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In this article, we examine recognition gaps exposed by the coronavirus pandemic. We apply Lamont's cultural processes of inequality framework to the critical case of COVID inequality during the first wave of the pandemic in Sweden - a period in which COVID-19 cases were concentrated among immigrants. We identify recognition gaps associated with five key cultural processes of inequality. Counter to the dominant narrative of Sweden as an open and equal society, our analysis uncovers cultural processes of inequality theorists have identified in other contexts: the racialization of immigrants; and the stigmatization and evaluation of immigrant spaces. We identify two additional cultural processes: resignification in which the State's coronavirus response was directed toward ethnic Swedish people; and inversion, in which higher death rates among immigrants were relabeled as a natural and acceptable cause of COVID deaths. In addition to applying and extending the theory, we demonstrate the value of a focus on recognition for studies of health inequality. The recognition gaps we identify in this article are practical and solvable problems. In comparison with the challenges of managing large-scale economic redistribution or abolishing prejudice and stigmatization by addressing bias on a person-by-person basis, anticipating and counteracting the cultural processes of inequality is an actionable pathway to pursuing more just and equal societies.

According to mainstream criminology, Nordic societies with their generous welfare states are supposed to moderate, if not restrict, penal powers. In the case of migration, we see the opposite pattern. In Denmark, we see extended use of penal institutions and penal harms to contain and remove unwanted populations from the region, including proposals for a prison island and the confinement of migrants in 19th century prisons. To make sense of these developments and interpret its social meaning, we unpack the logic of the punishment–welfare nexus and Nordic exceptionalism. We find that Denmark expands penal power to regulate non-citizens, deter migration and uphold national interests. These repressive practices are not exceptions to the rule but rather illustrate the exclusionary edge and very nature of the penal regimes in Denmark, a Nordic welfare state.

This chapter examines the criminalization of migration through the lens of transnational legal orders (TLOs). By doing so, it seeks to explain dramatic episodes such as the Diciotti refugee incident in Italy, but also provide socio-legal analysis for far-reaching practices such as immigration detention, removal, and refusal of entry, all of which depend on the development of a formalizing legal order and specific regulation such as the EU Returns Directive that transcends national boundaries. It argues that affluent democratic societies of the Global North are in the middle of a major transformation of governance while transnational legal orders are at the center of it.

In Sweden, control of the mobile poor is often driven by the needs and demands of the welfare state itself and follows a different logic outside the neoliberal paradigm. By examining the case of the Roma, EU citizens who travel to Sweden to ask for money on the streets, we can see the expansion and retraction of the criminal law as the government responds to new forms of migration and poverty in its society. The government’s mixed responses – no to bans on begging, but yes to evictions – are the result of dualities inherent in Nordic welfare states, when their inclusionary ameliorative dimensions collide with their exclusionary and nationalistic tendencies. This article proposes the term benevolent violence to conceptualize this duality. It occurs when coercive means are used to uphold the state’s ameliorative goals and when the state’s ameliorative practices have violent effects. In the case of the Roma, it means protecting them from their own livelihood and it means protecting the welfare state for nationals, keeping it solvent for members.

Penal power at the border relies on coercive tools such as expulsion, eviction, criminalization, and penalization to respond to mass mobility, which is perceived to be a social threat rather than a political expression of rights. By deploying its primal power, its material and symbolic violence invested in criminal justice, the state taps into unparalleled capacity to impose meaning on others, backed by the moral weight of censure and sanction. The criminalization and penalization of migrants are effective precisely because they bring moral weight to this sorting process, separating the worthy from the wrongdoer. This article develops conceptual tools to understand the structural and communicative capacities of penal power to reconstitute the nation state, to reset the national frame of reference, and reassert the state’s dominion over it.

In late summer 2015, Sweden embarked on one of the largest self-described humanitarian efforts in its history, opening its borders to 163,000 asylum seekers fleeing the war in Syria. Six months later this massive effort was over. On January 4, 2016, Sweden closed its border with Denmark. This closure makes a startling reversal of Sweden’s open borders to refugees and contravenes free movement in the Schengen Area, a founding principle of the European Union. What happened? This book sets out to explain this reversal.

Describes positive attitudes from mentors that might encourage teacher trainees and discusses methods of aiding trainees for better teaching skills that make a lesson more valuable. Makes recommendations on how to teach difficult ideas to students. (YDS)