Intercultural Studies Research

Our research explores the social dynamics of political and economic inclusion and exclusion. Racism, as an ideology and everyday practice, constitutes an integral part of this focus, as do discourses on cultural values in contemporary processes of both conflict and convivial coexistence.

We are represented in Kufo, the Research Group for Cultural Studies at Karlstad University.  

Below is a compilation of past and current research projects and collaborations we direct, along with links to various outputs, including conferences and publications.

 

RENEWABLE ENERGY, VIOLENT CONFLICT, AND GENDER EQUALITY: EXPLORING A TRIPLE NEXUS ON A CASE STUDY OF YEMEN

Ekatherina Zhukova, Maria-Louise Clausen (Dansk Institut for Internationale studier) and Vasna Ramasar (Lunds universitet). Funded by Formas - the Swedish research council for sustainable development, (2023-2027).

The decarbonisation of the economy is occurring at a time of increased conflicts, but the relationship between renewable energy and conflict remains poorly understood. This four-year project examines the energy-conflict nexus from a gendered perspective, as both conflict and renewable energy disproportionately affect women. More information is available on the project webpage.

 

SOCIAL SCIENCE AND ACADEMIC (UN)FREEDOM 

Staffan Löfving Funded by the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Karlstad University (2025) 

In the spring of 2025, Benjamin R. Teitelbaum from the University of Colorado Boulder returns as a Guest Professor at Karlstad, following a previous affiliation in 2023. Professor Teitelbaum’s acclaimed anthropology of far-right populism in the Nordics and beyond – with publications such as Lions of the North: Music and the New Nordic Radical Nationalism (Oxford, 2017), War for Eternity: The Return of Traditionalism and the Rise of the Populist Right (Penguin and HarperCollins, 2020), and Limitless: Visions of Tech Counter-Elite Unbound (forthcoming with Verso, 2026) – enhances the ethnography and political culture profile of Intercultural Studies at Karlstad. 

On the occasion of Teitelbaum’s visit, we are organising an international conference on the theme of academic freedom in times of illiberal tendencies and allegations of the politicisation of specific social science research foci, such as migration, gender, and diversity. A primary objective of gathering scholars from around the world with expertise in this area is to compare contexts and experiences while exploring opportunities for collaborative research initiatives. 

 

VISUAL CULTURE AND INTERCULTURALITY: AN INTERNATIONAL RESEARCH NETWORK

Staffan Löfving Funded by STINT – the Swedish Foundation for International Cooperation in Research and Higher Education (2021-2023), the University of Johannesburg (2023-2025), and Karlstad University (2021-2025).

With colleagues at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa, and globally, we explore visual culture and communication as modalities of interculturality in the social organisation of societies in and after conflict. We develop research projects, educational resources, and scholarly publications in collaboration with photographers, visual artists, and institutions managing visual heritage in contexts where political violence has been a significant part of modern history. This work aims to supplement the traditional focus in intercultural studies on the relationship between language and culture with theorisation within the less studied field of visual interculturality.

 

SWEDEN AS A NORM ENTREPRENEUR: THE CASE OF THE FEMINIST FOREIGN POLICY

Ekatherina Zhukova, Malena Rosén Sundström (Lund University, principal investigator). Funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (2020-2024).

Sweden introduced a Feminist Foreign Policy (FUP) in 2014, when Margot Wallström became Foreign Minister under the Social Democratic – Green coalition government. This policy has since been abandoned by the newly elected Moderate – Christian Democratic – Liberal coalition government. However, a number of countries have been adopting this policy – Canada in 2017, France and Luxembourg in 2018, Mexico in 2020, and Spain in 2021, and Germany, Chile, and Libya are expressing an interest in adopting one. The aim of the project is to study how a FFP is understood by those countries that have introduced it and by those countries that have not done so. For those countries that have introduced a FFP, the goal is to understand how FFP differs from ordinary foreign policy, what feminism in it entails, and what challenges and opportunities there are in having such a policy. For those countries that have not introduced it, the goal is to study why there is such an interest or a lack of it, how feminism is understood in each non-FFP country, and what challenges and opportunities there are for feminism in non-FFP countries. The first part of the study included media analyses of FFP coverage in different countries in the world (2020-2021). The second part of the study consists of interviews with experts (2021-2024).

 

The Swedish r-word: Uses and negotiations of the terms race and racism in contemporary Swedish online and social media discourse

Tobias Hübinette, Peter Wikström. Funded by the Swedish Research Council (2020-2023).

The purpose of this critical race theoretical, sociolinguistic and discourse analytical project is to investigate how the terms race [ras], racism [rasism], and racist [rasist/rasistisk/-t] are put to use and metalinguistically defined, contested, and negotiated in informal contexts of mediated interactions. The project will be based on case studies of the uses and negotiations of these terms in social media and online discourses across different online platforms, demographic groups, and political persuasions. The project poses questions concerning what discursive contexts the terms race and racism appear in, how they are articulated in terms of denotation and connotation, and how they are received by other interactants in terms of interactional consequences.

 

Intercultural Film and Swedish Education: Aesthetics, Equality and Alterity

Andreas Jacobsson, Daniel Brodén. (University of Gothenburg). Funded by Karlstad University (2019-2021)

This project aimed to develop critical perspectives on how so-called non-Western World Cinema can be used in Swedish schools, as a source for understanding different cultural, social and historical contexts and intercultural relations in contemporary (global) societies.

 

Training and Educating Teachers for Critical and Reflexive Interculturality

Andreas Jacobsson, Fred Dervin (University of Helsinki). Funded by Karlstad University (2019-2021)

The research project focused on a critical examination of interculturality in teacher education in Europe. The fundamental idea was to problematise simplified concepts and models such as intercultural competence and to make room for new perspectives on interculturality in teacher education.

 

Engaging Art: Paths towards the Unexpected in Science and Society

Staffan Löfving, Anna Linzie, Cecilia Parsberg. Funded by the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Karlstad University (2020)

In this collaboration across disciplines and departments at Karlstad University, participants explored how and with what results artistic methods are employed in research projects within the humanities and social sciences. The point of departure was their own experiences with performative social practices in literature, anthropology, and the fine arts. They studied the movement within design and fine arts of recent years towards interactive social engagements and activism, and the alleged knowledge-producing capacity and scientific value of an emergent “methodology of the unexpected”.

 

Photography and the Method of Art

Staffan Löfving. Funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, Karlstad Municipality, and the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Karlstad University (2019)

This initiative brought together PhD students and leading scholars from the UK, South Africa, Colombia, Austria, and Sweden in a conference and meetings with students and the public in Karlstad. The purpose was to establish an international network for visual, intercultural research and collaboration. Participants focused on digitisation and emergent forms and practices of image sharing and manipulation, and the assumption that digital technology is challenging photography’s documentary value and its relation to truth and the real. Individually and collaboratively, all participants are employing artistic methods in their efforts at developing an understanding of photography as straddling the divide between scientific method and social practice.

 

Racialising Sweden: Narrative Constructions of a New Swedishness 

Tobias Hübinette. (2017-2019)

This project aimed at analysing Swedish non-white migrant and minority narratives in the form of published novels and autobiographies as a way of studying how the authors write about and relate to race, whiteness and Swedishness in the form of new perspectives on and constructions of Swedishness. The overarching research questions are: How are white Swedes portrayed and represented in the texts? What is told and how is it told when it comes to Sweden and Swedishness from the perspective of being a non-white author? Do the authors write about themselves as Swedes, and if so, how do they construct their Swedishness?