Logo: to the web site of Uppsala University

Market adaptation, fragmentation and precariousness have been widely documented as problematic features of knowledge production processes in the university. This article follows an undercurrent of critical scholarship to explore how paths of resistance can be opened up by researching otherwise. The article builds on autoethnographic notes from a collective and non-funded research project aimed at gathering in situ narratives from people who experienced the 2013 Stockholm Riots. The research strategy behind this project, its organization as well as its results and reception, is here used as a point of departure to scrutinize the conditions of the possibility of critical knowledge production. The article draws attention to a critical place for doing research – in the cracks of the university – which arguably complicates the academic–public divide and keeps open discursive spaces during troubling moments of closure. 

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. 

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.

This book addresses the conflictual nature of radical democracy. By analyzing democratic conflict in Husby, a marginalized Stockholm city district, it exposes democracy’s core division – between governors and governed – as theorized by Jacques Rancière. Tracing the genealogy of that critique, the book interrogates a historical tradition generically adverse to every form of governance, namely anarchism. By outlining the divergent and discontinuous relationship between democracy and anarchy – within the history of anarchist thought – the author adds to democratic theory ‘The Impossible Argument’: a compound anarchist critique of radical democracy.

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.

The increased meat consumption during the past 15 years has boosted a dramatic production increase called the Livestock Revolution. This case study from Rio Grande do Sul indicates that the Livestock Revolution causes prosperity for large-scale food processing companies, while small-scale farmers are being marginalized. Utilizing the food regime analysis, this polarizing pattern is interpreted as an expression of the 'corporate food regime,' which is challenged by an alternative agri-food paradigm. As farmer resistance constitutes alternatives that fuel the dynamics of the Livestock Revolution, it is argued that these tensions reflect an ongoing crisis of the contemporary food regime.

The argument raised in this article stems from the analytical distinction between summative and formative assessment. While summative assessment demarks a measurable fixation of the student’s knowledge level at a given point in time, formative assessment instead aims to propel the learning process. Formative assessment becomes particularly manifested in the educational moment of supervised essay writing. Continuous and flexible feedback is vital to the art of supervising. This practice of formative assessment is, in turn, key to the student’s possibilities for deep learning. A fruitful formula for formative assessment and deep learning is to establish a horizontal relationship between supervisor and student, what Olga Dysthe has called the partnership model. This partnership relation is, as argued in this article, endangered by the examination practice’s constant insertion of verticality into the student-teacher relationship. By limiting relational horizontality, the examination locks the pedagogical potential that is naturally embedded in the relational process of essay writing.

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.

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. 

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 article explores how anarchist women viewed the feminist struggle for suffrage in theearly 1900s. By focusing on this alleged, historical anomaly – women against patriarchyrefuting the call for women’s suffrage – the article impels historical multiplicity. Thehistoriographic wave metaphor, typically employed to portray intensity of feministadvancements, is here regenerated in terms of radio waves. Through a variety ofpublications by influential anarchist women, the article tunes in to a broadcast that airs howanarchy expels patriarchy through a generic struggle against hierarchy. Here the historicalcase of anarchist women and women’s suffrage arguably signposts how to elude ateleological history writing of social movements.

This book advances a theoretical approach that recognizes social movements as contingent enterprises. It explores the endurance of social movements over time, by developing analytical tools to study how social movement heterogeneities are simultaneously acknowledged and articulated together, through collective narration and practices. With a unique empirical analysis of one particular narrative – the story of Brazil’s Landless Movement – this book portrays a narrative revisited and revised by movement participants, a story revived through enactment. This book addresses the increasing academic audience seeking to study, and theorize, the multi-colored phenomena of resistance and social movements.

This paper discusses variegated scholarly approaches to what is here typified as a political economy of meat. Identified as a multifaceted, transdisciplinary and most dynamic field of research, inquiries into the political economy of meat imbricate key issues of social and economic development, across the human–animal divide. While some scholars interpret livestock production as “a pathway from poverty”, others observe deepened marginalization and exploitation. The argument raised in this paper is that concise engagement with multiple critical perspectives may facilitate further explorations into the social dynamics that characterize the political economy of meat.

This article traces divergent approaches to democracy in the history of anarchist thought. It outlines an anarchist critique of democracy, a defiant composition arrayed against authority, representation and majority rule. Put in contrast to that approach is the anarchist reclamation, the understanding of anarchy as democracy radicalized. The article shows how the critique of democracy typifies classical anarchist thought, while reclamation of democracy breeds in post-classical anarchism after 1939. Yet these lines of thought also coexist historically, and they both continue into our days. Anarchism is now depicted in terms of radical democracy, while a reclaimed critique once again dissociates anarchy from democracy. In an attempt to recognize dialogue between them, this article suggests that divergent approaches articulate an impossible argument that could further the route toward anarchy.

The past decades’ substantial growth in globalized meat consumption continues to shape the international political economy of food and agriculture. This political economy of meat composes a site of contention; in Brazil, where livestock production is particularly thriving, large agri-food corporations are being challenged by alternative food networks. This article analyzes experiential and experimental accounts of such an actor—a collectivized pork cooperative tied to Brazil’s Landless Movement—which seeks to navigate the political economy of meat. The ethnographic case study documents these livestock farmers’ ambiguity towards complying with the capitalist commodification process, required by the intensifying meat market. Moreover, undertaking an intersectional approach, the article theorizes how animal-into-food commodification in turn depends on the speciesist logic, a normative human/non-human divide that endorses the meat commodity. Hence the article demonstrates how alternative food networks at once navigate confines of capitalist commodification and the speciesist logic that impels the political economy of meat.

