In recent years, Swedish women belonging to a post-migrant generation have made their voices against racism and social inequality prominent within public debate. Engaging in segregated and economically deprived suburbs, these women make use of art in order to counter stereotypical narratives of themselves and their communities. Based on interviews from two research projects, Accessing Utopia and Gendered Islamophobia in Sweden, this article aims to understand the complexities in using art to protest racist structures and stereotypes. In what ways are the young women making room for their own creative expressions in Swedish society, while countering processes of othering? How does the work of representation affect them? What meaning do the women give to the platforms and networks they have been involved in? This article shows that the women’s early experiences of othering and meeting likeminded youths play a central role in order to either enter or create collective platforms where they can creatively engage in expressing their subjectivities and counter society’s controlling images. Projects and platforms such as Revolution Poetry and Swedish hijabis provided collective self-care through support and confidence building among youths from marginalized communities. These platforms can be seen as an artistic homeplace for the interlocutors. The article also shows that the work of representation is sometimes felt as limiting. The activism the women engage in is a deeply personal struggle for self-valuation and seeking ways to live a life on one’s own terms.

Stockholmsregionen växer och utvecklas. Regionen förväntas växa med ytterligare cirka en miljon invånare fram till år 2050. Fler människor måste dela på stadens utrymmen och resurser. Stockholms ytterområden – där de flesta bor och kommer att bo – förtätas och rustas upp. Hur bygger vi då ett hållbart Stockholm, ett samhälle där alla kan få plats, delta, trivas och må bra?

This chapter offers a systematic review of the literature on educational inequality and school attainments of immigrants’ offspring in Sweden. The review covers research conducted between 1990 and 2015 and critically examines how different research traditions explain this inequality. The chapter begins by mapping the key characteristics of the Swedish educational system together with Swedish immigration patterns. Thereafter, five major research traditions that explain educational inequality and ethnic background in Sweden are presented. These perspectives include (1) political arithmetic; (2) racism and discrimination; (3) language proficiency tradition; (4) school choice and school segregation; and (5) cultural and social capital and socio-historical contexts. The ‘political arithmetic’ tradition, which starts mainly from a positivistic approach and employs large-scale, quantitative research strategies, has focused on the individual and demographic characteristics of pupils. The main assumption of the other research clusters is that there are important contextual circumstances (beyond individual factors) which decisively affect the educational achievements of the descendants of immigrants. While often dominated by qualitative approaches, these types of research do sometimes include quantitatively designed studies. These research traditions take a more critical stance on government policies, which have produced an extremely segregated school system, and show the consequences of a concentration of children of families from vulnerable groups (economically disadvantaged and immigrant groups in marginalized neighborhoods) in schools with limited resources.

The aim of this thesis is to highlight the central conditions, norms and values which enable the staging of certain masculine pupil positions and hinder others at a school located in the northern part of the municipality of Botkyrka, during 2004–2005. The school and the neighbourhood in this study are characterized by a high percentage of people with immigrant background, a result of urban ethnic segregation. The methodological approach is qualitative. The empirical data consists of interviews with 15 boys in grade 6, participant observations, and official documents. The study examines the central position of socially sanctioned conceptions of “good becoming” in society. Children are expected to control their own bodies and take on certain areas of knowledge in the correct way in order to create themselves as expanding subjects: they learn to ask for “success” and “upward” social mobility. But as this study shows this does not apply equally to all pupils. The boys in this study have to create themselves as pupils on terms that make it harder for them to establish themselves as successful pupils. The teaching they encounter in school, the socioeconomic conditions and the effects of the segregation that characterises the urban landscape they live in makes it harder for them to live up to the requirements of what an “ideal pupil” should be. The study also highlights the ways in which difference is being made between girls and boys in school, creating arenas that are more open for boys than for girls to enter into in everyday life, namely football and the multiethnic youth language. These arenas allowed the boys to stage masculine coded subject positions which in one way or another were connected with a positive social status. Thus boys in this study do not have as much reason to establish themselves in the position of a good pupil in comparison to girls since there is a greater variety in how they can create themselves within subject positions connected to social status.