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Kapitel i rapport, This publication has been produced within the framework of the European Project “Global so- cial work and human mobility: comparative studies on local government and good social work practices in the Euro-Mediterranean region (2022-2025)” (Project ID: 872209) Work Package 3: Training: Building the Global-ANSWER collaborative action research.

This article contributes to scholarly discussions about sanctuary enactments. We analyse transversal sanctuary enactments, i.e. when migrants in search of protection are provided with basic welfare and an opportunity to remain, in contestation of the state's migration politics. The study draws on empirical data collected through a transdisciplinary research initiative in Sweden, the Asylum Commission. The analysis is based on interviews with 90 people, asylum seekers and people voluntarily or professionally involved in support work. The article explores bottom-up transversal processes paralleled and intertwined with a growing institutional disenchantment. By analysing practices and challenges in sanctuary enactments and their implications for individuals and institutions, we argue that such disenchantment may have broader societal implications in terms of fundamental changes in relationships between public institutions and civil society actors. Furthermore, our study points to the importance of seeing beyond the city as sites for sanctuary enactments and acknowledging sanctuary enactments initiated in Sweden's rural areas.

Denna antologi är ett arbete som varenda människa med något intresse för mänsklighet och samhällsfrågor måste läsa och reflektera över. De samlade berättelserna, undersökningarna och rapporterna som presenteras i antologin utgör en tvärvetenskaplig samtidsanalys över det svenska myndighetssystemet och dess inverkan på människoöden, kanske för generationer framåt.

Kapitlet handlar om socialt arbete och dess betydelse i relation till de mänskliga konsekvenserna av den skärpta migrationspolitiken som inleddes hösten 2015 och som innebar att i hög grad osäkra liv gjordes extremt osäkra. Vi använder oss av etnografiska nedslag i två forskningsprojekt om hopp och motstånd i asylprocessen där vi följt ett antal unga i asylprocessen över tid.

Based on young Afghans' experiences of multiple rejections in Sweden, this paper will discuss “administrative violence” as a form a neo-colonial power performance to exclude unwanted and “othered” people from the Swedish welfare state. The paper will address experiences of different acts of administrative violence, from asylum rejections and loss of residential care accommodation to rejections on applications for economic support performed by the social services. For some project participants, having escaped from violence and deaths by weapons in the country they once left, the signature of a Swedish administrator’s pen becomes just as violent and life-threatening as the situation they left behind. For Swedish society, the administrative signatures become a means to neutralise and legitimise politics of exclusion and turn racist discourses into bureaucratic practice. This paper draws on two ethnographic research projects in asylum reception contexts. One project focuses on the social dimensions of hope among people who wait to have their cases assessed while the other addresses the significance of local civil networks for coping with and resisting ongoing politics of exclusion. Twenty youngsters, initially having sought asylum in Sweden, have been followed through participant observations and recurrent interviews for more than two years. While some of them remain in Sweden, others have opted for re-escaping to the migrant ‘quarantines’ of Europe, joining a growing ‘deportspora’ of people having been made ‘deportable’ through signatures and pen strokes.

The point of departure for this paper is the opportunities and challenges experienced in the work of the Swedish Asylum Commission – Commission for review of legislation, law enforcement and legal security for people who applied for asylum in Sweden during the period 2015-17. The Asylum Commission was formed in the spring of 2019, by researchers and people with extensive knowledge about asylum in Sweden (e.g. people who have experiences as asylum seekers, social workers, teachers, and members of NGO’s and other networks in the civil society). The aim of the commission is to initiate critical enquiries of changes in the Swedish asylum process, based on asylum seekers’ own lived experiences and perspectives. The background to the Commission are changes in Sweden’s migration management in recent years and recurring testimonies in various settings depicting a very difficult situation for children, adolescents, and adult asylum seekers. These testimonies concern unpredictable and degrading decision-making processes, increasing homelessness, mental illness, broken families and more violent deportations to countries affected by armed conflict. The Asylum Commission aims to initiate academic and activist work departing from asylum seekers’ own perspectives and lived experiences. The work, inspired by participatory action research (lisahunter et al. 2013), is carried out in close collaboration between asylum seekers, researchers, professionals. (e.g. social workers, teachers), the voluntary sector and civil society actors (e.g. god man, Vi står inte ut, Ensamkommandes förbund). Thus, one important ambition with the work is to rely upon the expert knowledge of all participants in the commission and working within a collective for shared understandings, analysis and action., Ej belagd 210205, Asylkommissionen

