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In Sweden, integration is a pressing issue particularly following the large influx of immigrants in 2015. Swedish municipalities play an important role in civic integration, with responsibility for newly arrived immigrants receiving a basic understanding of Swedish society, their rights and obligations. We analyse data from 204 applications granted funding 2016/2017 for projects improving the integration of refugees into society by co-operation between municipalities and other actors. Using thematic analysis, we identify two broad themes. One concerning the 'what' of integration – the Swedish values, norms and behaviours that immigrants are expected to learn in order to become 'good' Swedish citizens, and the other concerning the means or the 'how' of integration. However, although these projects are well-meaning, they may have normalizing and disciplining effects whereby the immigrant is constructed as subordinate, as the Other. Swedish gender-equality is heavily emphasized and we see how, in relation to this, the immigrant is constructed as unmodern, bound by tradition and unequal. Particularly immigrant women are produced as passive objects rather than active subjects, in need of special women's activities and lacking as parents in comparison with the Swedish ideal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many persons with dementia live at home with support from home care services. Despite this, research is scarce concerning how risks in daily life among persons with dementia are perceived and handled by home care staff. This study aimed to explore how home care staff identify risks in the everyday lives of persons with dementia, and to inquire into how they reasoned about their own actions related to those risks. A qualitative approach was applied for the study. Both individual interviews and focus groups were conducted with home care staff (n = 23). Data was analysed using a constant comparative method. Identifying, reasoning and acting upon risks in the everyday lives of persons with dementia were related to several dilemmas for the home care staff. These dilemmas are described and elaborated on in three categories: 1) Strategies for tracking risks, 2) Dilemmas concerning where to draw the line and deciding when to act, and 3) Dilemmas when acting on risks. The study provides new knowledge about the dilemmas that staff in home care services may face and how they reason about managing risks in the homes of persons with dementia. The study shows that the staff had to weigh risk and safety against the autonomy of persons with dementia. Based on these findings, we want to highlight the importance of competence among home care staff and the organizational conditions that must exist in order to manage the challenges of risky situations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Sweden, 'safety walks' are a well-established planning practice for improving safety. They involve citizens and local authorities evaluating public spaces in terms of safety. Building on observations, interviews and policy materials, this paper examines safety walks from a governmentality perspective. Our analysis shows that, through the governing techniques employed in the walks, safety problems are rendered technical, auditable and governable, while becoming disconnected from the social and political. Furthermore, the participatory rationale of the walks serves to produce self-governing communities, who are responsible for managing their own safety, while risking the reinforcement of boundaries of inclusion and exclusion within the imagined 'safe community'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With a spatial analytical framework, we study Take Back the Night demonstrations as a way of mobilizing for safety and claiming the right to the city. The marches are a symbolic display of women's distress about living in fear of violence. It is a critique of society's inability to handle the problem of prevailing gendered power relations and the unequal access to city spaces that stem from these. The aim of this paper is to examine feminist struggles to challenge gendered spatial power relations, focusing on Take Back the Night mobilization. Hence, this qualitative study focuses Take Back the Night demonstrations as a phenomenon and as an actual spatial strategy, by analysing representations regarding Take Back the Night in Sweden at large, and in Malmö, Sweden's third largest city, in particular. We discuss feminist efforts to create temporary safe spaces in terms of the demonstrations' emancipatory potential and how these spatial claims provoke resistance. The demonstrations and the reactions they create reveal existing inequalities and power structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two main explanations of tactical choice among social movements are repertoires of contention and characteristics of collective actors. Feminist theorizing suggests another dimension of tactical choice: the role of gender beliefs. This paper examines the relationship between these three explanations by drawing on a qualitative study that explored how activist groups in Sweden selected the 'Take Back the Night' (TBTN) march as a tactic. Begun in the 1970s, the TBTN march has been performed around the world, usually on central city streets at nighttime, to protest gender violence in spaces presumed to be gender neutral and safe for women. Our findings resulted in three themes that captured how activist groups selected it as a tactic: a routine performance in publicly visible urban settings, alignment with preferred forms of feminist organizing, and refusal of normalized fear and violence in the seemingly safe city. Each theme corresponded to one of the three explanations and shed light on a different dimension of tactical choice. We propose three heuristic tools for identifying these dimensions: making