Picturing inclusive places in segregated spaces: a participatory photo project conducted by migrant women in Sweden

This article uses participatory photography to explore contradictory processes of inclusion and exclusion in contemporary Sweden. Our aim is to analyse the social relations that shape the kinds of places recently arrived migrant women experience as ‘safe’, as well as their everyday experiences of inclusion and exclusion. The use of photography – wherein the women choose how, when and where to shoot photos – helps us highlight what otherwise would not be immediately evident with regard to the experience of such places. We argue that there are inclusive places in segregated spaces, and that issues of ethnic inclusion and exclusion are linked to ethnic hegemony and other relationships of power. Drawing on theories of relational space in general, and transgressive space in particular, we demonstrate that our informants' daily existence is simultaneously integrated and segregated, included and excluded, and that emancipatory processes that are already under way must be allowed to proceed if the social landscape of integration is to be an open and equal one.     

Visible Men and Elusive Women

Early gender archaeology formulated two statements: men are visible, women are invisible, and men work in hard materials, women work in soft materials. We discuss these dichotomies in connection with nineteenth-century folklore and an excavated eighteenth-century cottage at a summer-farm. We conclude that much of the gendered order-of-work tasks broke down in pragmatic day-to-day life, especially by women crossing the gender border. However, social chaos was held at bay by ritual acts and magic objects.     

Stories of lifestyle mobility: representing self and place in the search for the ‘good life’

In recent decades, mobility researchers have paid increasing attention to the flows of relatively privileged individuals whose mobility practices are largely understood to be lifestyle-motivated, consumption-led and tourism-induced (e.g. Benson, M., & O'Reilly, K. (Eds.). (2009). Lifestyle migration: Expectations, aspirations and experiences. Surrey: Ashgate; King, R., Warnes, A. M., & Williams, A. M. (2000). Sunset lives: British retirement migration to the Mediterranean. Oxford: Berg). Situated within the context of lifestyle mobilities, this paper aims to analyse the significance of place and representations of place in the movers' stories of mobility. The mobility experiences of Swedish retirees practicing routinised and seasonal mobility between Sweden and Malta have been analysed, and this paper explores how they actively give meaning to their choices and decisions. In their narratives, the movers express their representations of themselves in relation not only to their imaginings of places and to their belongings to and engagements with these places, but also to their mobility practices. The findings contribute to a discussion of how place imaginaries and self-identities are constructed through lifestyle mobility practices.     

A Whiter Shade of Pale

In 1922 the Swedish State Institute for Race Biology (SIRB) was founded in Uppsala, with the purpose being to survey and classify the Swedish people according to their race. To make this categorization, both measurements and visual analysis of bodies and faces were used and documented in charts and photographs. The data collected was then intended to make a foundation for a rational population policy aiming at improving the Nordic (Swedish) race.

The charts registering body characteristics, the photographic collection brought together by the institute, and the images illustrating the published results all testify to the importance of visuality in this eugenic project: how people looked was crucial when classifying them into different race types. In this study the works of the institute are analysed to see in what way race was constructed through this visuality.

The results show how the institute followed a scientific and pictorial rhetoric founded centuries earlier, in which the human species was organized in different subgroups according to their visual appearance. The results also show how race, with time, became more and more differentiated and that white, in the work of the SIRB, came in many shades.     

How to picture race?

The purpose of the Swedish State Institute for Race Biology, SIRB, was to survey the Swedish people according to its race criteria. In this research process photographs were used to document and portray the different races living in Sweden. This article examines how the photographs were used in this process: What pictorial rhetoric did they use and what did the photographs bring to the research process? The result shows that SIRB did not succeeded in developing consistent methods of portraying race. The style and formula of the portraits varied; sometimes environmental aspects came in to focus, sometimes bodily aspects. These methodological shortcomings must be attributed not only to the fact that the institution was working with a new and immature scientific medium – photography – but also that it operated inside an immature scientific discipline. The race scientific community had no joint theories and methods to work with, and did not know how to affiliate with other disciplines – such as anthropology, focusing on environmental factors, or medicine, focusing on bodily aspects. But the lack of methodological consistency was not just a shortcoming; it could also be used to bias the material in a way that served the ideas of eugenics.     

White gloves,feminist fists: race,nation and the feeling of ‘vintage’ in femme movements

This article raises the question of how the cultural politics of race and nation manifest within contemporary queer femme movements, performances and aesthetic practices. Focussing on the feeling of ‘vintage’, I specifically examine symbols, icons and aesthetics used in projects to queer femininity that invoke ‘the 1950s’. Grounded in femme-inist multi-sited ethnographic research in a movement to which I also belong, I draw on interviews and participant observation in queer subcultural spaces and analyse two examples of ‘vintage’ iconography within contemporary femme organizing where ‘vintage’ is a form of archival activism that also relates to a broader cultural imaginary of racialized femininity. Then I turn to an example of queer performance where ‘vintage’ is used as a critique of imperialism and whiteness. In closing, I discuss how the feeling of ‘vintage’ relates to whiteness and to a form of imperialist nostalgia.     

The co-creation (of) culture? The case of Umeå, European Capital of Culture 2014

Culture is often promoted as crucial in efforts to achieve economic growth and social cohesion. In recent debates, greater attention has been directed at the importance of culture in creating democratic and just cities. Drawing on theories concerning participation, we study the processes of citizen participation in the creation of culture in relation to the European Capital of Culture in Umeå in Northern Sweden. The city has been praised for its focus on participation and the ‘co-creation’ of culture. We scrutinize the idea of co-creation, how it is filled with meaning by different actors, the way it is operationalized by city officials and cultural actors/practitioners and the possibilities for public participation and the power relationships at play in the city. We conclude that culture tends to be depoliticized and turned into an arena available for all on supposedly equal terms and ignores the very unequal terms on which different actors participate. It ignores how power relations affect and construct who gets to speak and be heard; that there are conflicting meanings of culture and co-creation and how power influences whose definition of culture is accepted.