Citizenship and Ethnic Relations: Social, Cultural and Historical Perspectives
The stream is organized around two critical terms - citizenship and ethnic relations - which resonate into two major areas of research; one dealing with politics and policy, and how the relation between individual and state is transformed through the institution of citizenship; the other one dealing with ethnicity, culture, and politics of belonging, and how the relation between individual and social community is transformed through the ways in which the individual is addressed as embodying a specific ethnic, national, racial, sexual or gendered identity. Citizenship and ethnic relations are seen as instances of social formation and collective identification and hence as parts of the most enduring fabrics of human history.
Stream leaders: Professor Peo Hansen and Professor Stefan Jonsson
Active projects
Collective Agency in an era of Authoritarian Automation
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.
SoLiXG: The Social Life of XG
In the context of an expansion of digital infrastructures driven by the impact and recovery of the pandemic, we bring together perspectives from queer feminist technoscience, migration and cultural studies, social and political theory, from the EU and the UK, in order to investigate how infrastructural imaginaries (re)configure democratic sovereignty, imagined communities, and practices of bordering of the European Union. We propose to think and investigate sovereignty through (a) infrastructural and entrepreneurial ways of constituting and imagining ethnos and demos through technological innovations, and (b) conflicts that emerge where efforts to create new infrastructures meet existing ones. Is it possible, we ask, that new constitutionalities are being imagined, practiced, and produced here?
website:
https://www.solixg.net/
Managing the Unreliability of Migration Control
Anna Bredström, Senior Associate Professor
This project examines the utilization of biometrics and EU information technology systems in migration management, in the areas of asylum (EURODAC); borders (SIS II) and visas (VIS). The project builds on field research that revealed that authorities place great trust in biometric data, yet paradoxically, it also showed that the systems suffers from numerous insecurities and a lack of transparency.
The proposed project extend this earlier research by further probing its biopolitical implications posing three key research questions: (1) How do biometric technologies and the concerned EU IT systems enact identities along the lines of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, age and ability?; (2) What patterns emerge around how Swedish migration and police authorities meet insecurities?; (3) How do the systems affect the everyday life of migrants living in Sweden and their travels to and across Europe?
Qualitative observations and interviews are employed to examine how migration and police authorities use and interpret the technologies; and interviews with migrants aim to grasp how the technologies impact on their lives.
An ethnographic exploration of anti-genderism
Gender and sexuality matter in politics. The term Anti-genderism identifies a deep societal conflict in the challenge and resistance to the global expansion of women´s and sexual minorities’ rights, and the
democratization of the family. It highlights political and cultural agendas demanding re-patriarchalisation and retraditionalisation of both families, individuals, and societies. The research team has crafted a novel interdisciplinary and comparative program, bringing together a solid conceptual frame on the nexus gender, sexuality and family, through a multi-sited ethnography, towards a systematic exploration of a fundamental paradox: the centrality of gender equality in the Nordic region and the successful establishment of antigenderism coalitions at the core of the Nordic countries. The aim of the research program will be to analyze antigenderism as ideas, collective identities, communities of belonging and political projects in the Nordic region (here defined as Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden) focusing on civil society organizations and networks, mainstream political parties and religious institutions.
The Scania enigma and geographies of solidarity
The project focuses on the Sweden Democrats (SD) and the role of local and regional gendered place identities in contributing to the regional strength of ethnonationalism, but also to alternative democratic societal projects that mitigate ethnonationalism. It studies place identities both in regions where the SD is strong and weak, with the aim of understanding the role of place identities and the relationship to gender identities and diverse solidarities frames; posing the following research questions:
1. What role do local and regional gendered place identities play in facilitating and constraining ethnonationalist worldviews?
2. Which myths of origin can be discerned from local political, municipal and media documents, and how are they invoked and contested by both ethno-nationalist and alternative democratic solidarity projects?
3. What role does gender, class, ethnicity and age play in the construction and transformation of local and regional place identities?
