Mid Sweden University

This article investigates how migrant and refugee participants in Swedish municipal labour market programmes make sense of work and identity within the context of activation policies. While these programmes aim to promote integration and employability, they often reflect and reproduce normative ideals tied to ethnicity and gender. Drawing on qualitative interviews with participants from three municipalities, the study demonstrates how individuals navigate subject positions offered by the activation programmes and how these positions are shaped by ideals of the 'abstract worker' and normative practices of 'doing employment'. The findings reveal how municipal labour market programmes simultaneously enable and constrain participants: they open paths to employment and independence for some - particularly migrant women - but often reinforce ethnicized and gendered norms that limit participants' agency and opportunities. Participants' experiences show that employability is not a neutral concept, but one deeply embedded in cultural and institutional expectations around Swedishness, masculinity, and femininity. This study contributes to debates on the social justice implications of activation policies by highlighting how local labour market programmes both discipline and enable. The article argues that policies aimed at inclusion may, paradoxically, reproduce exclusion through the very norms they seek to enforce. Understanding how employment is shaped by culture and power relations is essential to design labour market interventions that foster real equity.

This thesis questions what the call for safety in entrepreneurial urban planning and development might entail for the openness of public space, and challenges contemporary approaches to measure unsafety. The overarching theoretical framework draws on the Foucault-inspired dispositif of safety: referring to a system of relations between discursive and non-discursive elements through which people and places can be disciplined and controlled, and access to public spaces regulated. The thesis uses a case study-inspired design that, by using the city of Sundsvall as an empirical case, aims to map out a dispositif of safety and use it to criticise entrepreneurial urban planning and development for restricting the openness of public space and enabling exclusionary practices. The aim is addressed through four papers. Paper I traces how entrepreneurial practices have been implemented in the planning and development of Sundsvall’s city centre. Papers II and III critically investigate how the concepts of safety and inclusion become intertwined with entrepreneurial values. More specifically, they explore who Sundsvall’s city centre is made safe for, and what or who poses a threat to this call. Paper IV problematises the way feelings of safety traditionally has been measured quantitatively and introduces an intersectional quantitative approach to measure and examine feelings of (un)safety. A synthesised reading of the four papers reveals the complex, often contradictory nature of public safety in entrepreneurial urban planning and development. Safety within the dispositif of safety is depoliticised and commodified, and treated as a neutral, technical or purely administrative concern rather than as a subject of political debate. Hence, although safety is closely related to inclusion, the findings demonstrate that planning and developing safe public spaces in the entrepreneurial city neither challenges nor changes the normative order of public spaces.

Kritik har riktats mot etablerade metoder för att kvantitativt mäta och kartlägga upplevelser av (o)trygghet, där trygghet ofta definieras som avsaknad av brott. Trygghet är dock mer komplext, och relaterar till individens sociala positioner, kroppsliga uttryck, erfarenheter och de maktstrukturer vi lever i. Vi ansluter oss till denna vidare förståelse av trygghet och menar att en reduktionistisk syn på trygghet som avsaknad av brott är problematisk i den svenska kontexten, där trygghetsmätningar ofta informerar kommuners arbete med att förbättra trygghet i offentliga rum. Mot denna bakgrund syftar denna studie till att introducera en intersektionellt grundad explorativ kvantitativ analys av trygghet och ge ett empiriskt exempel på resultaten av en sådan analys. Exemplet bygger på Brottsförebyggande rådets (Brå) Nationella trygghetsundersökning (NTU) från 2019. Studiens resultat illustrerar det komplexa samspelet mellan maktordningar och upplevelser av (o)trygghet i offentliga rum.

In this programme, we map and examine local labour market programmes (LLMPs) at the municipal level in Sweden. This includes their institutional structure and organisation, as well as the experiences of participants in the programmes, using a longitudinal approach with the aim to improve LLMPs. The long-term goal is to increasing the inclusion of LLMP participants in working life. To answer the programme’s questions, data will be collected and analysed within the four work packages. In each work package, a mixed-method approach is applied with a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods. The programme is informed by three overarching general theoretical approached, tying together institutional ethnography, intersectional studies of structural inequalities on different levels, and the role of emotions in everyday work. At the organisational level (WP 1), we will investigate the circumstances under which LLMPs are performed and negotiated by those involved. Here, the internal organisation, activities and methods are the focus. This approach will result in knowledge about the characteristics of these organisations and the factors promoting the inclusion of underrepresented groups in working life. By examining the activities in LLMPs (WP 2), we will be able to determine how their institutional structure differs between regions in Sweden, how the different municipalities work with labour market policy, how they translate national policy into the local context, how they organise their work and which initiatives they choose to adopt. By examining the individual experiences of those who are directly affected by such incentives (WP 3), knowledge and understanding will be obtained of the connections between experiences and labour market policies. This will give important insights into the functioning of local programmes and of the opportunities to create entry into the labour market. Furthermore, in WP4 we will develop and test an effect evaluation of work methods used in LLMPs and their effect on clients’ progress over time.

This chapter is a critical celebration of an academic and activist group that we call Ånge. Using memory work, we discuss our experiences of regularly meeting in Ånge, a small town located in rural northern inland Sweden. Drawing on theories of centre and periphery, safe space, slow scholarship, and feminist care, we find that safe spaces are crucial for resisting patriarchal and neoliberal demands of academia. Through Ånge we have found a more radical way of doing research. Overturning the neoliberal order within the university requires a release of unicorns—symbolising the creation of collaborative care and resistance.

Introduction: This paper focuses on how a (assumed) entrepreneurial shift in urban planning and development has been implemented in a medium-sized city in northern Sweden, and how sustainability-as in sustainable urban development-can be argued to be a second shift in urban planning and development or represents an alternative form of neoliberal governance. Method: To explore how and when urban entrepreneurialism and sustainability are interlinked, as well as when they are not, urban policy documents from 1988, 2007 and 2016 focusing on the development of Sundsvall city center has been examined using thematic content analysis. Results: The result shows that the 1988 document is significantly influenced by social democratic welfare politics, with prioritizing social bonds and the Sundsvall resident being the focus, while the newer documents emphasize visitors, potential residents and architectural design to promote the flow of people, money and goods. In this sustainability is put forward as a mobilizing metaphor, and serves to conceal the potential paradoxes of the priorities of the strategy, which involve the contradictions between economic, environmental and social values. Discussion: Consequently, it is possible to claim that sustainability, as a concept, has acquired a new function: to disguise the less palatable consequences of growth by evoking sustainability as a guarantee of the strategy's quality.