Asylkommissionen/Formas, Generating hope and dealing with uncertainty: An ethnographic study of the social dimensions of hope in the Swedish asylum-seeking context, VR, Social resistance and civil repair following forced migration – an ethnographic study of suffering and resistance among Swedish volunteers and young migrants

This article examines experiences of 'social death', and the strategy of 're-escaping', following sharpened Swedish asylum laws and practice. The arguments stem from ethnographic research with people who arrived in Sweden as 'unaccompanied minors' between 2014 and 2016. The participants have experienced step-by-step rejection processes from both the Migration Agency and social services, resulting in homelessness, pennilessness and a dependency on civil society goodwill. Some research participants remain in Sweden while others have re-escaped searching for asylum elsewhere in Europe. It is argued that the treatment from the Swedish Migration Agency and the social services has contributed to situating these young asylum-seekers in a position of 'social death', a condition lacking hope and opportunities for agency where they are not treated as fully human or grievable. The aim is to analyse their experiences of social and legal ostracism in Sweden and the act of 're-escaping' to other countries as a strategy not only to gain asylum, but also belongingness, self-control and dignity. While such handling of oppression may boost dignity and self-control, it may also lead to prolonged insecurity where individuals risk becoming permanent refugees stuck in precariousness within European borders.

Brev till Justitiedepartementet

Ej belagd 20210512

The right to a fair trial is a well-knownright in a state governed by the rule of law. Thisarticle delves into the subject of problematic interpretationsand addresses the right to a competentinterpreter as part of the right to a fair trial. It derivesfrom a socio-legal research project in Swedennamed “Negotiations in court and equality beforethe law: an ethnographic approach to negotiations ofculture, gender and age during trials related to streetcrime.” Our conclusion is that entering a Swedishdistrict court today, as a non-Swedish speaker, thereis an obvious risk that you will not be able to narrateyour version of whatever brought you to courtin the first place, nor can you be sure that courtrepresentative narratives are mediated to you in asatisfactory version., Även finansierat av Concurrences LNUC.Ej belagd 20190925

Ej belagd 20190503

Förhandlingar i rätten

RJ-projektet "Förhandlingar i rätten", RJP12-0405:1, Concurrence: Intersectional challenges during courtroom observations; acknowledging concurrent and/or conflicting voices while conducting ethnographic research

I denna artikel belyses socialtjänstens ansvar för att tillhandahålla skydd och trygghet vid akuta situationer för barn i papperslöshet. Ekonomisk utsatthet och situationer när barnen misstänks fara illa undersöks och diskuteras med utgångspunkt i relevanta rättsliga bestämmelser. Resultaten, baserade på två enkätstudier, en nationell och en lokal studie, samt uppföljande intervjuer med socialsekreterare och representanter från idéburen sektor visar att skyddet för barn i papperslöshet brister vid socialtjänstens handläggning och beslutsfattande. Socialtjänsten har att verka som ett yttersta skyddsnät mot nöd vid uppkomna akutsituationer av ekonomisk karaktär, men kanske viktigare, när det finns behov av skydd för barn som utsätts för olika former av övergrepp i sin närmiljö. Barnkonventionens bestämmelser om barnets bästa och barns lika rättigheter och värde samt mera uttryckliga stadganden om rätt till social trygghet och skydd mot övergrepp omfattar alla barn, oavsett legal status. Trots det visar denna studie hur myndigheter, men även andra verksamheter, inte sällan hanterar papperslösa barn som en andra klassens människor, vilka behandlas sämre och erhåller ett lägre skydd mot missförhållanden., RJ-projektet "Förhandlingar i rätten", RJP12-0405:1

Regeringen föreslår nio åtgärder för att hitta och utvisa papperslösa. Det kommer att slå hårt och främst gå ut över redan svaga och jagade människor. Vi uppmanar därför regeringen att ta tillbaka åtgärderna, skriver 43 forskare.