4. What role does local media play in shaping regional and local identities, constructions of “we” and “them” and solidarity agendas in parliamentary politics?
Finished Projects
White migrations
Catrin Lundström, Research Fellow
The migrant is often thought of as a non-westerner in search for a better future in Europe or the United States. From a multi-sited ethnography with Swedish migrant women in the US, Singapore and Spain, this project explores the intersections of racial and class privilege and gender vulnerabilities in contemporary feminized migration from or within the West. Through an analysis of white migration, I develop theoretical tools to understand the dynamics that shape the women?s lives as wealthy housewives, expatriate wives and lifestyle migrants. Using the concept of white capital, I approach whiteness as an embodied form of cultural capital that is interlinked with and upheld by (transnational) institutions, citizenships, a white (Western) habitus and other resources that are transferrable (but mediated differently) cross-nationally, yet complicated by gendered and heterosexual norms, and its dependencies and regulations. By shifting the gaze towards privileged migrants, I illustrate how race and whiteness shape contemporary transnational migration and how white privilege is reproduced globally.
Swedish Genes? Ancestry and Ethnicity in Human Genetics Research
Anna Bredström, Senior Associate Professor
Underpinned by the rapid advancement in gene sequencing technologies, there has been an upsurge of genetics research that focus on genetic differences and make use of racial, national and ethnic categories as proxy for genetic ancestry. This project focuses on how methodological, translational and ethico-political matters are dealt with in Sweden-based human genetics. The primary aim of the project is to explore how national, ethnic and racial categories are defined and made use of in genetics research with a particular focus on research that either is produced in a Swedish academic context, or focuses empirically on Sweden. By comparing three fields of human genetics secondary aims are to examine possible tensions between basic science and clinically oriented research, and discuss possible implications for clinical practice and pharmaceutical commerce. A key focus in the project is to situate the discourses on race and ethnicity in our empirical material in a broader discursive/material terrain. Methods include interviews with key researchers, participant observations at research meetings and analysis of published results and other written materials.
Research Communication through Exhibitions and Talks
Erik Berggren, Research Coordinator
This communication project will produce exhibitions and arrange lectures and conversations in the exhibition space to
communicate research and knowledge about the refugee situation in Europe and Sweden today. A particular focus is on the
problems and possibilities of municipal refugee reception. The project is thus not only about knowledge dissemination, but
also dialogue and communication between professional groups, the general public and researchers.
The overall aim of the project is to combat xenophobia by increasing knowledge and to contribute to a pro active
discussion about a sustainable refugee reception system which corresponds to the humans rights we as citizens and as a
political community have committed to.
Monstrous Events
The project examines art, literature and film dealing with collective protests in 2011 and after. It will explore how aesthetic presentations advance our understanding of collective political action in ways that other modes of knowledge such as sociology, history and journalism are unable to do.
The material is a selection of literary and artistic works that present or perform the Tahrir revolution in Cairo 2011, the People’s Assemblies in Athens 2011, and the Maidan Revolt in Kiev 2013-2014. The project focuses on the dialogical and multivocal modes of experience at the heart collective protest.
Navigating "Respectability"
The proposed project aims to explore how parenthood is negotiated and constructed by parents with foreign backgrounds in Muslims countries through strategies of respectability when they access welfare institutions such as the family central in Sweden from an intersectional perspective. Studies show that families with foreign backgrounds in general, and those in risk of being racialized as Muslims in specific, pertains to groups that in different ways are marginalized in terms of access to the services in welfare institutions, although there are important variation of experiences within and across these groups. Issues that often are raised concern language barriers and socio-economic factors explaining a status as vulnerable. There are also other factors such as discrimination, stereotyping and stigmatizing discourses against families with a foreign background in welfare institutions. Thus, performing ‘migrant respectability’ can be a strategy to avoid stigmatization and stereotypes when they access welfare institutions such as the family central in Sweden.
