Projects with keyword Racialisation/Racism/”race”
Active projects
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.
Urban justice movements
Aleksandra Ålund, Professor Emerita
After the violent youth rebellions in Swedish suburbs during 2009, a plurality of new dialogue oriented activist groups have emerged, profiled as youth urban justice movements (YUJM). They address issues of segregation, racism and welfare transformation in Swedish cities.The project will explore expressions of agency; claims, network building and knowledge production with focus on cooperation and dialogue between YUJM and the wider civil society.
Questions for research: how YUJM relate to the broader civil society; what situated knowledge is produced and find expression in strategies and action repertoires; how YUJM constitute themselves as public voice relating to local, national and international contexts.
The project combines perspectives from urban studies and social movement studies. It employs a battery of qualitative methods aiming at highlighting activism as embedded in suburban livelihoods, local institutional conditions and wider structural change.
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
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.
Conflicting identities and fractured solidarities
As one of the largest organizational complexes in Sweden, trade unions both reflect and influence societal development, affecting policies, regulating labor markets and influencing wage-earner identities and solidarities. The last decades have seen substantial changes in the trade union landscape, with the increasing strength of white-collar trade unions vis-à-vis blue-collar unions, changes in the character of the labor market, while the strength of Sweden’s social democracy has been decreasing.
The aim of this study is to explore white masculinities in the forging of the trade union worldviews, policies and strategies relating to three spheres– socio-political, industrial relations and internal organization. The focus is on three trade unions dominated by men with a Swedish background variously affected by globalization: engineers, managers and construction workers.
The project is inspired by three central theoretical concepts: neoliberal globalization, white masculinity and trade union solidarity. Methodologically, it encompasses ethnography: interviews, focus groups, observations and document analysis.
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.
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.
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 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.