While Sweden is often viewed as a benchmark for equality within education, this book examines this assumption in greater depth. The author argues that Sweden's education system - even prior to the global spread of neoliberalism in education, meta-policies and privatization - was never particularly equal. Instead, what became apparent was a system that offered advantages to the upper social classes under a sheen of meritocracy and tolerable inequalities. Combining ethnographic and meta-ethnographic methodologies and analyses, the author examines the phenomenon of structural injustice in the Swedish education system both vertically and diachronically across a period of intensive transformation and reform. This revealing volume offers a mode of engagement that will be of value and interest to researchers and students of injustices within education, as well as policy makers and practitioners.

While Sweden is often viewed as a benchmark for equality within education, this book examines this assumption in greater depth. The author argues that Sweden's education system - even prior to the global spread of neoliberalism in education, meta-policies and privatization - was never particularly equal. Instead, what became apparent was a system that offered advantages to the upper social classes under a sheen of meritocracy and tolerable inequalities. Combining ethnographic and meta-ethnographic methodologies and analyses, the author examines the phenomenon of structural injustice in the Swedish education system both vertically and diachronically across a period of intensive transformation and reform. This revealing volume offers a mode of engagement that will be of value and interest to researchers and students of injustices within education, as well as policy makers and practitioners.

This book is the result of extensive ethnographic research that has analysed the experiences of young people from immigrant families in the Nordic cities of Copenhagen, Gothenburg and Oslo. Concepts of cultural and urban studies, sociology, education and other disciplines are used - inclusion/exclusion, territorial stigmatisation, post-colonialism and critical race theory. In many ways suburban youth are to be viewed as a class-in-itself: objectified by curricula and school practices, often vilified, downtrodden and symbolically exploited in the mainstream media and common understanding. At the same time their youth cultures evoke the other half of the Marxist class concept, the class-for-itself, in understanding youth sub-cultures as creative collective responses and resistance to a shared social situation. The hip-hop cultures of youth in multicultural areas are often postmodern in identity-play and aesthetics, but by no means de-politicised, and furthermore these youths display creativity in the social media where they challenge dominant discourses of place, identity and belonging in society. The Nordic countries are often seen as the home of egalitarianism and decent hosts of immigrants, but this book reveals a more complicated picture. Inclusion and multiculturalism may be key words in Nordic educational policy, but analyses of curricula and teaching practices show that these goals are far from realised. Curricula stress a Nordic, Western and Christian cultural heritage, school practices recommend migrants to adapt to life style of the natives and residential segregation is a central factor in mechanisms of exclusion. All major cities in the Nordic countries have immigrant-dense areas, primarily in suburbs that were originally built for the upwardly mobile native working class. This segregation means less opportunities in the educational system and it is difficult to apply for a job from 'the wrong address'. At the same time these areas have become the nests of creative and resistant youth cultures.

The teaching and practice of democracy in schools might be considered particularly important in the present era as young people are spending increasing amounts of time in education. Upper secondary schools and universities are becoming more common post-school options than conventional workplaces. Consequently, the experience of democratic participation among the young people is strongly related to education spaces. Contemporary research shows the teaching of democratic values to typically emphasise individual freedom of choice and individual rights, at the expense of collective justice, political criticism and reflection. This risks leaving young people without guidance for how to exert influence both inside school and more generally. However, we lack knowledge about the relations between the content and organisation of teaching, and young people's attitudes and actions, as they typically constitute different research fields. This book attempts to help bridge this gap. Young people's influence and democratic education explores the teaching of democracy in school. In particular it relates to young peoples' responses and initiatives to change in formal education. Based on recent ethnographic investigations of Swedish upper secondary schools the book has been developed with a special focus on gender in relation to social background. Five differently gendered and classed upper secondary programmes were studied in detail. Theoretically, the book draws in particular on Bernsteinian and feminist perspectives. The book includes close individual analyses of the researched upper secondary classes as well as common presentations of previous research, theory and main empirical results. Central joint themes that are explored concerns teaching students to influence, student initiatives to exert influence, conditions for developing valued masculinities and femininities, the reproduction of hierarchical relations, and representations and relations of theory and practice.

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In Sweden a new 'third way' welfarist society has led to the education system being exposed to market forces and successive waves of privatisation and this new commercial education can be characterised as a commodity in the market place. The schools have been transformed from being amongst the most highly regulated education systems in the world to being amongst the least regulated. Education and the commodity problem uses ethnographic research to investigate and describe what is often termed a changed root-metaphor of schooling in Sweden. Here control over the curriculum has changed from the State to the individual in a situation where students are, with help and guidance from teachers, to look for their own knowledge, and to a degree, choose their own educational content and to develop a lust for life-long learning. This change is sometimes referred to as one from a transmission curriculum to a constructivist one. But the book shows that the change is neither straightforward nor unproblematic. Education and the commodity problem is based on a series of related ethnographic investigations carried out over a long period of time. It has suggested that educational institutions are places where knowledge and learning can appear with both 'use-value' and commoditised forms, as the accumulation of educational capital. It also describes the problems that can be associated with the commodity form of education value in practice and the meaning and significance of these developments as a characterisation of globalisation processes and the de-regulation of State intervention.

The idea of democratic schooling with its emphasis on equality is seriously attacked by the marketisation of education. New policies of educational restructuring emphasise accountability and close links between school and industry, where schools and students become targets of constant evaluation and competition. This book challenges such policies and practices through analyses of their negative consequences for social justice and democracy. It explores the effects of restructuring on everyday life in schools and other educational institutions and presents analyses of how differences based on gender, social class, ethnicity, nationality and embodiment are dealt with in educational settings. The authors draw on a range of theories, including poststructuralist, postcolonial, feminist and Marxist perspectives, and the localised ethnographies are contextualised in changing educational politics. How policies are contradicted by practices is discussed in relation to the classroom, teacher education and issues of inclusion and exclusion. A critical gaze is directed at Nordic countries where restructuring processes contradict a political discourse based on equality and comprehensive education. It is the immersion in the daily life of institutions and their participants that gives ethnography a particular edge in obtaining insights into what changes and what stays the same. This book provides a looking glass into the tensions and contradictions that New Right policies have introduced in educational institutions. Actors in the field experience frustration in introducing changes and controlling the direction of those changes. It is their voices that ethnographers try to hear and disseminate.