Structures of Indifference in extractive-imperial formations
What constitutes and maintains the structures of indifference that enable ongoing extractive plunder by the Canadian polity? As a consequence of taking the erasure of plunder as a starting point, we are invited to examine how contested extractive processes unfold in space and time: their speculative ‘buzz’ phase, their toxifying phase, and their many traumatic after-lives. That such extractive processes always have an emplaced aspect in a ‘site’ where we can encounter them in research or classification goes without saying, but of particular importance to my research are its embodied aspects, which are transmissible across space and generations insofar as communities under extractive pressure are toxified and restructured into no-places of unrestrained profit-potential, marked by monopolistic or oligopolistic life-worlds of expulsion. Two questions arising from this attention to lived communal experiences of extraction and explored across the cases are: what do those displaced by extraction carry with them? How are transversal projects of resistance articulated?
Madams and Maids
The aim is to investigate the narratives of employment relations between expatriate Scandinavian women
employers and Tanzanian women domestic workers, and how this influences their social identity models and
communication around work. An important part of the aim is also to investigate the changes and continuities
between contemporary employment relations articulated by the women involved and the employment relations
that were practiced during the system of indentured labor in East Africa during the period 1820s – 1940s. The
system was introduced by colonial settlers after slavery was
Cultures of Rejection
CuRe gathers five research teams from Austria, Croatia, Germany, Serbia and Sweden. Its goal is to understand the recshift in everyday life towards polarization and radicalization, and the successes of right-wing movements and parties in Europe. We start from the premise that cultures of rejection emerge as the result of crises in Europe’s democracies, as well as due to changes in national institutions and civil society. Since rejection is a threat to all forms of social cohesion and peaceful coexistence, the project seeks to study the conditions that have led to the rejection of, among else, immigration, political elites, media and cultural values such as gender equality and sexual liberty.
Specifically, the research focuses on the way economic and technological changes impact employees in logistics and sales, and in which way employees ascribe any particular meaning to these changes.
The researchers assess the situation along the 2015 migration route across Sweden, Germany, Austria, Croatia and Serbia, thoroughly examining work places, digital and socio-spatial environments in interviews and ethnographic fieldwork.
Project web page: http://www.culturesofrejection.net/
What Art and Literature Can Teach Us about Democracy
This project suggests a new research concept. It assumes that aesthetic expressions offer unique methods for inquiring into political emergence. Aesthetic works own this potentiality because they register sociopolitical transformation through voice, embodied experience and subjective expression, comparable to the testimonial mode of the participant, in situations of antagonism and political violence.
– How are collective protests, migrant movements, and authoritarian populism – and their mutualtensions and interdependencies – articulated in contemporary aesthetic presentations and performances?
– In comparison to disciplinary research in the social sciences, what do such aesthetically rendered accounts tell us about the political emergence of collective protest, migrant movements, and authoritarian populism?
– In which ways can the aesthetic dimension improve our understanding of the concept and practices of democracy, in an era of social rearrangement and computational control of collective behavior?
The project engages aesthetics to traverse epistemological boundaries and enables methodological convergences between the social sciences and the aesthetic humanities.
Syrian Kurds and Politics of Naturalization
This project examines the transition from statelessness to naturalization and citizenship in the case of Syrian Kurds who have historically been denied their identity. The project explores the extent to which the statelessness of Syrian Kurds triggered their migration and how it affected their legal status, resettlement and integration in their countries of asylum, mainly Sweden and Germany. The aim is to understand how identity is perceived, negotiated and expressed during the transition from stateless to national or citizen alongside experiences of migration and exile. The purpose of this study is not only to clarify the complex relationship between statelessness, migration and identity of Syrian Kurds, but also to shed light on this relationship in a broader historical, political and social context.
