Eva Reimers

Death and identity: graves and funerals as cultural communication

A multicultural Swedish grave quarter and three immigrant funerals are used as vantage points to elucidate how funerals and graveyards are employed as communicative symbolic actions for construction of ethnic and cultural identity. The theoretical perspective draws on ritual studies (Driver, 1991; Durkheim, 1915/1965; Myerhoff, 1984; van Gennep 1960), Goffmans (1967) notion of self-presentation, and studies of ethnicity (Barth 1971; 1994). The study focuses on situations in which ethnicity is actualised and brought to the fore as essential traits of individual or collective identity. Comparison between immigrant ritual practices and mainstream Swedish practices indicate that death rituals can be employed to enhance, subsume, or to fuse social boundaries. In the latter case, the rituals play a part in constructing new social groups. The study further elucidates how multicultural cemeteries reflect and construct a new multicultural Sweden.

Representations of an honor killing

This study uses discourse analysis to examine representations found in Swedish newspapers of the murder of a Kurdish woman perpetrated by her father. It discloses representations of a media event that reiterate intersecting norms concerning ethnicity, gender and social class, which together delineate boundaries and significant core values for a hegemonic notion of the Swedish. Notions of ethnicity, class, and gender are articulated together, forming a dichotomy between a modern, tolerant Sweden and an obsolete, conceited other. In putting forward integration as the solution to honor-motivated male violence against women, the discourse presumes and reiterates the Swedish as signified by gender equality and, because social class and ethnicity are articulated together, integration becomes synonymous with social mobility. By presenting a culturalized interpretation of the killing, the discourse conceals possible connections between the male violence perpetrated by immigrants and the more common violence perpetrated by non-immigrants.

A reasonable grief—discursive constructions of grief in a public conversation on raising the shipwrecked M/S Estonia

The paper uses a debate in Swedish newspapers about the fate of the corpses from the shipwrecked M/S Estonia as a case study, in order to demonstrate how different discourses on grief construct a normative way of mourning. The theoretical vantage point is a discursive perspective on grief where different discourses are regarded as resources and limitations for how to express and make sense of bereavement. It maintains that what are to be considered as normal or deviant are social and cultural constructions, not ontological facts. The analysis demonstrates a notion of normal grief as grief work that moves through a process from emotional reaction to rational reflection, and in which ritual practices play an important part. The study illustrates how negotiations regarding grief and mourning draw on different discourses. It also elucidates how a specific notion of grief is constructed as normal and legitimate at the same time as other manifestations of grief are made abnormal and deviant.

Primary mourners and next-of-kin – how grief practices reiterate and subvert heterosexual norms

This article discusses kinship practices in connection with death and mourning. It argues that kinship is an ambiguous and contingent concept, and that rituals done in connection with death and mourning have consequences for how people are acknowledged as bereaved. The discussion is based on data from a Swedish study of bereavement. Besides evincing the salience in death practices of a notion of kinship based on conjugal relations and blood ties, the results of analyses of participant observations in a grief group and in-depth interviews with gay widowers reveal that the dominant kinship norm both constrains and enables differing positions as primary mourners. Drawing on Judith Butler and discourse theory, the study shows that claiming a position as bereaved can entail struggles concerning acknowledgment of kinship, and that examples of denunciation simultaneously stand out as resistance and subversion. To avoid marginalizing prospective mourners, it is important to be aware of how these practices of kinship and grief work together.

Ambiguous spaces for troubled youth: home, therapeutic institution or school?

In Sweden and elsewhere, students permanently excluded from school are removed from their local environment, and sometimes their parental home, and moved to a rural residential care home. Thus ‘home’ and ‘school’ are clearly considered places where problems exist, but it is the young people themselves who are scrutinised and subjected to change. This study examined how the change of place and the performance of the alternative ‘home’ and alternative ‘school’ affected student adjustment. It also explored the significance of place in these measures and questioned how possibilities for agency and subjectivities are produced. The work comprised an ethnographic study of two residential care homes for troubled youth (aged 12–15). The results show how complex assemblages produce opportunities and limitations for care and education and how location and buildings partake in the constitution of possible subjectivities and agency. The analysis, inspired by actor-network theory, captured mobility and flow, an important aspect when studying complexity. The analytical approach used enabled the complex arrangements for disadvantaged teenagers to be studied in terms of social interactions, but also of materiality.

Discourses of education and constitutions of class: public discourses on education in Swedish PBS television

Drawing on post-structural perspectives and analysis of television programs on education, the article investigates the public educational discourse in Sweden. It shows how a dominant neoliberal educational discourse is articulated together with a discourse of equal education, where the two discourses influence and subvert each other so that neither becomes totally hegemonic. Taking as its point of departure the neoliberal emphasis on the individual, especially as it relates to school choice and to the significance of class for educational success, the analysis focuses on the constitution of classed positions. The study reveals constitutions of class in which race, place, gender, economy and agency are intertwined, such that the schools and the students are attributed both different statuses and different subject positions in terms of future economic trajectories. The conclusions drawn are that, in the public conversation about the organization and goal of compulsory education, it is important to be aware of the discursive and political contexts in which the discussions take place. It is also important to realize that class matters in the educational assemblage in the form of economic subjectivities constituted in a web of intersecting notions about differing preconditions and outcomes of education.

Homonationalism in teacher education – productions of schools as heteronormative national places

The paper interrogates how teacher education and schools are produced as places for simultaneous and intertwined norms of nationality and norms of sexuality. Drawing on data from observations at a Swedish teacher training programme, the concepts of banal nationalism, homonationalism, and precarity are used in order to discuss productions of sexual, national, and cultural subjects. The analysis indicates that homonationalism in education produces tolerable queers together with intolerant migrants. In this way Sweden is produced as a homonormative nation in opposition to nations and subjects that are considered ‘other’. The concluding section suggests using investigations of homonationalism as a tool in teacher education in order to bring about more inclusive schools.