Everyday racism in Malmö, Sweden: the experiences of Bosnians and Somalis

Cederberg, M, 2005. Everyday racism in Malmö, Sweden: the experiences of Bosnians and Somalis. PhD, Nottingham Trent University.

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Abstract

This thesis is about everyday racism in Mahmö in the south of Sweden. It draws on the lived experiences of Bosnian and Somali refugees to examine the processes whereby migrants come to be disadvantaged and/or excluded through events and practices taking place in everyday life. The working definition of racism for the research is racism as social relations or relations of power in which minority ethnic groups are in a disadvantaged position. By using an inclusive notion of what counts as racist practices, the thesis identifies a number of processes whereby those relations are produced and maintained. The method used is biographical interviews. Furthermore, introducing a comparative dimension to lived experiences, and including two groups normally assumed to be differently exposed to racism, it goes beyond reductive analyses, to illustrate multiple racisms. Particularly it manages to get at the more subtle forms of racism, and the processes that function to disadvantage beyond the production of otherness.

Racism needs to be understood in relation to specific historical, social and political contexts. The experiences that emerge from biographical interviews are contextualized in terms of wider processes and relations, both presently and historically. Tracing how a specific version of national identity has developed through time, as well as looking at contemporary public discourse, we see how specific conceptions of 'us' and 'them' are produced and imagined. This in turn establishes a specific relation between the two, and as the lived experiences of Bosnians and Somalis illustrate, these conceptions and relations are not only imagined but lived in the everyday. However, we also see that the historically and selectively imagined Swedish 'self, by being centred around notions of democracy, equality and solidarity, means that structural inequalities and the lived experiences of these become difficult to grasp and conceptualise.

Item Type:	Thesis
Creators:	Cederberg, M.
Date:	2005
ISBN:	9781369324365
Identifiers:	Number Type PQ10290187 Other
Divisions:	Schools > School of Arts and Humanities
Record created by:	Linda Sullivan
Date Added:	12 Nov 2020 11:13
Last Modified:	11 Oct 2023 10:33
URI:	https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/41629

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