Catrin Lundström

I am Associate professor in Ethnicity and Migration at REMESO.

I defended my thesis in sociology at the University of Uppsala in 2007 and became Associate Professor of Sociology in 2011. I have worked as a teacher and researcher at Mälardalen University, Stockholm University, Lund University, Södertörn University and Multicultural Centre, primarily within the fields of sociology and gender studies.

I have been a visiting researcher at the Department of Anthropology at University of Arizona, Tucson (2005) and at the Department of Sociology, at University of California, Santa Barbara (2007-2008), and a post doc at Umeå Centre for Gender Studies (UCGS), at Umeå University (2009-2011), as well as Future Research Leader at Linköping University in Sweden (2013-2019).

Since 2020 I am Director of Doctoral Studies at the Department of Culture and Society, Campus Norrköping.

Research

My research spans over the fields of sociology, migration studies, critical race and whiteness studies and gender studies. I approach whiteness as a global postcolonial and transnational construct, by which whiteness and white identities and positions shift in relation to other categories such as gender, sexuality and class. In my dissertation, examined the notion of Swedishness and national identity among young Latinas in Sweden. In a later project, I investigated national identity among expatriate and returning Swedish migrant women.

From ethnographic studies with Swedish migrant women in the US, Singapore and Spain I published the book White Migration: gender, whiteness and privilege in transnational migration (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, Swedish ed. 2017) in which I discuss how the field of migration studies can be developed by empirically including migrants within and from “the West” in the theoretical analysis of different migration processes. In 2003 I was rewarded a research grant from the Swedish research council for the project “Re-integrating Swedishness: the politics of belonging among returning Swedish migrant women”.