Sabine Gruber

The main aim of the project is to examine what role ethnicity and gender have in the treatment of women of migrant background in primary health care, and how this is reflected in the every day practice in three different institutions: a primary health care center (vårdcentral); a youth clinic (ungdomsmottagning) and a maternity welfare clinic.

The project contains three sub-studies that examine three different empirical levels. The first study analyses definitions and intentions on a policy level and map out how the work is organised in different institutions. The second study examines the level of implementation and focuses on the every day practice of the three institutions. Method for this study includes both focus group interviews and single interviews. The third study examines, through in-depth interviews, how migrant women experience the treatment from the different institutions. The project applies a comparative perspective and analyses similarities and differences between the different institutions as well as between the different empirical levels.

Studies of educational stratification show that children from advantaged backgrounds (more economic and cultural capital) attain higher educational merits than others. Recent research in educational stratification incorporates social capital as an additional factor with a significant impact on school achievement. The aim of this project is to examine, in a Swedish context, how access to social capital affects the educational performance of young people from different backgrounds (class, gender, and ethnicity), through the following research questions: Which characteristics of young people affect their access to social capital? Does social capital offset limited access to economic and cultural capital and contribute to better educational outcomes for young people of lower socioeconomic and/or immigrant origin? By what mechanisms does social capital improve individuals educational achievements?

The aim of this project is to grasp processes of globalization in education policies and in selected pedagogic texts in Norway, Sweden, Syria and Turkey through a focus on the education of the "right" kind of future citizen. People increasingly move across national borders for longer or shorter periods. The autonomy of nation states is thus challenged and questioned, but they still hedge in and concomitantly close off people in separate national spaces. These simultaneous often contradictory - processes are of great importance for how the right kind of future citizen is moulded in mandatory schooling. Research on transnationalism is a theoretical starting point for this project. Long- or short term migrants create and maintain social relations which cut across national borders, but also law and policies move and are established across such borders. Research on education and nation state building and the globalization of education are important for the project, in order to understand education polices and the governance of education. We will collect and analyze educational documents and curricula for selected subjects like history, civic and religious education, interview politicians with influence over education, as well as teachers and authors of textbooks, and scrutinize selected textbooks in the four national settings. The cases will be used for soft comparison where similarities and differences will be used throughout to generate new insights and deepen the analysis.

Young people with the same educational qualifications do not reach the same place in the social hierarchy, because educational credentials are never separable from the individuals that hold them. The economic and social return of educational credentials (in terms of salary and the status of the job) depends mainly on the social capital of their holders. How much social capital an individual has access to, depends, among other things, on her socio-economic background, gender and ethnicity.

The aim of this project is to examine: 1) what is the impact of social capital (compared with socio-economic background and education) on labour market outcomes of young people in obtaining their first jobs, and 2), is there any differences between young natives and children of immigrants in regard to their access to and return from social capital when they get their first employment?

In order to achieve the aim of the project, we will examine the labour market outcomes (salary and the work's status) of young people with the same education, three years after completed studies from universities and secondary schools.

The method design of the project combines quantitative and qualitative method (questionnaire - and interview studies).

Since the 1970s, preschool has been seen as an important place for ethnic integration. Yet, it has not been much investigated with respect to ethnicity aspects. This project aims to explore how ethnicity is accomplished in a number of Swedish preschools. More specifically it focuses on the interaction between children, parents and teachers, and how ethnicity is invoked and made meaningful in every day practices. Moreover, it maps the organizational framework for everyday interactions and practices, in relation to bilingualism and ethnicity. The project is planned as four sub-studies in order to reach a broader understanding of how ethnicity is constructed in different preschool contexts. A variety of methods will be deployed - focus group interviews as well as dyadic interviews, video recordings, participant observations, and analyses of documents - which all supplement each other. We believe that the project will deepen the knowledge about how ethnicity is accomplished in daily preschool interactions and practices. The project also aims to increase understandings of everyday constructions of ethnicity, which has relevance both for preschool teachers and for preschool teacher students.

The project investigate how ethnicity and gender is constructed in the care and treatment at youth detention homes. Central questions are about how the institution staff understand the enrolled boys and themselves in relation to ethnicity and gender and how that understanding is given importance in the organization of the institutions, their practices and attitudes. This is investigated with participant observations and interviews at four detentions homes for boys in the age of 13-21. The aim is to analyse how ethnicity and gender is given significance and materialize in practice through the institution staff actions, reflections and definitions of the social world. The study has a critical understanding of ethnicity, that will say ethnic relations are understood as products of power relations. Ethnicity is under this an instrument for sorting people that results in differential identities, exclusionary practices, different and unequal conditions. The study also builds on feminist research indicating that gender has a central position i constructing ethnicity. This approach emphasizes that neither ethnicity or any other dimension of social relations can be analysed as something pre-given, it problematizes rather how constructions of different relationships/categories also implies an attitude in relation to each other.

In recent decades, tourism and travelling has increasingly come to be recognized as a highly complex field of research that raises questions that are both local and global, that involves questions about identity and self-understanding, as well as questions relating to human rights, development, global economy and international political relations. Still, there are yet few Swedish textbooks where contemporary tourism and travel is highlighted from a critical perspective, or where issues of global power relations are in focus. Therefore, the purpose of this project has been to produce text books in Swedish, in which international tourism and travel are confronted with new, critical, theoretical perspectives.

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.

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?

In the wake of two high-profile murders in 1999 and 2002, which involved the killing of two young women of Kurdish background by close family members, the situation of and the victimisation experienced by "immigrant girls" in their families has been transformed into an important issue in Sweden. The murders came to bo defined as "honour murders" and the situation showed that there was an acute need for conrete measures to combat this violence. The project analysis the Swedish school system´s efforts to combat "honour-related" violence. The study is ethnographic and the empirical material is based on interviews with student welfare staff at different compulsury schools and colleges of further education. There are also some participant observations at study days focused on "honour-related" violence. An important result is that the violence is understood as related to the Other, located to a "traditional" and "patriarchal" culture. A consequence of this is that the violence is homogenized. That will say the violcene is attributed to clear-cut explanations and signs, which makes alternative explanations and interpretations invisible. "Honour-related" violence is distinguished and separated from other gender-based violence, whereby whole groups will be stigmatized as victims or perpetrators of violence.

The study, which is a dissertation study, examines how ethnicity is turned into a central category for the social organisation of the school and used to emphasise differences, whereby students are categorised as Swedes and immigrants. Interest is also levelled at how ethnicity constructions are bound up with social complexity and interact with other relations, especially gender and class.
The study is based on ethnographical field studies in a comprehensive secondary school, primarily consisting of participant observations of classroom situations, staff meetings and informal discussions where teachers talk about their work and students.
The study shows that the differences that are generated and sustained through the school personnels actions, argumentation and interactions with the students are complex, varied and closely bound up with the school context. This means that individual students are not only and alternately identified as immigrants or Swedes, but are dependent on contexts also understood in a variety of ways. For example, students who are successful in their schoolwork are, to a lesser extent, identified as immigrants.
One important observation is that the school personnels everyday work and contact with the students are ambitious when it comes to justice and tolerance, but that these intentions are seldom combined with insights into the power aspects associated with social relations. Daily practices are instead overshadowed by the need to accomplish certain teaching elements, where attention is focused on the classroom situation in preference to highlighting or discussing students individual experiences and living conditions. The school personnels intentions and possibilities of working towards equality and against discrimination are thus transformed so that the school instead produces and sustains relations of inequality.