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This paper explores everyday nationalism in relation to work with traditions in Swedish preschools, as well as how preschool teachers reflect on these practices. One of the tasks of the Swedish preschools is to transmit and develop a cultural heritage. In Sweden, 95% of children aged 3-5 attend preschool. Approximately one fourth have a foreign background. Moreover, preschool children encounter very different cultural realities depending on where their preschool is located. Sweden is a secular as well as multi-religious country. This makes the cultural heritage that the preschools are supposed to transmit ambiguous and complex. Based on a survey where preschool practitioners answered questions about what traditions they pay attention to and what content they fill these traditions with, the article maps which traditions preschool practitioners actualize in their preschool practices. The data is analyzed and discussed in relation to everyday nationalism and the pedagogy of nation. The results show that the everyday nationalism of Swedish preschools both consolidates and challenges the traditions generally considered as being rooted in Swedish history. At the same time, many preschools integrate new traditions into their repertoire that represent societal changes, both in terms of cultural globalization and in terms of the traditions of religious minorities gaining greater visibility. Funding Agencies|Swedish Research Council; [721-2014-2397]

This article draws upon theories of gender, nation and haunting in order to examine what we term the spectre of the boy in a dress within two international contexts, Sweden and Australia. These two contexts have been chosen because, on the surface, they appear to be very different and yet as our analysis will reveal there are striking similarities around gender conformity discourse and nation, although they play out differently. We illustrate how the notion of the boy in a dress is drawn upon as a problematic figure within these two different socio-political contexts, and argue that this figure represents a ‘tipping point’ between the tolerance and intolerance of gender diversity within public and educational spaces. Two key moments will be analysed. In Australia, the recent (2017) postal survey on Marriage Equality saw a campaign run from a conservative right group, the Coalition for Marriage, that included a television commercial featuring a concerned mother stating that, ‘School told my son he could wear a dress to school if he likes’. In Sweden, in 2016, the department store Åhléns chose an image of a child of African heritage and indeterminate gender to be the face of their annual Lucia marketing. This caused significant controversy and sparked a ‘Jag är Lucia’ (I am Lucia) campaign featuring notable Swedish celebrities dressed as Lucia, including footballer Zlatan Ibrahimović. These critical incidents act as illustration of how the power of cisgender normativity intersects with notions about the nation, within educational spaces and public consciousness.

Desexualized heteronormativity saturates most educational spaces. Thus, research on LGBTQ teachers tends to focus on the precarious and vulnerable work conditions produced by this norm. The aim of ...

This article discusses the emergence of political subjectivity and politicization among social workers and teachers. We present situations that have induced teachers and social workers to become politically active and examine what their struggle might imply for these unaccompanied children. We also ask how the nation state is interpellated and transformed. Drawing on Laclau, Mouffe and Biesta, we find that political subjectivity emerges in situations with conflicting norms and contradictory interpellations. When Sweden deported unaccompanied refugee children, numerous social workers and teachers found themselves torn between acting as loyal civil servants or acting in accordance with their professional ethics. When representatives from this category emerge as political subjects directed at political change, the nation state becomes unstable and porous, creating possibilities for change.

Swedish preschools are supposed to be non-confessional. At the same time, they are supposed to pass on a cultural heritage of a nation where the Lutheran Church has permeated society for ce...

According to policy and research, newly arrived students with limited educational backgrounds struggle in relation to school demands. Drawing on interviews and observations from three compulsory schools, the article analyses how these students and their school performances are made intelligible, i.e. recognisable within the framework of the school as an institution. The results show how students’ school difficulties are often constituted as enigmatic by the school staff, who articulate them in different ways: as being dependent on the students’ cultural background and/or cognitive ability or on the students’ limited educational background. We argue that although all these understandings to some extent place the problem within the individual student, they produce different subjectivations, since the last explanation also constitutes the problem in relation to the school’s organisation.

In Sweden, as in many other countries, students that schools are unable to handle are removed from their local environments and sometimes from their parental homes and moved to rural residential ca ...

