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Sweden is often considered one of the most gender-equal countries in the world and held up as a model to follow, but the reality is more complex. This is the first book to explode the myth of Swedish gender equality, both offering a new perspective for an international audience, and suggesting how equality might be rethought more generally. While the authors argue that the gender-equality mantra in Sweden has led to a society with increased opportunities for some, they also assert that the dominant norm of gender equality has become nationalistic and builds upon heteronormative and racial principles. Examining the changing meanings and parameters of gender equality against the country's social-democratic tradition and in the light of contemporary neoliberal ideologies, the book constitutes an urgent contribution to the debates about gender-equality policies and politics.
In the modern globalized world of work, society’s capitalist and patriarchal norms perpetuate old and create new differences based on gender, class, ethnicity, age, and other social categorizations. This book proposes a novel conceptual framework offering theoretical and methodological insights for thinking through the present and future inequality challenges in the globalized world of work and working life issues in the context of spatio-temporal relations. Bringing together global feminist studies of intersectionality and transnationalism, work-life research, and studies of space, place, and identity, this edited collection responds to the growing interest in peripheries, rurality, and o...
This book brings feminist theories and concepts to the sociology of risk in an attempt to carve out a framework for intersectional risk theories in times of ambivalence. The authors purport that risk is pervasive in the Global North, and is fast becoming a hegemonic governing principle. In order to understand this crucial aspect of society, sociological risk theories and risk analysis must go beyond power and social inequalities, to incorporate an intersectional risk approach that takes into account gender, race and other critical perspectives. Their proposed framework will provide the tools to assess how risk is situated in different configurations of power, revealing cracks and openings in the weft of power and rethinking risk governance in contemporary society. By utilising an intersectional and nuanced analysis, the everyday understanding, practices and discourses of risk can be explored and better understood. This book will be of interest to scholars and students who value the importance of establishing interdisciplinary networks between risk theory, sociology, politics and more in order to study the contemporary world.
Sweden has the reputation of being one of the most gender-equal countries in the world, and it is often held up as a model for other societies--but the reality is much more complicated, as this volume shows. The first book to provide a thorough analysis of the myth of Swedish gender equality, it demonstrates how that dominant idea has become a form of heteronormative, racially specific nationalism that ultimately excludes those who fall outside the social norm.
This book questions why so many mothers leave their families in twenty-first-century Swedish literature, analyzing literary representations of maternal abandonment in relation to sociopolitical discourses. The volume draws on a queer-theoretical framework in order to highlight norm-critical dimensions, failure, and resistance in literature about motherhood. Jenny Björklund argues that novels about mothers who leave can be understood as ways to problematize and challenge Swedish-branded values like gender equality and a progressive family politics that promotes ideals of involved parenthood, the nuclear family, and pronatalism. The book also raises questions beyond the Swedish context about maternal ambivalence, family politics, and privilege and discusses how literature can work as resistance and provide alternatives to the current social order.
Multiple refugee regimes govern the lives of forced migrants simultaneously but in an often conflicting way. As a mechanism of inclusion/exclusion, they tend to engender the violence they sought to dissipate. Protection and control channel agency through mechanisms of either tutelage and victimisation or criminalisation. This book contrasts multiple groups of refugees and refugee regimes, revealing the inherent coercive violence of refugee regimes, from displacement and expulsion, to stereotypification and exclusion in host countries, and academic knowledge essentialisation. This violence is international, national, society-based, internalised, and embodied - and it urgently needs due scholarly attention.
Positionality and researcher reflexivity - how to account for one's subject position - remain as challenges for new researchers. But they also remain as challenges for experienced researchers, who are often involved in multiple research projects simultaneously. Where Am I in the Picture? sheds light on the idea of researcher positionality through visual methodologies, particularly in the context of studying rurality in Canada, Sweden, and South Africa. The book is intended for new and experienced researchers seeking to decolonize their own perspectives in research in the social sciences and humanities. It incorporates photographs, drawings, and memory work to highlight the social constructed...
The Nordic states were among the first in the world to enact general gender equality and anti-discrimination laws with low threshold enforcement mechanisms. Today, the Nordic countries top the World Economic Forum’s Gender Gap Index –but they have still not succeeded in closing the gender gap. This book draws a diverse and complex picture of the long, uneven, and unfinished process towards substantive equality in four Nordic countries: Sweden, Finland, Norway, and Iceland. It presents the Nordic gender equality model’s systematic use of three measures: overarching gender policies, legislation that has an explicit or implicit impact on gender relations, and gender equality and anti-disc...