White Working Class Communities in Stockholm

This report is part of a six-city research series, Europe's White Working Class Communities, which examines the realities of people from majority populations in Aarhus, Amsterdam, Berlin, Lyon, Manchester, and Stockholm.White Working Class Communities in Stockholm explores the experiences and concerns of majority Swedes in Greater Stockholm, more specifically in the municipality of Southern Botkyrka. Botkyrka is the fifth-largest municipality in Greater Stockholm, with a history of migration stretching back to at least the 1960s. It is today the first municipality in Sweden where the majority population is no longer the majority locally, but the biggest demographic segment among many minorities.A working class and lower-middle class municipality, Botkyrka is divided into the North—traditionally a home to immigrant workers where today 65 percent of residents have a foreign background—and Southern Botkyrka, a relatively homogenous neighborhood where only 25 percent of residents have a foreign background. While Northern Botkyrka is relatively poor, Southern Botkyrka is a mix of poor and high-income residents. Though few Swedes from the majority population feel marginalized, there are signs that this is changing, with inequality on the rise and labor market participation decreasing for those with less education. Following on from work by the Open Society Foundations' At Home in Europe project on Muslim and Somali communities in Western Europe, this research focuses on white working class communities in seven areas of local policy—employment, education, health, housing, political participation, policing, and the media—as well as broader themes of belonging and identity. It is one of a series providing ground-breaking research on the experiences of a section of the population whose lives are often caricatured and whose voices are rarely heard in debates on integration, social cohesion, and social inclusion. Through a comparative lens, the project seeks to highlight parallels and differences in policies, practices, and experiences across the European cities

The orphaned nation : Korea imagined as an overseas adopted child in Clon’s Abandoned Child and Park Kwang-su’s Berlin Report

International adoption from Korea constitutes the background to this study. The forced migration of Korean children has by now continued for over half a century, resulting in a diaspora of more than 150,000 adopted Koreans dispersed among 15 main host countries on the continents of Europe, North America and Oceania. Both the demographic scope, the time span and the geographic spread are absolutely unique in a comparative historical child migratory perspective, and still over 2,000 children leave Korea annually. This massive intercontinental displacement and dispersal of Korean children was, for many years, silently taking place in the shadow of Korea’s transformation from a war-torn and poverty-stricken country to a formidable economic success story in the postcolonial world. Even if the subject of international adoption and adopted Koreans turned up now and then in the political debate throughout the years, it was not until the end of the 1980s that a comprehensive discussion started. Ever since, the adoption issue ibyang munjê) has been haunting Korea as a recurrent subject in Korean media and popular culture. This paper is a reading of the pop group Clon’s song Abandoned Child from 1999 and the world-famous Korean director Park Kwang-su’s film Berlin Report from 1991 where adopted Koreans are seen as symbols of a divided and dispersed nation. With the background of Korean nationalism with its notion of the nation as family and its strong emphasis on homogeneity and continuity, the point of departure is the very existence of the adopted Koreans as a delicate threat to nationalist ideology, causing anxieties of disrupting a supposedly fixed and unified national identity, and calling into question what it means to be Korean and who belongs to the Korean nation. The reading is grounded on the fact that the subject of separated families is considered to be one of the most important aspects of the Korean reunification discourse, and has become a powerful metaphor of the Korean nation itself. Abandoned Child is the most typical of Korean adoption songs in representing the fate of Korea’s 150,000 lost children, and the adoptee of the song is easily transformed into a powerful symbol of one of Korea’s numerous separated families. In Berlin Report, the divided and dispersed Korean nation is represented by two separated adopted Koreans longing and searching for each other as the adoption issue is set upon the reunification issue, and their individual traumas become the national trauma of all Koreans

Adoption ur ett koreanskt och ett svenskt perspektiv

Sverige och Korea har länge varit aktörer på det internationella adoptionsfältet vilket innebär att adoption idag tillhör vardagen i dessa länder. Detta har givit avtryck i de båda ländernas barn- och ungdomslitteratur i form av utvecklingen av en adoptionsgenre. I denna artikel jämförs ett antal koreanska och svenska barn- och ungdomsböcker med syftet att studera hur framställningar och föreställningar om internationell adoption och adoptivkoreaner kommer till uttryck i de olika länderna

Den svenska gulinghumorn vid ett vägskäl? : svenska rasstereotyper av asiater efter Svenska nyheter-affären 2018

Bilder av ras i svensk visuell kultur är en tvärvetenskaplig antologi om hur representationer av ras etablerats, omformulerats och kritiserats i Sverige under tvåhundra år. Författarna är forskare i genusvetenskap, historia, konstvetenskap, litteraturvetenskap, medievetenskap, musei- och biblioteksvetenskap samt språkvetenskap, och nedslag görs i material från flera tidsepoker: bokillustrationer från 1800-talet, reklamaffischer och rasbiologiska fotografier från 1900-talets första hälft, tv- och filmkultur samt skämtbilder från 2000-talet.Utan att ge en heltäckande bild av problematiken närmar sig författarna materialet med en bred uppsättning angreppssätt och perspektiv; det visuella materialet diskuteras utifrån begrepp som dekolonialitet, representation, stereotyp, makt, genus, vithet och bildbruk

Adopted Koreans and the development of identity in the "third space"

Since 1953, 150,000 Korean children have been adopted to 15 main host countries in the West. They constitute the largest international adoptee group worldwide. An adopted Korean movement has existed on an international level since the 1990s and is today trying to formulate an identity and community of its own beyond Western adoption ideology and Korean nationalism. Tobias Hübinette outlines the history of international adoption from Korea, Western and Korean perspectives on international adoption and adopted Koreans, and the emergence of an adopted Korean identity transcending race, citizenship, culture, religion and language in what he terms as the "third space"

Comforting an orphaned nation : Representations of international adoption and adopted Koreans in Korean popular culture

This is a study of popular cultural representations of international adoption and adopted Koreans in Western countries. The study is carried out from a postcolonial perspective and uses a cultural studies reading of four feature films and four popular songs as primary sources. The aim is to examine how nationalism is articulated in various ways in light of the colonial experiences in modern Korean history and recent postcolonial developments within contemporary Korean society. The principal question addressed is: What are the implications for a nation depicting itself as one extended family and which has sent away so many of its own children, and what are the reactions from a culture emphasising homogeneity when encountering and dealing with the adopted Koreans? After an introductory chapter, Chapter 2 gives the history of international adoption from Korea, and Chapter 3 is an account of the development of the adoption issue in the political discussion. Chapters 4, 5, 6 and 7 analyse the cinematic and lyrical representations of adopted Koreans in four feature films and popular songs respectively. Chapter 4 considers the gendering of the colonised nation and the maternalisation of roots, drawing on theories of nationalism as a gendered discourse. Chapter 5 examines the issue of hybridity and the relationship between Koreanness and Whiteness, which are related to the notions of third space, mimicry and passing. Linked to studies of national division, reunification and family separation, Chapter 6 looks at the adopted Koreans as symbols of a fractured and fragmented nation. Chapter 7 focuses on the emergence of a global Korean community, with regards to theories of globalisation, diasporas and transnationalism. In the concluding chapter, the study argues that the Korean adoption issue can be conceptualised as an attempt at overcoming a difficult past and imagining a common future for all ethnic Koreans at a transnational level.Avhandlingen är även utgiven på Jimoondang Publishing Company (Seoul, 2006) och ingår där i Korean Studies Series No.32, isbn 8988095952. The thesis is also published at Jimoondang Publishing Company (Seoul, 2006) in Korean Studies Series No. 32, isbn 8988095952