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This thesis explores the role of folkbildning, the Swedish tradition of non-formal popular adult education, for asylum seekers placed in small towns and cities in Sweden. Despite its role in the reception, support, and inclusion of asylum seekers in Sweden, folkbildning has received limited scholarly attention as a potential space of solidarities with, for, and by asylum seekers. This dissertation argues that folkbildning constitutes an important space where solidarities are enacted and negotiated. Practices of folkbildning solidarities are multiple, contested, and negotiated; shaped by unequal power relations, practised across different spatio-temporalities, involve different actors, and produce varying outcomes. Methodologically, the research builds on ethnographic participatory observations of study circles, interviews, and creative collage workshops with study circle leaders and participants. The dissertation contributes to geographies of solidarity by analysing how multiple spatialities shape different solidarities while simultaneously being reshaped through them.

The thesis consists of four research articles. Article I examines the practices and discourses of volunteers and study circle leaders. Building on an intersectional framework, it analyses how solidarities can both challenge and reproduce power asymmetries shaped by, amongst others, gender, age, race, family status, class, and citizenship. Article II is a methodological discussion of the creative and participatory methods introduced to address challenges in conducting participatory research. Concretely, I describe how collage workshops and card-based discussions enabled the inclusion of diverse experiences in ways that productively aligned with folkbildning's horizontal and participatory pedagogy. Article III explores how spaces of folkbildning are produced as spaces of solidarity through negotiation among different actors about what folkbildning solidarity is, how and where it should be practised, and what its outcomes are. The paper shows how different spatialities are co-constitutive of different practices of solidarity. A similar argument is made in Article IV, which explores the interrelation between solidarities and ruralities. The paper analyses how rural spaces shape particular practices of rural folkbildning solidarities and how folkbildning solidarities also contribute to the production of ruralities.