Racism in the Swedish School: Between Racism, Discrimination and Integration? (CRRE Seminar)

Claes Tängh Wrangel, Director for the Centre for Multidisciplinary Studies on Racism & Hassan Sharif, Senior Lecturer in Child and Youth Studies, Uppsala University, Sweden

Education is often defined as key to combatting racism. At the same time, research has shown that the Swedish school sector is far from free from racism and discriminatory practices. For many students, racism is a part of their everyday life, particularly at school.

In our presentation we will present a recently initiated project that seeks to understand everyday racism in Swedish school settings in light of a current shift within the educational sector’s official government mandate: from combatting racism and discrimination (Arneback and Jämte, 2017) to an increased emphasis on promoting integration to Swedish values.

We understand the educational sector and the Swedish school context as a social and political field (Bourdieu 1990), in which racialized logics and practices are not only contested, but actualized and reproduced in both direct and indirect ways. As the project is new, empirics will be drawn from previous research, in particular empirical studies with newly arrived upper secondary students and their educational strategies to avoid racism and discriminatory practices in school.  

All welcome. Registration is essential to receive the link to ZOOM.