Logo: to the web site of Uppsala University

Whereas the sociology of food has drawn attention to differences between corporate and alternative foodways, the political imaginations underpinning the latter are often overlooked. This article distinguishes between different political imaginations of the community kitchen, a set of practices characterised by collective preparation and redistribution of food. The analysis builds on ethnographic and archive material in Sweden to outline how the folkkök (people’s kitchen) was once an institutional practice to address urban food insecurity, soon outsourced as altruistic soup kitchens, and then regenerated a century later by the anarchist movement. By distinguishing between altruistic and anarchistic imaginations in this analysis, the article adds another layer to the critical sociological study of alternative foodways. 

Radical nationalism is a political ideology centred on tying animagined people to a bordered territory. It grows from nationalism’sroot system into a diversity of political manifestations aimedat sealing the people-territory bond. By theorizing radical nationalism,this article outlines a political-ideological approach that opensnew pathways for studying the so-called far right. The article drawson Michael Freeden’s conceptual-morphological theory and delineateshow nationalism’s thin-centred conceptual core – people andterritory – can thicken into a full-bodied political ideology: fromfootball and flags to systemic discrimination, deportations, andmass violence. In response to the empirical observation that radicalnationalism nurtures historical and contemporary actors across theleft-right spectrum, the article offers a political-ideological lens fortranshistorical analyses of various political manifestations thatsprout and flourish from the exclusionary roots of the modernnation-state.

Transnational cooperation between radical nationalists has especially been the case in Sweden, Denmark, Norway, and Finland, where fascism has not only developed through interdependent processes but also through interactions between and beyond national boundaries, and where “racial relationship” has been a core argument. With chapters ranging from the inception of fascism in the interwar years up to the present day, this book offers the first fragments of an entangled history of Nordic fascism. It illuminates how The North occupies a special place in the fascist imagination, articulating ideas about the Nordic people resisting the supposed cultural degeneration, replacement, or annihilation of the white race. The authors map ideological exchange between fascist organisations in the Nordic countries and outline past and present attempts at pan-Nordic state building. 

Crisis is a conceptual tool for synchronizing different experiences of time. It is operative in notions of the Financial Crisis, the Crisis of Democracy, the Climate Crisis—and the Corona Crisis. This article explores that synchronization through an empirical inquiry into the different timescapes of the Corona Crisis. It builds empirically on 200 interviews with residents in Norra Botkyrka, which is located at the fringes of Sweden’s capital Stockholm. The thematic analysis shows how the respondents’ different time frames, time orders, tempos, and timings become synchronized through the crisis concept, but also how they invoke active and passive desynchronization. This temporal diversity points out the interplay between social differences and the various ways people are (de)synchronizing with the Corona Crisis. 

This chapter introduces the rationale for mapping the nature of Nordic fascism. It clarifies the theoretical, methodological, and conceptual starting points that inform the book chapters and binds them together. Nordic fascism is here construed as a revolutionary branch of radical nationalism that encompasses a plethora of historical and contemporary manifestations in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Finland. The introduction chapter outlines how Nordic fascists typically share a mythical belief in the exceptional Nordicness and The North as an idealised past and a desired future. It offers a unique historical overview of fascism in the Nordic countries, a development unfolding not only with varied pace and intensity across localities but also through entanglements that transcend national boundaries. Entangled history is presented as a joint effort by the chapter contributors to capture how political ideas and actions develop across the Nordic countries. The chapters of this book are all based on original research and present new findings – fragments – of an entangled history of Nordic fascism.