claims, enacting claims and reclaiming spaces. The different dimensions relate to distinct conceptions of power: centralized authority, movement agency and gender power relations respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on imaginaries of the ideal city is an important method to illustrate the power of ideas, imagination, representations and even visions, and how these dimensions influence the way in which cities are organized and lived. In this article, we argue that one current and important city imaginary in a Swedish context is the gender-equal city. In this imaginary, the gender-equal city becomes a symbol for the open, tolerant, bustling, safe city, a city aiming to attract the middle and creative classes. However, at the same time, the imaginary of the ideal, gender-equal city is highly ambiguous. This ambiguity will be discussed throughout the article. Based on present planning projects in the city of Umeå in Sweden, we will discuss how the imaginary of the gender-equal city is presented, filled with meaning and used in place marketing, with the overall ambition of discussing the possibilities and pitfalls of what we call the gender-equality planning strategy. The aim of the article is to study how the city of Umeå is acting to create a gender-equal city and what kind of imaginaries these practices build on. The material consists primarily of a case study focusing on projects that aim to create an equal city, and also includes analyses of policy documents and media reports. This study illustrates how imaginaries are produced through local projects and different imaginaries provide different spaces for politicizing gendered power relations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study analyses the responses and reactions among women and men in Umeå during the period of threat from a serial rapist, the so-called Haga Man. This article discusses how the increased threat in public space influenced constructions of male and female bodies in space during a period of changing public crime discourses. The article illustrates the importance of context and demonstrates the temporality of how bodies are perceived in space. Public descriptions of the Haga Man focused on characteristics of the perpetrator's body and “normal Swedish appearance”, which constructed an image of the dangerous white body. White male respondents positioned themselves in relation to these descriptions, and were partly challenged with respect to new perceptions and meanings associated with “normality”. In descriptions of the Haga Man's victims, women were presented as vulnerable, but in contrast to many other cases of serial rape there was no immediate focus on their bodies in terms of respectability. A shift of emphasis took place, towards a focus on bodies that frighten, rather than those that are afraid. The findings contribute to a discussion of how gendered power relations can be understood through shifting representations of bodies in space. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Several cases of single repeat offenders in urban space have raised public concern in Sweden during recent decades. Few studies have been conducted on the consequences of the ‘hostage situations’ that emerge when one individual offender causes fear and affects a large group of people in a specific place. The concern of this article is to examine consequences of the Haga Man phenomenon: the case of a serial rapist operating between 1998 and 2006 in Umeå, a medium-sized Swedish city. The article focuses on the construction of white masculinities among male respondents in Umeå during the time of the attacks. I examine how men positioned themselves in relation to the public image of the offender as a ‘normal Swede’ and how they related to women's increasing fear of violence in urban space. Three prominent constructions of masculinity emerged from the research data: thedangerous stranger, thesuspectand theprotector. These three constructions of masculinity were not clear-cut and did not ‘belong’ to specific men – several of the interviewees articulated various forms of masculinities but stressed them in different ways depending on, for instance, age and/or ethnicity/race. I conclude that men largely positioned themselves as protectors as a strategy to distance themselves from the perpetrator (the image of the ‘normal Swedish man’ performing the rapes) and to ensure that they would not be perceived as suspects. However, men largely perceived that women's increased fear of crime was ‘one man's fault’ and broader issues about gendered power relations in space were not raised. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Geographers may benefit from a narrative approach as it permits insights into both meanings and how stories are permitted and controlled by social conditions. The aim of this article is to discuss methodological aspects of studying fear as a restriction on mobility and use of public space. We have used examples from a study on fear of violence in the city of Umeå, Sweden at the time of threats from a serial rapist, the Haga Man. We employed Labov's model to analyse female and male narratives about fear. Women from all backgrounds reproduced a shared story of experiences of fear. Male stories were fragmented and diverse, especially in terms of ethnicity. The Haga Man was described in the media as a man of 'normal Swedish appearance', which put a focus on Swedish hegemonic masculinity and 'normality' rather than on commonly reproduced fear of the racialized other. Labov's model was useful in clarifying how narratives differed in their structural components and completeness, but limited in terms of how to interpret the evaluative component: the model needs to be combined with theory in order to understand relations to changing political, institutional and media discourses on crime and fear in public space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]