This paper deals with methodological challenges presented while carrying out observations during an ethnographically inspired research project into notions and ideas about culture, ethnicity, gender and age within a Swedish courtroom context. Approximately 20 court cases on “street related crime” and “domestic violence” have been studied by means of observations in court, interviews with defendants and readings of court documents. Two analytical courses of action have emerged while applying postcolonial perspectives on preliminary findings; one being to address the court as an arena for multiple, concurring and conflicting voices and the other as a discursive arena for epistemological colonialism, or as contemporary, inherited expression of a Nordic (discursive) colonialism. However, the intersectional approach of trying to account for several concurrent voices proposes some interesting methodological challenges, which is the focus of this paper. One such challenge is related to scope and range of social categories present in the court context, placing great demands on the researcher’s ability to “keep track” of multiple perspectives/voices simultaneously. The paper will address this issue by exploring questions concerned with the amount of time and material needed to reach empirical saturation, as well as potential methods facilitating the acknowledgement and observation of a multi-perspective presence. Another challenge when doing research in a setting characterized by diversity related to the (un)awareness of the researcher’s situated knowledge and position(s) within specific discursive homes. The paper will discuss methodological possibilities as well as difficulties when it comes to accounting for the agency of people found to be othered in courtroom discourse and interaction. The importance of interviews to verify or contest researcher findings will be addressed, in addition to the importance of empathy and dangers of “othering” when approaching a diverse se, Concurrences: Intersectional challenges during courtroom observations; acknowledging concurrent and/or conflicting voices while conducting ethnographic research, RJ-projektet "Förhandlingar i rätten", RJP12-0405:1

By far, most of the research into processes of discrimination and ethnification in Sweden considers urban settings. This article focuses on how the regional press in a rural area of south-east Sweden represents immigrants in a residential area in the outskirts of the Kalmar township. It points at the urgent need for researchers and decision-makers to take into account both subtle and palpable stigmatizing processes that meet immigrants who reside the countryside. An analysis of two local newspapers shows a continuous construction of `otherness' through pictures and texts, in which the identities of minority ethnic groups are stereotyped and subverted. One of the most persistent themes in this work of representation is the brutalization of the masculinity of `others', stressed even further by a `traditionalization' and feminization of a weak, caring female other. Both these gendered images serve a higher purpose, that of maintaining a positive image of a taken-for-granted Swedishness.

The Norrliden project. Genderisation and ethnification of a low status residential area in the local press Media often contributes to segregation by constructing low status residential areas as “different” from what is “normal” and “Swedish”. Research into media representations of these residential areas often focuses big city contexts. Furthermore, research tends to be preoccupied with the construction of ethnic differences, paying little attention to the relationship between construction processes of gender and ethnicity. This article is a critical analysis of how the local daily newspapers in a medium sized town, Kalmar, construct stereotypes of immigrants and gendered identities in the low status residential area Norrliden. Two newspapers were studied in search for articles related to the area, published during the year 2005. Despite the newspapers’ claim that they want to contribute to a more nuanced and less stereotyped image of the residential area the consequences of their work seem to be the opposite. The representation sof the area are coded with stereotypes suggesting that the area is unsafe and dangerous and that the people who live there are motivated by affect and emotions rather than by successful socialisation. These representations are also characterised by notions of ethnicity and gender, as well as class. Norrliden is described as an area in need of change and improvement, as an unfinished project dependent upon aid from the outside. A reading of the 2005 media representations of Norrliden exposes an example of “symbolic violence” in that texts and photographs repeatedly degrade the area and its inhabitants., Sociologisk Forsknings digitala arkiv