Social movement scholarship has increasingly shown how continuous mobilization depends on collective memory construction. This article sets out to study this formative activity in a changing media landscape. It asks how activists navigate the temporal nexus of collective memory mediation. The empirical focus is on Brazil’s Landless Rural Workers’ Movement (MST), a well-established organization that since the early 1980s has communicated its collective memories on several media platforms. This article also demonstrates, through a corpus analysis of MST’s internal newspaper, Jornal Sem Terra (1984–2014), and its Facebook page (2014–2019), how collective memories of rural violence serve various functions in these different media. The empirical study verifies the formative implication of rural violence for Brazil’s landless movement, but also unveils notable differences between the newspaper and Facebook in this regard. Whereas Jornal Sem Terra employed a horizontal collective memory construction through contemporary documentation of ongoing and upcoming events, the Facebook posts primarily engaged in the vertical extraction of already established memories. In other words, the print media produced a narrative around collective memories of rural violence, and these memories were re-produced through digital media platforms. These empirical findings implicate that renewed methodologies are needed in future studies of social movements.

This scoping review article concerns COVID-19 social impacts on youth between 15 and 24 years old. The article charts 108 scientific journal articles, published between 1 March 2020 and 1 November 2021, encompassing 27 different countries but primarily concerning the USA (30%) and Canada (12%). The reviewed studies tell the overall hardship of being young in pandemic times; they report collective experiences of isolation, constraint, loss of formative life moments, and reverberation of structural inequalities. But they also show that the pandemic is not just passively consumed by the youth of today; young people are likewise at the forefront of collective mitigation strategies and community support organizing. Based on these scoping review findings, the article concludes that further agency-oriented research on youth responses is vital for a deeper understanding of what it can mean to be young in pandemic times.

perspectives everyday Previous research has demonstrated that many children experience racism in the Swedish school system, a public institution that formally aims to combat all forms of discrimination. The question posed in this article is how racism can endure despite the school system's anti-racist agenda. Everyday racism is examined from children's perspectives, based upon eight focus groups with primary school pupils and a group of 11-year-old co-researchers who contributed to the interview planning and data analysis. The focus group discussions show that while everyday racism is typically concealed, invisible to teachers and other adults, racial microaggressions are nevertheless often detected by children themselves. The analysis reveals that children have the intention to speak up against everyday racism, but lack the necessary support and protection from adults. The article concludes that to fight racism in the Swedish school environment, adults must learn how everyday racism operates and in that learning process actively consult children for their perspectives.

Den här rapporten sammanställer kunskap om människors erfarenheter av rasism i kontakt med svenska myndigheter och andra offentliga verksamheter. Kunskapsöversikten inbegriper totalt 523 vetenskapliga artiklar, böcker, bokkapitel och rapporter som publicerats mellan januari 2016 och maj 2021. Samtliga studier berör rasism, en teknologi som sorterar och rangordnar människor utifrån stereotypa föreställningar om ras, etnicitet, kultur, nationalitet eller religion. Studierna i kunskapsöversikten är indelade i tre urvalsnivåer: en övergripandeurvalsnivå (A) som inbegriper samtliga insamlade rasismstudier, en generellurvalsnivå (B) med studier som berör myndigheter och offentliga verksamheter, och en specifik urvalsnivå (C) med studier om människors erfarenheter av rasism ikontakt med dessa samhällsinstitutioner. Urvalsnivå A består till viss del av historiska studier (7 %), men merparten handlarom rasism i dagens Sverige (93 %). Studierna utgörs av vetenskapliga artiklar (59 %), antologikapitel (16 %), rapporter (16 %), doktorsavhandlingar (6 %) och akademiska böcker (3 %). De bygger framför allt på kvalitativa metoder som intervjuer och textanalys (82 %), men inbegriper även enkätstudier och andra kvantitativa undersökningar (18 %). Sammantaget ger de 523 studierna en övergripande bild av hur rasism återfinns på olika områden och samhällsnivåer. Urvalsnivå B inbegriper 195 studier som berör rasism inom samhällsinstitutioner som skola och förskola (21 %), regering/riksdag (13 %) och Polisen (12 %). Sammantaget tyder detta generella kunskapsläge på att människor även drabbas av rasism genomsvenska myndigheter och andra offentliga verksamheter. Urvalsnivå C innehåller 16 studier som dokumenterar människors erfarenheter. I mötet med Polisen återfinns rasistiska praktiker som rasprofilering, våld och trakasserier. Det finns indikationer om stereotypisering av ungdomar på HVB-hem. Studier om medborgares kontakt med socialtjänsten pekar på försummelse, misstänkliggörande och trakasserier. Inom skolområdet visar studier att elever stereotypiseras och utestängs av skolverksamheten, och på universitetet återfinns liknande erfarenheter. Studier om rasism inom vårdområdet talar om stereotypisering och bortprioritering som ett hälsoproblem i Sverige. Det aktuella kunskapsläget indikerar alltså att det finns erfarenheter av rasism ikontakt med svenska myndigheter och andra offentliga verksamheter. Samtidigt är bilden ofullständig. Endast ett fåtal myndigheter/verksamheter har undersökts och det saknas komparativa och longitudinella studier, metaanalyser och internationella jämförelser, samt forskning om hur rasism samverkar med andra maktordningar. Kunskapsläget implicerar att återskapandet av rasistiska praktiker – inom och genom svenska myndigheter och andra offentliga verksamheter – är ett fenomen som är väl belagt men fortfarande outforskat. 

