This essay aims to investigate what discourses and what forms of exercise of power that can appear in the description of intercultural work in the book Interkulturellt arbete i förskolan med läroplanen som grund (2019) by Jonas Stier & Bim Riddersporre. The entrance to the essay is a wonder about which discourses are actualized and whether they can be seen to contribute to the categorization of individuals being constructed and to norms being anchored on the basis of these categorizations. We also wonder how power relations emerge in relation to these discourses.

Our research questions:

1. What discourses appear in the descriptions of intercultural work in the book Interkulturellt arbete i förskolan by Stier & Riddersporre?

2. What forms of power can be seen in these discourses that appear in the intercultural work in the book by Stier & Riddersporre? 

The theoretical starting point for our analysis is discourse theory as it focuses on how the creation of discourses contributes to the design of different types of categorizations, power, and norms. This starting point becomes, when we analyze parts of Stier & Riddersporre's book, relevant to how and what positions individuals are attributed through the language used by the authors and educators. In the analysis, we also use Foucault's forms of power to highlight how the text's description of intercultural work through various forms of power imputes other individuals to an identity through the construction of discourses on ethnicity, gender and religion. Our results show inequalities in positions of power through categorizations, norms and values and that it’s difficult to know what really characterizes intercultural work.