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Catrin Lundström

Senior Lecturer

My research focuses on inequality and privilege from intersectional perspectives. Of particular interest is how race and whiteness is negotiated within different contexts and how ideas of whiteness are linked to the idea of being Swedish.

Perspectives on Swedish whiteness

I am interested in the social and cultural constructions of whiteness and its relationship to Swedishness, in Sweden and abroad. 

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.

Publications
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2019

2018

2017

News
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Housewife

Wives who accompany husbands working abroad

Prof. Lundström has investigated the situation of women who return home after living abroad. These migrants are disadvantaged by two factors: the global economy and the Swedish welfare system. This is particularly clear in the matter of pensions.
Spansk badstrand

A different kind of migrant

Migrants are not necessarily people from poor countries who take any low-paid  job they can. There is another, less discussed kind of migrant: white, well-off Europeans. They are now being studied in a newly released book.

Current research
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Nordic Whiteness

Catrin Lundström, REMESO, has edited a special issue of Scandinavian Studies on Nordic Whiteness
Spansk badstrand

A different kind of migrant

Migrants are not necessarily people from poor countries who take any low-paid  job they can. There is another, less discussed kind of migrant: white, well-off Europeans. They are now being studied in a newly released book.
Swedishness

White melancholy

A quarter of all Swedish citizens are of foreign origin. In spite of this, both xenophobes and anti-racists associate Swedishness with whiteness and with something good. 

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