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.

Markus Lundström och Tomas Lundströms artikel analyserar vad författarna benämner som ”radikal nationalism” i Sverige mellan 1915–2015. Utifrån tidigare forskning sammanställs en historisk översikt över de aktörer vars politiska projekt tar sin utgångspunkt i nationalismens själva rot: att knyta en nedärvd folkgemenskap till en specifik plats. Till skillnad från tidigare konceptualiseringar av denna politiska miljö utgår ”radikal nationalism” från aktörernas egen idévärld, och genom att betona aktörernas gemensamma ideologiska drag framträder en bild av ett historiskt föränderligt flätverk där olika aktörer skapas och splittras, interagerar, förgrenas och återuppstår. Författarna identifierar tre olika idéströmningar som präglar miljön och som under hundra år av radikal nationalism korsat varandras färdriktning. Medan den rasorienterade ochsocialkonservativa nationalismen historiskt sett stått i konflikt med varandra, tycks den identitära idéströmningen på senare tid ha skapat nya kontaktytor aktörerna emellan. Artikelns historisering av svensk radikal nationalism föreslår, med andra ord, en analysram för att studera dessa aktörer, och för att begripliggöra nationalistisk radikalisering i Sverige.

This article introduces the method of podcast ethnography. The method encompasses three general stages: to explore a podcast from a particular social field, to engage with it through careful, ethnographic reflexivity and to examine the podcast by developing typologies and themes expedient for analysis. Podcast ethnography is beneficial due to its spatial and temporal flexibility; observing a podcast universe can be performed on the move and in parallel with other tasks. This advantage enables a much-needed breathing space for researchers inquiring vehement milieus, such as white radical nationalism. The article uses an example from this precise milieu in Sweden – the podcast Motgift [Antidote] – to illustrate and flesh out the potentials and challenges of applying the method’s three stages. In so doing, the article argues for inclusion of podcast ethnography into the extended family of ethnographic methods.

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.

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.

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 article sketches fascism’s ideological morphology under a post-fascist condition.It builds empirically on three years of ethnographic studies of the radical-nationalist podcast Motgift [Antidote], disclosing that (i) fascist multivocality characterizes and feeds the rhizomic structure of Swedish radical nationalism; (ii) fascist narration locates protagonists and antagonists in driving a plot of ‘genocide against the white race’; and (iii) fascist temporality reinforces ideas of a lost past and degenerated present – prompting a struggle for cultural rebirth and racial revival. The multivocality, narration, and temporality of Motgift illuminate the radical-nationalist politics at work under a post-fascist condition: the state of ideological reconfiguration pondering fascism’s historical downfall. 

Vilka erfarenheter har barn av rasism? Denna rapport bygger på enkätsvar från 1117 elever samt intervjuer från åtta fokusgrupper som involverar 33 barn. De gick alla i femman vid olika skolor i Sverige. Tre barn deltog i studien som medforskare; de bidrog till att utforma intervjuguiden och analysera de transkriberade fokusgruppsintervjuerna. Elva ungdomsambassadörer har också deltagit i arbetet genom att ta fram lärarhandledningar till de medverkande skolorna och även bidragit med sina erfarenheter av rasism och diskriminering. Syftet har varit att få en bild av barns erfarenheter av rasism samt diskriminering och trakasserier med fokus på etnisk tillhörighet, hudfärg, kultur, språk och religion, samt att belysa frågor om vad de vuxna i skolan gör och inte gör för att förhindra att rasism sker.

I korthet visar rapporten att:

• Barn ser rasism i skolan, i offentliga miljöer och på sociala medier. Skolan är jämfört med fritiden den plats där det är störst risk för barn att bevittna och utsättas för rasism. Cirka hälften har sett rasism på sin skola.

• Barn har kännedom om sina rättigheter; nio av tio har hört talas om barnkonventionen, och sju av tio har arbetat med barnkonventionen i skolan. Däremot uttrycker barnen att de vuxna, på grund av passivitet, misslyckas med att tillgodose deras rättigheter.

• Bland barn med utländsk bakgrund är det en högre andel – vart fjärde barn – som uppger att de har blivit diskriminerade och/eller trakasserade jämfört med barn med svensk bakgrund, där vart sjunde barn uppger det.

• Bland barn som är troende muslimer är det något mer än var fjärde (27%) som uppger att de blivit diskriminerade och/eller trakasserade.

• Vart femte barn med utländsk bakgrund är orolig för att bli retad utifrån etnisk tillhörighet, vilket kan förstås utifrån minoritetstress.

• Barn berättar att vuxna inte lyssnar, förstår eller tar barnens erfarenheter av rasism på tillräckligt stort allvar. Vuxna saknar tillräcklig insikt för att kunna se och därmed motverka rasism.

• Barn berättar att vuxna misslyckas med att skydda barn från rasism, och från repressalier knutna till när barn själva väljer att ingripa och agera antirasistiskt.

• Barn utsätts för rasism i skolan. Barn är särskilt utsatta av andra barn men de blir också utsatta av vuxna på skolan. Eftersom det åligger skolan att skydda barn från rasism, diskriminering och trakasserier, drar vi slutsatsen att skolan misslyckas med detta uppdrag.

• Rasism är något som hela tiden förminskas och fördunklas, blir osynligt, både för vuxna och barn.

• Barn vill att vuxna, i synnerhet skolpersonal, blir bättre på att skydda barn från rasism. För att kunna göra det måste vuxna först lära sig att se rasism.