Projects with keyword Ethnicity
Active projects
After Optimism
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.
A New Biologism?
Anna Bredström, Senior Associate Professor
The aim of this project is to examine the extent to which ethnic differences in health are ascribed a biological significance in a Swedish context, and if so, how that may impact on equality in health care as well as attitudes on race and ethnicity.
The project will meet its aim through two case studies: Psychiatric Ill-health (Depression/Anxiety) and Diabetes (Type 2) in Sweden. Both Psychiatric Ill-health and Diabetes constitute major health problems both globally and nationally, and in both cases, migrants are identified as disproportionally affected. Migrants vulnerability is explained both with reference to sociocultural factors and to genetic or neurobiological differences between different ethnic groups. The latter have gained increased significance during the last decades, which has been interpreted by scholars in science and technology studies as a “biomedicalization” of society. Some also argue that biomedicalization is transforming the social categories of race and ethnicity to primarily biological categories.
Through a detailed empirical study, this project thus examines to what extent this is true in Sweden.
Finished Projects
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.
Social Stratification & Meritocracy
Stratification theory commonly puts education as the link between class of origin and class of destination. This system, where class is inherited through education and education inherited through class is often referred to as meritocracy. The concept of meritocracy – a society dominated by those with the most merits – has gained widespread support. Still, authoritarian and populist resurgences throughout the West indicate that ascriptive factors very much remain of import. So what is happening to meritocracy? In this doctoral project I address this question by studying the Swedish educational system and the phenomenon known as immigrant optimism.
Immigrant optimism refers to the fact that immigrants and children of immigrants tend to be more academically driven than expected given their socioeconomic backgrounds. This would result in advantage in the labor market, were it not for racialization and discrimination. As a result, immigrant optimism is at the intersection of the competing principles of attainment and ascription, making it an ideal subject for a project concerned with meritocracy.
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
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.
Social capital and the educational achievement of young people
Studies of educational stratification show that children from advantaged backgrounds (more economic and cultural capital) attain higher educational merits than others. Recent research in educational stratification incorporates social capital as an additional factor with a significant impact on school achievement. The aim of this project is to examine, in a Swedish context, how access to social capital affects the educational performance of young people from different backgrounds (class, gender, and ethnicity), through the following research questions: Which characteristics of young people affect their access to social capital? Does social capital offset limited access to economic and cultural capital and contribute to better educational outcomes for young people of lower socioeconomic and/or immigrant origin? By what mechanisms does social capital improve individuals educational achievements?
Strategies and Structures
Martin Klinthäll, Associate professor
The project analyses how changes in policies and regulations affect conditions and opportunities for small business development in different industries over time, and how self-employed persons act in response to changes in opportunity structures. We study strategies of growth and survival within specific industries and markets, but also transitions of self-employment across industries and types of markets. The project will contribute new knowledge through a systematic and coherent longitudinal and spatial investigation of the dynamics of self-employment among immigrants in Sweden. The project systematically applies and develops instruments from recent international research on ethnic minority businesses (EMB). Theory in the field is developed through the integration of entrepreneurship theory and new theoretical contributions from EMB research. Theoretical perspectives on strategies and self-employed as actors is combined with theory on opportunity structures (the framework of ?mixed embeddedness?). Methodologically, the approach implies coordinated analyses of different dimensions on different levels, using a combination of policy studies, case studies and quantitative analyses.
School's Treatment of
Sabine Gruber, Associate Professor
In the wake of two high-profile murders in 1999 and 2002, which involved the killing of two young women of Kurdish background by close family members, the situation of and the victimisation experienced by “immigrant girls” in their families has been transformed into an important issue in Sweden. The murders came to bo defined as “honour murders” and the situation showed that there was an acute need for conrete measures to combat this violence. The project analysis the Swedish school system´s efforts to combat “honour-related” violence. The study is ethnographic and the empirical material is based on interviews with student welfare staff at different compulsury schools and colleges of further education. There are also some participant observations at study days focused on “honour-related” violence. An important result is that the violence is understood as related to the Other, located to a “traditional” and “patriarchal” culture. A consequence of this is that the violence is homogenized. That will say the violcene is attributed to clear-cut explanations and signs, which makes alternative explanations and interpretations invisible. “Honour-related” violence is distinguished and separated from other gender-based violence, whereby whole groups will be stigmatized as victims or perpetrators of violence.
The School Makes a Difference
Sabine Gruber, Associate Professor
The study, which is a dissertation study, examines how ethnicity is turned into a central category for the social organisation of the school and used to emphasise differences, whereby students are categorised as Swedes and immigrants. Interest is also levelled at how ethnicity constructions are bound up with social complexity and interact with other relations, especially gender and class.
The study is based on ethnographical field studies in a comprehensive secondary school, primarily consisting of participant observations of classroom situations, staff meetings and informal discussions where teachers talk about their work and students.