The Nation's Brightest and Noblest
This study brings into focus the issue of reproduction and transformation ofcultural authority in the so-called post-Soviet context. It seeks to examine howintelligentsia may be presented and what empowering narratives it may articulate in a concrete locality, namely, in the post-1991 West Ukrainian city of L’viv. Theauthor argues that claims for cultural authority stemming from the socio-culturallocation of intelligentsia are decisive in discussions about Ukrainian nationalidentity and cultural development, which gained momentum after independence.Despite significant discursive transformations, after 1991 intelligentsia is stillpresented as the essence of the nation, as its typical and brightest representativeswho assume the right to speak for the whole nation and to extrapolate own valuesand choices to it.
Building Eurafrica
This project investigates the relation of European integration to colonialism by retrieving a once influential notion: Eurafrica. Through sources mainly in the EU’s historical archives, it demonstrates that the incorporation into the EEC of the member states’ colonial possessions was a necessary condition for the agreement on the Rome Treaty in 1957 and hence for the founding of today’s EU. This by now forgotten fact is clarified by a historical investigation of how, from the 1920s until the late 1950s, practically all of the movements and institutions working towards European integration placed Africa’s geopolitical and economic incorporation into the European enterprise as a key objective.
Austere Histories
European societies have recently turned toward more austere political regimes. Evidence of this can be seen in budget cuts, management of the labor market and restrictions of welfare systems, as well as in new regimes of migration and citizenship. Against the backdrop of such processes, this project investigates how a current politics of austerity affects our cultural memory. This project seeks to extract the correlation between how minorities, migrants and their descendants are treated by present policies and how memories and experiences of migrants, minorities and colonized peoples are treated in historiography and historical pedagogy. The project is unique in the sense that it brings together social scientists analyzing ethnic relations and migration in contemporary Europe and historians studying Europe?s history and cultural memory. It is also potentially path breaking as it crosses borders between languages and academic traditions and initiates a truly inter-European academic discussion on scholarly and intellectual concerns that are deeply shared by most national communities of Europe but usually studied only in the contexts of the various nation states.
Transnational Practices and Movement in Southern Africa
This project examines circular movement in Southern Africa in the context of entrepreneurship, multiple logics of legitimacy, and everyday interaction between travelers and state functionaries. The project builds on the ideas of the human economy and embodiment as a way to investigate how movement can be understood by those that are involved in its everyday practice. The projects specifically focuses on the practice of private transporting of goods, people and ideas between South-Western Zimbabwe and South Africa. A focus on practices of movement has some implications for the understanding of migration in Southern Africa, of economic livelihoods and of the continued development of the African state in general.
Futures Past of South African Whiteness
This project examines the position of the white subject in Africa. Specifically, it examines Nadine Gordimer’s exploration of the notion of whiteness and white Africanity in her fiction and prose, as well as her investigation of the oppressor’s consciousness, and her negotiation and interrogation of her own position as a white South African. In essays and speeches she intervened in debates and voiced feelings and apprehensions that concerned the futurity of whiteness in a shifting political and social context. As I argue, these interventions were made from a new emerging subject position that resulted from the social and political constraints of apartheid and colonialism, inhabiting the interstice of an old, given colonial order, and the decolonial processes of the antiracist, anti-imperial and anticolonial struggles in Africa and Europe which was bringing the colonial era to an end. Through her fiction writing she was able to shape this subject position, which lacked representation and hence existence within the dominant political discourse. Projected into her fiction, the subject position emerges as an object of knowledge within the intellectual history of South Africa.
Beyond Racism: ethnographies of anti-racism and conviviality
The aim of the project is to explore antiracist ideas, practices and strategies, focusing on women and migrants doing antiracism and everyday practices of conviviality. Methodologically the project is inspired by institutional ethnography, extended case method and ?What?s the problem represented to be? (WPR). Indepth, focus group interviews and participant observation will be carried in two major and two rural municipalities, where 5 different organizations/networks will be studied (human rights, migrant; antiracist, feminists and religious).
