Peter Wikström

Kriterium - kvalitetsgranskning och publicering av vetenskapliga böcker Open Access Kriterium är en plattform för granskning, publicering och spridning av högkvalitativa vetenskapliga böcker. Kriterium är ett sätt att kvalitetsmärka forskning med en certifiering som ska säkerställa och visa att ett vetenskapligt manus genomgått en kontrollerad och dokumenterad peer review-process. Kriterium-märkningen innebär också att den färdiga boken ska finnas fritt digitalt tillgänglig,

Kriterium - kvalitetsgranskning och publicering av vetenskapliga böcker Open Access Kriterium är en plattform för granskning, publicering och spridning av högkvalitativa vetenskapliga böcker. Kriterium är ett sätt att kvalitetsmärka forskning med en certifiering som ska säkerställa och visa att ett vetenskapligt manus genomgått en kontrollerad och dokumenterad peer review-process. Kriterium-märkningen innebär också att den färdiga boken ska finnas fritt digitalt tillgänglig,

Sweden has a paradoxical history when it comes to race, as a term, as a concept and as a lived reality. In this introduction, we provide a short background on the life of the concept of race in Swedish culture and language within the last century. In addition, we introduce some key concepts and outline the aim and central arguments of the book. From its role as a pioneering nation in race science in the earlier parts of the 20th century, Sweden was equally as pioneering in the latter parts in deracialising public life and discourse, embracing a hegemonic, normative colourblindness. In today’s Sweden, neither conservatives nor progressives, and neither xenophobes nor antiracists can talk about race and hope to be taken seriously. However, things may be in the process of changing, in a situation of escalating tensions between an increasingly superdiversified Swedish population and the emergence of a revitalised far right. In the introduction, we outline six empirically focused chapters which constitute analyses and case studies of both historical and contemporary materials aiming to shed light on some of the most important and pernicious articulations of Swedish colourblindness in a time when this doctrine is becoming increasingly untenable.

This chapter presents an investigation of a particular discursive figure, one of conceptualising white Swedes as “Swedish Negroes” and problems affecting white Swedes as “Swedish Negro issues”. This discursive figure emerged in the post-war period and continued to make itself heard of well into the 1970s. This investigation comprises a kind of case study of what we call the “Swedish N-word” (neger – “Negro”). However, by extension, this is also a case study of incipient Swedish antiracism in the guise of white Swedish identifications with African Americans and with blackness in general. Throughout the period when the figure occurred most often, white Swedish women and white Swedish workers, and later on many other white Swedish groups such as youth subcultures, people living on the countryside and so on, claimed that they suffered the Swedish “Negro problem” and consequently that they were the “Swedish Negroes”. This white Swedish antiracist identification with blackness – or, as it may also be construed, appropriation of the ethos of black struggle – is theoretically articulated through the concept of transraciality. We argue that white Swedes identified so strongly with African Americans at least in part out of a desire to escape from a whiteness tainted by Nazism and colonialism after the Holocaust and during the era of decolonisation.

Race in Sweden is an introduction to, and a critical investigation of, the Swedish relationship to race in the post-war and contemporary eras. This relationship is fundamentally shaped by an ideology of colourblindness, with any kind of race talk being taboo in public discourse and everyday language use, and in practice forbidden in official and institutional language. A study of a country which was until recently strikingly white but has become extremely diverse, yet where the legacy of Swedish whiteness co-exists with a radical, colourblind, antiracist ideology, Race in Sweden will appeal to scholars across the social sciences and humanities with interests in race and ethnicity, whiteness and Nordic studies.

In these concluding remarks, we reflect upon and envision the possible future of the notion of race in Sweden. We foresee a continued emergence of the new multiracial and super-diverse Sweden. Following this, the maintenance and defence of the colourblind hegemony of contemporary public life in Sweden must inevitably become more and more challenging as inequalities continue to grow and segregation structured by race eventually becomes impossible to ignore. Thus, while the colourblind fantasy of post-1968 Sweden lives on, and provides cover for the emergence of an increasingly emboldened far right, we suggest that things must change. We, therefore, express our hope that coming generations of Swedes will break with the current white melancholy period. Instead, we hope that tomorrow’s Swedish antiracists, white and non-white alike, will be both more willing and more capable to engage with the concept of race, the language of race and the lived reality of race in a more substantial and critical way.