The study shows that the differences that are generated and sustained through the school personnels actions, argumentation and interactions with the students are complex, varied and closely bound up with the school context. This means that individual students are not only and alternately identified as immigrants or Swedes, but are dependent on contexts also understood in a variety of ways. For example, students who are successful in their schoolwork are, to a lesser extent, identified as immigrants.
One important observation is that the school personnels everyday work and contact with the students are ambitious when it comes to justice and tolerance, but that these intentions are seldom combined with insights into the power aspects associated with social relations. Daily practices are instead overshadowed by the need to accomplish certain teaching elements, where attention is focused on the classroom situation in preference to highlighting or discussing students individual experiences and living conditions. The school personnels intentions and possibilities of working towards equality and against discrimination are thus transformed so that the school instead produces and sustains relations of inequality.
"From Immigrant Dense to Internationl"
Sabine Gruber, Associate Professor
This study is an evaluation conducted on behalf of the Education Office in Linköping municipality during 2007-2009. The evaluation includes the training project “From Immigrant Dense to International” for teachers employed in elementary and secondary school and was conducted as a process evaluation. The reader can take advantage of the result in the referenced report, which primarily reflects the quality of a training project, but also can be read as examples of teacher´s speach and notions about “multicultural education”, “cultural differences” and “immigrant students”. The reasoning put forward by the evaluation participants are common findings that have been shown and discussed in a number of previous studies focusing on school and ethnic relations. Not least that well-meaning but unthinking inclusive aspirations of the school might lead to stigma and exclusion of students with immigrant backgrounds.
Language and Communication in Multilingual Preschool Groups
Sabine Gruber, Associate Professor
This study is an evaluation conducted on behalf of the Education Office in Linköping municipality during 2007-2008. The evaluation includes a one-year training “Language and communication in multilingual preschool groups” for pre-school staff. Purpose of the training was to undertake a development project for clarifying and strengthening language stimulation and language support activities in the preschool. Evaluation questions have been: How do they who participated in the training reflect on its knowledge material and how they reflect on language? What footprint provides training in daily preschool activities, in terms of concrete actions, thoughts and reasoning? What dilemmas can be seen in relation to the completed training?
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.
From Workers Self-Management to Global Workforce Management
Branka Likic-Brboric, Professor
The project aims to explore the impact of foreign direct investments (FDI) on employment and human resource management practices, new organizational ethnic hierarchies, industrial relations and local communities in different national contexts. The focus is on acquisitions by multinational companies (MNCs) from emerging economies in the post-communist region of former Yugoslavia. The research is situated at the forefront of the research on globalization, migration, global workforce management and the local and transnational challenges to corporate power. An extended case study investigates the acquisition of the Bosnian Steel company by Indian Mittal Steel and its impact on industrial relations, labour standards and management practices, including Indian management relationships with the state, local management, trade unions and local community. The project is developed in collaboration with the Management School, Sheffield University. It also engages Professor Jacklyn Cock, University of Witwatersrand, South Africa, planning a joint comparative study of ArcelorMittal in South Africa and Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Ethnicizing employability
This research project aims to highlight the European Social Funds (ESF) task to increase the labour supply with “a particular focus on target groups with a foreign background”. My aim is to examine how this mission is formulated, practiced and made comprehensible in various empirical material related to labour market projects co-funded by the ESF.
More specific, my aim is to analyze how ethnicities (and other social categories) are constructed and problematized in relation to ideas about individual employability. Furthermore, I am interested in examining how different techniques are described as suitable (or not suitable) to address target groups with a foreign background, in order to make the individual employable according to certain norms. How, and what ethnicities are made problematic in relation to norms are also questions of interest.
Foucaults notions of power/knowledge relations and governmentality are central to my theoretical understanding of these questions.
Policy Governance
Maritta Soininen, Professor, Guest researcher
This project addresses the question of the interplay between norm building processes and form of policy governance. How do different governance legacies affect the way the antidiscrimination legislation or its requirements/arguments are used in/to motivate policies/policy measures, and which is the relative role of different societal actors/actor constellations – social partners, private sector actors and state agencies, – in promoting the mainstreaming of this legislation?
Trade Unions, Transnational Solidarity and Ethnic Divisions
Branka Likic-Brboric, Professor
The research project addresses the EU’s regional approach to support countries in the Western Balkans in their progress towards EU membership. It focuses on the social reconstruction in post-war Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia and Croatia and the regional dialogue on social and employment policies within the Bucharest process. The study investigates local and national trade unions strategies to challenge downward pressure on labour rights and standards brought about by the implementation of a neoliberal model of reconstruction. It analyses the counter-influence of European social dimension as well as practices of the international organizations such as the UNDP, ILO and International Trade Unions Confederation (ITUC) and civil society organizations on the development of ‘transethnic’ regional solidarities. It also examines the forms of labour collaboration necessary to counterbalance hostile employers and governments. The main question concerns the efficacy of EU support for social dialogue and the implementation of the ILO ‘decent work agenda’ in empowering trade unions in their struggle for labour rights and standards in post-conflict former Yugoslavia. The issue is especially pertinent considering the wider study of post-conflict societies, marked by social fragmentation, ethnic divisions, political clientelism, poverty, informal economy and migration pressures.
