Projects with keyword: Multiculturalism

The project explores research and debates on multiculturalism, social cohesion and liberal values in academic discourse, policy documents and the media. It scrutinises discourses voicing anxiety over "multiculturalism" in societies marked by the erosion of citizenship, urban revolts among disadvantaged migrant youth, an ongoing nationalist-populist alignment and exclusivist policies of migration and "integration".

This study is an evaluation conducted on behalf of the Education Office in Linköping municipality during 2007-2009. The evaluation includes the training project "From Immigrant Dense to International" for teachers employed in elementary and secondary school and was conducted as a process evaluation. The reader can take advantage of the result in the referenced report, which primarily reflects the quality of a training project, but also can be read as examples of teacher´s speach and notions about "multicultural education", "cultural differences" and "immigrant students". The reasoning put forward by the evaluation participants are common findings that have been shown and discussed in a number of previous studies focusing on school and ethnic relations. Not least that well-meaning but unthinking inclusive aspirations of the school might lead to stigma and exclusion of students with immigrant backgrounds.

In Sweden, as in other countries, calls for partnership between state institutions, market and local communities, punctuate discussions of a number of areas of public policy. In recent years, political parties from left to right have stressed that public policy needs to view the exercise of power as one based on "bottom-up" rather than from top-down strategies. These calls for a bottom-up approach reflect a gradual shift that has increasingly put en emphasis on individual agency and freedom of choice vis-à-vis governmental control, endeavours to achieve equality and promote democratic participation, i.e. a shift towards the ideal of an active citizenship. The project engages with normative as well as substantial dimensions of the notion of active citizenship in Swedish politics at the turn of the Millennium, focusing on the relationships between democratic participation and social citizenship in the multi-ethnic society.

This study is an evaluation conducted on behalf of the Education Office in Linköping municipality during 2007-2008. The evaluation includes a one-year training "Language and communication in multilingual preschool groups" for pre-school staff. Purpose of the training was to undertake a development project for clarifying and strengthening language stimulation and language support activities in the preschool. Evaluation questions have been: How do they who participated in the training reflect on its knowledge material and how they reflect on language? What footprint provides training in daily preschool activities, in terms of concrete actions, thoughts and reasoning? What dilemmas can be seen in relation to the completed training?

The project is financed by the Swedish Research Council. There are two researchers involved in the project Tünde Puskás and Prof. emeritus Rune Johansson and the project consists of two parts. Rune Johansson studies the construction and re-formulation of languages policies at the national, societal level. Tünde Puskás focuses on how language policies are implemented at the municipal level within the sphere of education.
Thus the project aims at exploring
1. how Swedish language policies interact with major ideological debates on uniformity and diversity
2. how local school politicians and school leaders interpret, challenge and appropriate societal language planning principles and how they relate to the usage of Swedish and other languages in municipal schools.
The project fits well in the internationally expanding academic field ethnography of language policy. Studies within this tradition aim to link micro-level educational practices with macro-level language policies and discourses on language use through illuminating the connections between macro and micro levels of analysis. The ethnography of language policy in the context of this project allows us to illuminate the different layers of language policies. This approach requires broad definition of language policies. Language policy is thus conceptualised as the totality of language beliefs (ideologies, societal norms, values and individual perceptions) and language management (rules, laws, regulations and actions undertaken to influence or modify language practices).

European societies have recently turned toward more austere political regimes. Evidence of this can be seen in budget cuts, management of the labor market and restrictions of welfare systems, as well as in new regimes of migration and citizenship. Against the backdrop of such processes, this project investigates how a current politics of austerity affects our cultural memory. This project seeks to extract the correlation between how minorities, migrants and their descendants are treated by present policies and how memories and experiences of migrants, minorities and colonized peoples are treated in historiography and historical pedagogy. The project is unique in the sense that it brings together social scientists analyzing ethnic relations and migration in contemporary Europe and historians studying Europe?s history and cultural memory. It is also potentially path breaking as it crosses borders between languages and academic traditions and initiates a truly inter-European academic discussion on scholarly and intellectual concerns that are deeply shared by most national communities of Europe but usually studied only in the contexts of the various nation states.

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).

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.

This project develops theoretical insights and methods for the purpose of aiding anti-discriminatory education to accommodate value conflicts in society. The project builds upon previous research that has identified value conflicts related to gender and sexuality as a challenge for education that seeks to combat discrimination against racial and ethnic minorities, in particular in situations where gender equality and sexual rights are articulated as 'Swedish' values.

The project employs qualitative methods and consists of fieldwork carried out in two upper secondary schools over a period of two years. The fieldwork follows an interactive research design where the researchers conduct classroom observations, interview teachers and students, provide feedback and, subsequently, develop the continuing practice in close cooperation with the participants. Drawing upon theories of feminist intersectionality and multicultural conviviality, the project seeks to promote reflexive knowledge among the participants, and to develop anti-discriminatory pedagogies that are inclusive and sensitive to diverse experiences and conflicting values among the participants.