While the collection and analysis of equality data including racial identification is common in many parts of the world, prevailing norms of colourblindness and antiracialism prevent such practises in Sweden. This chapter presents a case study of the outrage and indignation that met a Green Party member of parliament (MP) who, in February 2019, proposed that Sweden should collect equality data comprising racial identification. We analyse a comprehensive corpus of opinion and editorial texts, as well as a sample of Twitter posts representative of the colourblind outrage directed at the Green Party MP, as well as at leftists, antiracists, identity politics and associated actors and movements. Our analysis reveals a range of argumentative strategies through which a colourblind, antiracialist status quo is preserved. Colourblind arguments are recruited by both a professional and a lay commentariat, positioning antiracist activists and politicians as a race-obsessed, authoritarian and divorced-from-reality threat to democracy, freedom and social order. In this way, a kind of liberal–conservative alliance is mobilised to resist and deny any substantial effort to engage with the realities of segregation and prejudice, reinforcing colourblindness as the only morally acceptable antiracist stance, in today’s Sweden.

This study addresses normative orientations to smartphone use in Swedish upper-secondary classrooms. We present a Nexus Analysis from a policy enactment perspective of a material comprising ethnographic interviews, classroom video observations, and smartphone screen capture, investigating how a cultural conception of the smartphone as a source of disturbance is negotiated in discursive and embodied social action. Three groups of policy actors – head teachers, teachers, and students – balance competing agendas such as digitalization strategies, popular media narratives, and student autonomy and peer relationship maintenance. There is a tension between orientations to the smartphone as a legitimate resource for socialization and learning in the digitalized classroom, but also as an exception to desired digitalization – a potential threat to the social and disciplinary order of the classroom. Notably, the students display considerable awareness of such tensions, in reflective comments made in interviews and in displayed strategies for managing their smartphones in class.

This study concerns discursive mobilisations of race and racism in the Swedish debate on equality data, in the case of a controversial statement made by a Swedish Green Party MP. In March 2019, female Muslim MP Leila Ali Elmi argued publicly for introducing equality data in Sweden, in opposition to prevailing colour‐blind and antiracialist norms. Her statement was controversially formulated in terms of ‘registering’ people ‘by race’, leading to forceful criticism in the mainstream press and on social media, particularly on Twitter. In a material representing this criticism, we analyse discourse participants’ argumentative strategies, focusing on mobilisations of race and racism as acts of subject positioning, performative of a moral identity. Participants positioned themselves as morally righteous, liberal antiracists by virtue of their own antiracialism (Goldberg, 2009, The threat of race . Wiley‐Blackwell, Hoboken, NJ) and colour‐blindness (Bonilla‐Silva, 2010, Racism without racists . Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, MA), while constructing equality data as a racist practice, and as a threat to a liberal order. They also constructed advocates of equality data, and specifically Ali Elmi herself, as being irrational race ideologues, to be morally condemned for espousing a return to racial thinking comparable to that of German Nazism or scientific racism. The findings point to the exceptional status and character of what we call a colour‐blind antiracialism in Sweden, and further show how far ‘liberal arguments for illiberal ends’ can go in reinforcing a moral status quo and counteracting antiracist reform.

In this article, we focus on smartphone use initiated by students during lessons, with the aim of deepening the knowledge of when and why this use happens. Our methodological approach is video-ethnographic. The empirical data consists of 20 focus students in 9 upper secondary school classes, comprising 70 h of video material. The results show that the use of smartphones most often occurs in what we call the in-between spaces during lessons. These spaces are individual and negotiated within the classroom interaction frames. We argue that turning to one’s phone during an in-between space may largely be seen as a social excursion that is generally smoothly and tactfully integrated into the social order of the classroom.