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.
Participation of Inhabitants versus Security Politics
My research project lies in the framework of the restructuring of the states sovereignty in Europe and attempts to analyse the consequences of a set of reforms implemented in social and urban policies. The methods developed through the Local Development Agreements in Sweden as well as the so-called City Policy in France (Politique de la ville) promote new territorial approaches in deprived areas. This new category of public action includes a strategic management, which is most of the time based on public and private partnerships and a coordination of plans in various fields such as housing, education, safety, health and economic development.
In my opinion, the development methods implemented in deprived areas have to be questioned. In general terms, the co-existence of a policy that emphasises safety and one that aim at the involvement of the inhabitants leads to a paradoxical situation in the definition and management of urban development projects. How can one in fact articulate two political directions where one has its object to control and the other to involve a population?
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.
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.
Equal Work-Places in a World of Inequality
Studies of Swedish working life shows inequality: women and migrants earn often less in the same jobs. Women and migrants face more obstacles in their careers. The project aims to compare the factors that influence the situation of different groups at two workplaces, one equal, and the second less equal. Methods used are questionnaires, interviews, participant observation in the workplace, and discourse analysis: 1) How are formal qualifications valued for wage setting and promotion at the workplaces? 2) What knowledge is valued as workplace-specific skills at each workplace? 3) What is the effect of possession of social capital, ie network, on wage and career development at the workplaces? 4) Are there differences in opportunities for people of the different groups? 5) Can the measurement of knowledge explained in terms of local discourses and social practices related to the construction of masculinity and femininity, Swedish or non-Swedish? The project contribution is expected to produce extended knowledge of the conditions for capital accumulation, and a broader understanding of how social practices at workplaces may generate equality.
Reorganization of the Public Sector
This project aims at describing and analysing the reorganization of the Swedish public sector from ethnic, gender and age perspectives. The Swedish public sector is in a process of transformation. The current changes are often in line with the international New Public Management trend. As the welfare services in Sweden are an obligation to the 290 municipalities, empirical studies have to be conducted on the local level. Improved democracy in terms of freedom of choice to the citizens, increased diversity in services available, lower costs for the local community, and development of new markets are often the aspired goals from the promoters of the changes. These new markets are expected to encourage local entrepreneurs and especially former employees. As women are overrepresented among the employees, the new strategies are expected to be very positive for women and, due to an assumed demand from the clients, for ‘ethnic specialists’. This means that the reorganization might entail new possibilities for entrepreneurs with a business profile different from ‘the mainstream entrepreneur’ but to this point we find a domination of large organizations rather than small.
Ethnicity in Preschool
Sabine Gruber, Associate Professor
Since the 1970s, preschool has been seen as an important place for ethnic integration. Yet, it has not been much investigated with respect to ethnicity aspects. This project aims to explore how ethnicity is accomplished in a number of Swedish preschools. More specifically it focuses on the interaction between children, parents and teachers, and how ethnicity is invoked and made meaningful in every day practices. Moreover, it maps the organizational framework for everyday interactions and practices, in relation to bilingualism and ethnicity. The project is planned as four sub-studies in order to reach a broader understanding of how ethnicity is constructed in different preschool contexts. A variety of methods will be deployed – focus group interviews as well as dyadic interviews, video recordings, participant observations, and analyses of documents – which all supplement each other. We believe that the project will deepen the knowledge about how ethnicity is accomplished in daily preschool interactions and practices. The project also aims to increase understandings of everyday constructions of ethnicity, which has relevance both for preschool teachers and for preschool teacher students.
Ethnicity, Gender, Boys and Young Men in Institutional Care
Sabine Gruber, Associate Professor
The project investigate how ethnicity and gender is constructed in the care and treatment at youth detention homes. Central questions are about how the institution staff understand the enrolled boys and themselves in relation to ethnicity and gender and how that understanding is given importance in the organization of the institutions, their practices and attitudes. This is investigated with participant observations and interviews at four detentions homes for boys in the age of 13-21. The aim is to analyse how ethnicity and gender is given significance and materialize in practice through the institution staff actions, reflections and definitions of the social world. The study has a critical understanding of ethnicity, that will say ethnic relations are understood as products of power relations. Ethnicity is under this an instrument for sorting people that results in differential identities, exclusionary practices, different and unequal conditions. The study also builds on feminist research indicating that gender has a central position i constructing ethnicity. This approach emphasizes that neither ethnicity or any other dimension of social relations can be analysed as something pre-given, it problematizes rather how constructions of different relationships/categories also implies an attitude in relation to each other.