Trade unions, migrant workers and extreme right-wing support
Research on trade unions has identified the crises and challenges trade unions face, not only in relation to employers and the state, but also regarding how to keep the trade union and workers together. One particular challenge is how to build solidarity in a context in which the number of migrant workers is increasing and working class support for anti-immigrant extreme right parties is growing.
The research question framing this proposal is how an important organisation for Swedish industrial relations negotiate what seems to be a fundamental contradiction among its members. The aim is to analyse the strategies and actions taken by trade unions in relation to migrant workers, ethnic diversity and members and activists displaying support for extreme right parties.
The theoretical framework is drawn from labour studies and industrial relations research along with migration and ethnic studies, supplemented with gender studies.. Methodologically, the project is an ethnographic study of five blue collar trade unions and Landsorganisationen, employing semi-structured interviews and participant observation, complemented with document analysis.
Re-integrating Swedishness
Catrin Lundström, Research Fellow
How do Swedish migrants re-negotiate national identity upon returning to their home country? This project investigates re-constructions of national identity and processes of re-integration among Swedish migrant women after returning to Sweden. Statistics show that most Swedes living abroad choose to return to Sweden, a fact that makes them the single largest immigrant group to Sweden. Among Swedes who emigrate to Asia, the absolute majority returns within a couple of years, but fewer do so from the UK and the US. What are the gendered implications of Swedish return migration? In what ways has migration impacted on the womens working lives and family relations? What are the theoretical implications of Swedish return migration in understanding concepts of home, belonging and national identity? Special attention is directed at the women?s views on gender equality. Have their views on Sweden?s cultural and political projects on gender equality and social egalitarianism changed? From their perspectives, how has the Swedish society changed during their time abroad?
White melancholia
Catrin Lundström, Research Fellow
This project offers an historicized account of three phases and moments of hegemonic whiteness in Sweden, namely the white purity period between 1905-1968, the white solidarity period between 1968-2001 and the white melancholy period from 2001 and onwards, and their interrelation with different racial formations and minority discourses, class structures and gender relations, as well as different political ideologies and affective structures that characterise these three periods. The argument is that Sweden at the present moment is subjected to the double-binding power of Swedish whiteness in the sense that the disappearance of old Sweden, that is Sweden as a racially homogeneous nation, and the passing of good Sweden, that is Sweden as a politically progressive nation, are both perceived to be threatened by the presence of people of colour within the Swedish body politic and state territory. Consequently, both the reactionary and racist camp, and the radical and antiracist camp, are affected by and implicated in the contemporary crisis of Swedish whiteness.
Narratives of Belonging, Homeland and Nationhood
Tünde Puskas, Postdoctor fellow
This dissertation explores what happens with ethnic and national identifications built on the same ethnocultural grounds, but under different socio-economic circumstances. Territorial and non- territorial minorities have traditionally been considered non-comparable because it was assumed that groups organized on different grounds were distinctively separate phenomena. In this study, the comparative method is used to throw new light on how ethnic and national identifications are constructed, negotiated, and re-constructed in territorial and non-territorial minority contexts.
The focus is on the question whether the ethnic and national identification and articulation processes of Hungarians in Slovakia and Hungarians in Sweden constitute different types of Hungarianness. Drawing on extensive interview material the empirical focus is on the interaction of self-narratives and public narratives. The project aims to challenge the notion that national minorities and diaspora communities are fundamentally different in their understanding of nationhood and their relationship to an external national homeland.
Future Citizens in Pedagogical Texts and Education Policies
Sabine Gruber, Associate Professor
The aim of this project is to grasp processes of globalization in education policies and in selected pedagogic texts in Norway, Sweden, Syria and Turkey through a focus on the education of the “right” kind of future citizen. People increasingly move across national borders for longer or shorter periods. The autonomy of nation states is thus challenged and questioned, but they still hedge in and concomitantly close off people in separate national spaces. These simultaneous often contradictory – processes are of great importance for how the right kind of future citizen is moulded in mandatory schooling. Research on transnationalism is a theoretical starting point for this project. Long- or short term migrants create and maintain social relations which cut across national borders, but also law and policies move and are established across such borders. Research on education and nation state building and the globalization of education are important for the project, in order to understand education polices and the governance of education. We will collect and analyze educational documents and curricula for selected subjects like history, civic and religious education, interview politicians with influence over education, as well as teachers and authors of textbooks, and scrutinize selected textbooks in the four national settings. The cases will be used for soft comparison where similarities and differences will be used throughout to generate new insights and deepen the analysis.