This report concerns people's experiences of racism in contact with public institutions in Sweden. It is based on a literature review that comprises 523 scientific articles, books, book chapters, and reports, published between January 2016 and May 2021. All studies concern racism, a technology that orders and grades people based on stereotypical conceptions of race, ethnicity, culture, nationality, or religion. The selection of studies comprises three levels: an overarching level (A) with all identified studies of racism in Sweden, a general level (B) concerning racism in public institutions, and a specific level (C) focused on people’s experiences of racism in contact with these institutions. Selection level A – the complete selection of 523 studies – consists partly of historical analyses (7 %), but primarily concerns racism in Sweden today (93 %). The selection includes scientific articles (59 %), chapters in anthologies (16 %), reports (16 %), doctoral dissertations (6 %) and academic books (3 %). The studies are mainly based on qualitative research methods like interviews and text analysis (82 %), but also include survey studies and other quantitative inquiries (18 %). The overarching picture emerging from this state-of-the-art is that racism in contemporary Sweden recurs at different areas and societal levels. Selection level B consists of 195 studies that concern racism in public institutions. They focus primarily on Swedish school and day care services (21 %), the Government/Parliament (13 %), and the Police (12 %), and signal altogether that racism is operating through public institutions in Sweden today. Selection level C holds 16 studies that document people’s direct experiences of racism. These experiences include racial profiling, harassment, and physical violence in contact with the Police. The studies also document experiences of suspicion and neglect in contact with the social services, as well as signs of racist stereotyping at residential care homes. In both higher education and health care systems, the studies document experiences of stereotyping and exclusion. The literature review concludes that racism in Sweden continues to operate through public institutions. Yet knowledge about this operation is still incomplete. Most institutions have not been examined at all, and there is a lack of comparative and longitudinal studies, meta-analyses, international comparisons, as well as analyses of how racism interacts with other power asymmetries in the Swedish society. In conclusion, documented evidence about racism in public institutions designates a vast research field that is largely unexplored. 

This article probes the ambiguity of a posthuman heroism by revisiting the remarkable story of Pippi Longstocking. The purpose is to explore with Pippi a non-anthropocentric living in the more-than-human world. Its critical posthumanist analysis is empirically it is based on the American English translation of the Pippi book trilogy from the 1950s, as well as the Swedish TV-series produced in 1969. Pippi’s posthuman power here serves to conceptualize a move beyond the anthropocentric savior-complex. The analysis exhibit a power used to defy, mock and resist authority, but always with the purpose of securing agency for Pippi and her community. This power-to, rather than power-over, becomes a creative force that builds a posthuman community between inorganic matter, human and nonhuman animals. In place of a heroism to save our planet, Pippi animates how to relate differently to the more-than-human world. She is a productive fantasy, an idea materialized – a posthuman figuration – that extends the notion of community, opens up the demos, and forcefully challenges anthropocentric normativity.