Paula Mählck comes from Stockholm University, where she is a senior lecturer in pedagogy.Paula Mählck.
Paula has just returned after three years in East Africa where she was affiliated with the African Women's Studies Center, University of Nairobi, Kenya. Previously, she was also a Post doc at the African Gender Institute (AGI) University of Cape Town, South Africa.
Tell more about your research and teaching orientation!
The focus of my research has been on studying discrimination in academia and how race, ethnicity, gender and postcolonial relations construct conditions for research and education.
It concerns everything from research assistance, researcher mobility and assessment of academic qualifications for appointments. My projects have been national or international and comparative. My dissertation, Mapping Gender in Academic Workplaces. Ways of reproducing gender inequality within the discourse of equality (Umeå, 2003), was an contribution to the debate on gender equality in academia from a social studies of science perspective. I have mainly taught Gender studies, Sociology and postcolonial theory.
What will be your focus during your time at REMESO?
Here I will mainly work with my project “Madam and the maid. A narrative study of domestic work and postcolonial racism in Dar es Salaam", financed by the Swedish Research Council. It concerns the relationship between women who have different migration paths, class- and postcolonial position, and who perform unpaid and paid household and care work in so-called expatriate homes in Dar es Salaam. The project has also a historical focus and will analyze similarities and differences between contemporary work and everyday learning and the like during the colonial era. This is how the project also contributes to the debate on modern slavery.
How come you chose to work at REMESO with this?
I have long followed the research at REMESO and I applied here because it is a central node for research on migration and ethnicity in Sweden. My project is related in several ways to issues of race, ethnicity and migration in relation to education and domestic and care work and I look forward to learning more about the research and educational mission at the department as a whole.
