Through various ethnographic studies, I have investigated processes of inclusion and exclusion in relation to ideas of national belonging and limiting boundaries of Swedishness. Theoretically, I examine how whiteness is negotiated within local and global postcolonial racial legacies and how it shifts intersectionally in relation to other categories such as gender, sexuality and class.

A central part of my research deals with migration and diaspora. In my latest book White Migration: gender, whiteness and privilege in transnational migration (Palgrave, 2014), I discuss how the field of migration studies can be developed by empirically include migrants within and from “the West” and its theoretical significance in understanding how processes of racialization are linked to migration.

Currently, I am working with two research projects: one on return migration among Swedish migrant women which intends to contribute to a broader understanding of migration to Sweden and another project on a historicized analysis of the development of Swedish whiteness during the 1900s.

About me

I defended my thesis in Sociology at the University of Uppsala in 2007 and became an Associate Professor in sociology in 2011. I have been a post doc at UCGS, Umeå University and worked at Mälardalen University, Multicultural Centre and Centre for Gender Studies at Stockholm University. I have also been a visiting scholar at the Department of Linguistic Anthropology, University of Arizona, Tucson, and at the Sociology Department, University of California at Santa Barbara. Currently I am Future Research Leader/LiU Research Fellow at Linköping University in Sweden.