Collectivity and Universality
This project is an investigation of concepts that serve to interpret human collectives and explain historical change. Since its modern inception, European human and social science has attributed historical agency to collectives by calling them “classes”, “nations”, “masses,” “peoples” or “cultures” – terms that have profoundly shaped our historical consciousness. These terms are now contested, theoretically and politically, and researchers seek new ways of describing collective phenomena. Jonsson will chart the conceptual geography that emerges as scholars in philosophy, post-colonial studies, critical anthropology, and spatial cultural history trace collective modes of being and acting. Important notions will be “network,” “subalternity,” “multitude,” “migrant,” “flow,” “movement,” “community,” and “humanity”. The project is part of a national research program funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond at coordinated at Södertörn University.
Multiculturalism, Nation and Globalisation
Carl-Ulrik Schierup, Professor
The project explores research and debates on multiculturalism, social cohesion and liberal values in academic discourse, policy documents and the media. It scrutinises discourses voicing anxiety over “multiculturalism” in societies marked by the erosion of citizenship, urban revolts among disadvantaged migrant youth, an ongoing nationalist-populist alignment and exclusivist policies of migration and “integration”.
Women and Migrants within the Sweden Democrats
During the last 20 years their has been an upsurge in research on xenophobic populist parties mirroring their political successes. However, these studies have rarely touched upon the role of women and immigrants within these parties. While women are often invisible in research, located in a marginal role as girl-friends and sisters, migrants support to these parties is often defined as a contradiction in terms and remains un-theorised. The aim of the study is to analyse the double edged relationship between on the one side women and migrants approaching the Swedish xenophic populist party -Sweden Democrats, and on the other side the discourse of the party in respect to women and migrants in their conditions of representatives. It will identify women’s and migrant’s agency and explore the ways through which these shape, constrain and influence their position in the organisation. Theoretically the project is framed within gender and IMER studies, focusing on the notions of the family and nationhood, and the notions of ethnic belonging and nationhood. Methodologically the study is based on in depth interviews and life-stories with women and migrants representing SD in municipalities.
Cultures of the Crowd
This project analyzes the idea and image of the masses in modern European history. To write the history of the masses is at once to write the history of the political, ideological, and aesthetic boundaries that have been fabricated in order for a certain people, nation, or ethnicity to view itself as a unity, and this by rejecting certain segments of the population as “masses”. The problem at the heart of this research undertaking is thus central to the ways in which cultural and collective identities have been construed throughout European modernity. The project is completed and has resulted in two major monographs and a number of articles; the first one is “A Brief History of the Masses: Three Revolutions”, published in Swedish in 2005, and in English in 2008; the second one is entitled “Crowds and Democracy: The Idea and Image of the Masses in Europe between the Wars”, and is (2011) forthcoming.
Diaspora, transnationalism and transborder citizenship
Khalid Khayati, Postdoctor fellow
This project is a comparative exploration of an ongoing process of change from a mono-dimensional, victim-related Kurdish diasporic identity to a more modulated, dynamic and active form of it among Kurds in the Marseille region in France and the Stockholm region in Sweden.
Moreover, the project focus on the relationship between diaspora and tourism where diasporan groups develop various transnational networks, institutions and organizations in order to carry out various forms of journeys not only between their new and old societies but also over many state borders.
Furthermore, the project advance diaspora as a specific context of knowledge which is non-compatible with methodological nationalism; a perspective which privileges the nation-state as a conceptual reference regarding how knowledge is organized and produced by social scientists.
