eurafrica: The Untold History of European Integration and Colonialism” of which there is also an academic article and recently he wrote a short magazine article as well.”