Drawing on post-structural perspectives and analysis of television programs on education, the article investigates the public educational discourse in Sweden. It shows how a dominant neoliberal educational discourse is articulated together with a discourse of equal education, where the two discourses influence and subvert each other so that neither becomes totally hegemonic. Taking point of departure in the neoliberal emphasis on the individual, not the least concerning school choice and in relation to the significance of class for educational success, the analysis focus on the constitution of classed positions. The study reveals constitutions of class in which race, place, gender, economy, and agency are intertwined, such that the schools and the students are attributed both different status and differing subject positions in terms of future economic trajectories. The conclusions drawn are that in the public conversation about the organization and goal of compulsory education it is important to be aware of the discursive and political contexts in which the discussions take place, and that class matter in the educational assemblage in the form of economic subjectivities constituted in a web of intersecting notions about differing preconditions and outcomes of education. Klass i marknadsliberala utbildningsdiskurser

The paper interrogates how teacher education and schools are produced as places for simultaneous and intertwined norms of nationality and norms of sexuality. Drawing on data from observations at a Swedish teacher training programme, the concepts of banal nationalism, homonationalism, and precarity are used in order to discuss productions of sexual, national, and cultural subjects. The analysis indicates that homonationalism in education produces tolerable queers together with intolerant migrants. In this way Sweden is produced as a homonormative nation in opposition to nations and subjects that are considered other. The concluding section suggests using investigations of homonationalism as a tool in teacher education in order to bring about more inclusive schools. Funding Agencies|Swedish Research Council [2003-4442]

Education and Political Subjectivities in Neoliberal Times and Places investigates the conditions and possibilities for political subjectivities to emerge in international educational contexts, whe ...

This article discusses kinship practices in connection with death and mourning. It argues that kinship is an ambiguous and contingent concept, and that rituals done in connection with death and mourning have consequences for how people are acknowledged as bereaved. The discussion is based on data from a Swedish study of bereavement. Besides evincing the salience in death practices of a notion of kinship based on conjugal relations and blood ties, the results of analyses of participant observations in a grief group and in-depth interviews with gay widowers reveal that the dominant kinship norm both constrains and enables differing positions as primary mourners. Drawing on Judith Butler and discourse theory, the study shows that claiming a position as bereaved can entail struggles concerning acknowledgment of kinship, and that examples of denunciation simultaneously stand out as resistance and subversion. To avoid marginalizing prospective mourners, it is important to be aware of how these practices of kins...

This study uses discourse analysis to examine representations found in Swedish newspapers of the murder of a Kurdish woman perpetrated by her father. It discloses representations of a media event that reiterate intersecting norms concerning ethnicity, gender and social class, which together delineate boundaries and significant core values for a hegemonic notion of the Swedish. Notions of ethnicity, class, and gender are articulated together, forming a dichotomy between a modern, tolerant Sweden and an obsolete, conceited other. In putting forward integration as the solution to honor-motivated male violence against women, the discourse presumes and reiterates the Swedish as signified by gender equality and, because social class and ethnicity are articulated together, integration becomes synonymous with social mobility. By presenting a culturalized interpretation of the killing, the discourse conceals possible connections between the male violence perpetrated by immigrants and the more common violence perpetrated by non-immigrants.

The paper uses a debate in Swedish newspapers about the fate of the corpses from the shipwrecked M/S Estonia as a case study, in order to demonstrate how different discourses on grief construct a normative way of mourning. The theoretical vantage point is a discursive perspective on grief where different discourses are regarded as resources and limitations for how to express and make sense of bereavement. It maintains that what are to be considered as normal or deviant are social and cultural constructions, not ontological facts. The analysis demonstrates a notion of normal grief as grief work that moves through a process from emotional reaction to rational reflection, and in which ritual practices play an important part. The study illustrates how negotiations regarding grief and mourning draw on different discourses. It also elucidates how a specific notion of grief is constructed as normal and legitimate at the same time as other manifestations of grief are made abnormal and deviant.

A multicultural Swedish grave quarter and three immigrant funerals are used as vantage points to elucidate how funerals and graveyards are employed as communicative symbolic actions for construction of ethnic and cultural identity. The theoretical perspective draws on ritual studies (Driver, 1991; Durkheim, 1915/1965; Myerhoff, 1984; van Gennep 1960), Goffman's (1967) notion of self-presentation, and studies of ethnicity (Barth 1971; 1994). The study focuses on situations in which ethnicity is actualised and brought to the fore as essential traits of individual or collective identity. Comparison between immigrant ritual practices and mainstream Swedish practices indicate that death rituals can be employed to enhance, subsume, or to fuse social boundaries. In the latter case, the rituals play a part in constructing new social groups. The study further elucidates how multicultural cemeteries reflect and construct a new multicultural Sweden.