European Integration and European Colonialism
The project’s purpose is to study the relation between colonialism/decolonization and European integration. EU research has yet to investigate how concerns about colonial dominance influenced the positions of the six states that signed the Rome Treaty in 1957, four of which were colonial powers at the time. To varying degrees, they emphasized integration either as an instrument for maintaining colonial control or as a compensation for their demise as colonial powers. Our project will analyze how the colonial system and the process of decolonization influenced this early phase of EU integration.To put our analysis of the relation of European integration and colonialism in its proper historical context, we will also discuss the various ideas on European integration and colonial expansion which emerged already in the interwar period and which acquired renewed interest in the 1940s and 1950s. To this historical approach we add a contemporary perspective, in which we explore how this influence is perceived in the current historiography of the EU.
Empirically, the material being investigated draws from academic accounts, media reporting and from accounts provided by the EU itself, including archival materials. The project thus rests on two research methodologies, the first one dealing with secondary sources in the scholarly and popular context, the second with EU documents and other primary sources in the political context.
The project is of a pioneering character: the first account to date that maps the neglected historical relationship between the EU and colonialism/decolonization. Conversely, it will also be the first account to inquire into how this nexus continues to impact on the EU of today, especially in its efforts to foster a European identity by disseminating a particular history of EU integration.
The Politics of European Citizenship
The project traces the politics of European citizenship as it has unfolded since the beginning of the European integration project in the 1950s to the present day. The main focus, though, lies with the more contemporary developments, stretching from the mid-1980s, or the commencement of the EU’s Single Market project, until the present. The overall purpose is to critically conceptualize and empirically analyze the historical development of EU citizenship as it has developed alongside the deepening cleavage between the power of EU institutions on the one hand and popular legitimacy among its citizenry on the other; charting its long-range movements vis-à-vis the broader transformations of the EU integration project. This results in an integrated analysis of EU citizenship, one that carefully scrutinizes the deeply interrelated processes of migration, socio-economic transformation and resurgence of ethno-nationalist sentiments at all levels of the EU polity.
Labour Migration, Crisis and Cohesion in Eastern Europe
Charles Woolfson, Professor Emeritus
This project focuses specifically on labour migration from the Baltic new member states in terms of challenges it offers to social cohesion and longer-term prospects for social development in the context of the continuing aftermath of economic recession and the global economic and financial crisis. The project analyses the intersection of global economic recession with the underlying crisis of neo-liberalism in a new European Union member state, Baltic Lithuania. It ethnographically charts the disappointment of expectations occasioned by the shock of crisis for the citizens of a post-communist society. Resulting social unrest and the fragmentation of social solidarities are depicted through an analysis of “voice”, as expressed in “discourses of discontent”. It is suggested that the failure of the political process to acknowledge these popular discourses, and the muting of popular political protest via increasingly repressive public order policing has led to an outward “exit” of labor migration on an unprecedented scale, as well as the concerning possibility of “internal exit” in the form of xenophobia, populism and racism.
The Feeling of Migration
This dissertation is an ethnographic interview study analyzing narratives of queer partner migration, i.e., a family-tie migration in which one partner of a relationship has migrated in order for the partners to be together, and where the partners queer the migration in the sense that they have a non-normative sexuality and/or gender identity. The purpose is to examine how queer partner migrants and their non-migrating Swedish partners experience the migration process by analyzing what emotions and feelings ‘do’ to the relationship and how emotions and feelings structure the migration process. The study analyzes the work three different emotions – love, loss, and belonging – carry out in these migration processes, and how this work is described in participant narratives. Migrant participants have migrated from different parts of the world (Africa, Europe, Latin America, and North America), making it possible to analyze what emotions and feelings do in this particular migration process from the point of view of nationality and, in particular, proximity to ‘Western-ness,’ race, and language as well as how privileges connected to these positions come to matter in the process.