Torun Elsrud

I am an associate professor in sociology, working as a senior lecturer in social work at the Department of Social Work. I received my PhD in 2004 from the Department of Sociology at Lund University, Sweden. I am also the director of the Master's programme in Social Work and responsible for the advanced-level and freestanding courses at the Department of Social Work.

After completing my dissertation, I have mainly devoted myself to teaching and research on various forms of inclusion and exclusion processes in society, and on people's experiences of precarious living conditions in vulnerable environments. In all my work - both teaching and research - I have a strong interest in how society's structuring conditions, such as laws, practices, norms, and cultural and social values, are transformed into lived experiences in people's lives and actions, whether these take form in everyday chores, welfare services, legal interactions, or asylum processes.

At Linnaeus University, I participate in different research environments with a focus on migration issues, such as Social Work and Migration at the Department of Social Work, and the Migration Knowledge Environment, which is an interdisciplinary collaborative setting where researchers and professionals meet. I am also engaged in the interdisciplinary LNUC Concurrences in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies, where I am a member of the cluster Borders of Justice: Migration, Equity, and the Global Postcolonial Order. I am also part of several international networks that focus on people's experiences of living under welfare restrictions and forms of 'conditional belonging' within nation-states. 

Since 2015, I have been involved in asylum advocacy in my spare time, and I serve as a legal guardian. I consider it important for researchers and teachers to be anchored and present in the environments they speak about, or for, and to regard research as an act of reciprocity.

Teaching

In addition to what is described above, my teaching involves various aspects of social work, critical social work, international social work, social psychology, cultural sociology, cultural and social meaning-making, gender, intersectionality, human rights, power relations, exclusion and inclusion processes, discrimination, racism, Eurocentrism, media representations, research ethics, ethnography and qualitative methods.

Research

My thesis, published in 2004, was based on long-term ethnographic research, including interviews, participant observation, and media representation analysis. It examined how gendered adventure narratives and myths are constructed in individual travel (backpacking) to what is often referred to as the "third world."

After the thesis, I received substantial funding for ethnographic research projects addressing topics such as:

• Negotiations of gender, age, and culture in criminal court cases

• Civil repair and resistance among young asylum seekers and solidarity networks in response to increasingly restrictive migration laws and their implementation

• The social dimensions of hope among people seeking asylum in Sweden

This latter project used the lens of hope to examine the precarity, suffering, and agency of individuals seeking asylum. Focusing on the restrictive and austerity-driven policies that shaped public responses after the sharp rise in asylum applications in 2015, the research drew on longitudinal ethnographic fieldwork within the Swedish asylum system, supplemented by material from other European contexts. It explored how asylum seekers’ conditions change over time and how these changes relate to their understandings of hope and the future. The research analysed how people experience and navigate uncertainty and instability during migration, arguing that while hope can be a source of resilience and empowerment, it can also lead to disappointment and serve as a mechanism of control in the hands of authorities. It contended that critically examining current asylum systems - and the emotional and physical harm they produce through bureaucratic forms of violence - is essential for advancing social justice and human rights.

My current research builds on the former “hope project” by focusing on secondary flight or secondary migration, following young adults who sought asylum in Sweden and later received rejections, some after spending 10 to 12 years in the Swedish asylum system, as they continue their journeys within Europe. In this project, we focus on their skills and strategies for navigating the European asylum system and new asylum conditions. This includes studying both pre-existing networks (from their countries of origin and from Sweden) and newly formed social connections in their secondary asylum contexts, in order to analyse their resourcefulness and forms of mobility capital. The project also examines solidarity movements and civil resistance that are relevant to the participants in an era of increasing societal injustices.

Commissions

Between 2019 and 2022, I was a member of the steering group of the Asylum Commission. The Commission was a collaborative forum initiated by Linköping University and FARR (The Swedish Network of Refugee Support Groups), bringing together researchers, professionals, civil society actors, and people with personal experience of seeking asylum. The Commission gathered and disseminated experiences and knowledge about the lived consequences of increasingly restrictive asylum laws and practices since 2015. The knowledge I gained in that context has been of great value for both teaching and research.