Project information
Project manager at Linnaeus University
Jesper Johansson
Other project members
Malin Thor Tureby, Linköping University, Sweden (project manager)
Participating organizations
Linnaeus University; Linköping University, Sweden
Financier
Vetenskapsrådet (the Swedish Research Council)
Timetable
1 Jan 2017-31 Dec 2019
Subject
Social work (Department of Social Work, Faculty of Social Sciences)
More about the project
This project investigates how memory institutions contribute to construct and dissolve the boundaries of the Swedish community by including or excluding immigrants in the construction processes of cultural heritage. The archive of the Nordic Museum's is selected as the object of study because it is a leading cultural heritage institution in Sweden.
The project examines the collecting processes and the content of three collections of narratives by and about immigrants at different times from 1970 to 2015. Working within the framework of oral history and archival science and by using the concept of intersectionality we research how the understandings of categories such as 'Swedes' and 'immigrants' and other social categorisations have shaped the different processes of collection.
Moreover, we study whether the collection processes have changed or not over time. We will also analyse collected narratives from the three collections. Thereby we will also focus on how normative social categories and positions are told by the subjects of the collected narratives. By doing so we want to catch the interplay between positioning and identification, that is, to explore people's self-understandings and thus open up for analysis of opposition to assigned positions.
The project gives new knowledge on how cultural heritage is used in the construction of collective identity formations, and on the meaning of cultural heritage activities in relation to globalisation and migration.
The project is part of the research in the Social work and migration research group.
