Malin Wieslander is a lecturer at the Department of Behavioural Sciences and Learning. Her general research focuses on social categories, norms and values in police education and occupational culture, and in policing. She held her PhD in Pedagogical Work at Karlstad University, 2014, with a thesis about diversity discourses in Swedish police educational context. The thesis, which is a monograph in Swedish, has the title “Forces in the Police Force: Discursive Conflict, Dilemmas and Resistance in Police Trainee Discourse on Diversity”.
During 2016, Wieslander has been a researcher at Gothenburg University in the program ”Policing Ethnicity in a Diversified Sweden”, financed by the Swedish Council for Working Life and Social Research. She analysed and problematized diversity work within the police and police education, and how intersecting social categories are reproduced among police trainees. During 2016 she conducted an inquiry for the National Police, concerning the possibilities to speak out in the organization.
The research interest centres on every day talk and its significance for how norms and values are constituted in institutional contexts. As such, she analyses the significance of occupational humour for re-creating and challenging occupational norms and resistance. Her latest research concerns collegial relations, whistleblowing and organisational silence within the police.
Common for Wieslander’s research is a qualitative based, empirical research in the police. She has experiences of fieldwork in educational as well as occupational settings, focus groups interviews, reflexive in-depth interviews as well as policy document analysis. The data is usually analysed in reference to discursive psychology.
Other major research interests include qualitative methods, intersectional studies, the re-production of social categories, gender studies and post-colonial research, identity politics.
