The preoccupation of the study revolves around relations hetwecn everyday life in Swedish schools and the multicuiturai context of Swedish society. Based on fieldwork, media debates, analysis ofpolicy documents, discussions with teachers as weil as teacher's educators, and interviews with principals working in the elementary schools of Malmö, the dissertation explores three analytical arenas; schools as (re)producers of values and norms, Ihe mullicullural school and finally Ihe localions of schools in lime and space.

The aim of the discussion conceming relations between the functions ofeducation in modem societies, and migration related issues and aspects ofmulticulturalism, is to highlight paradoxes in the mle of schoois. The policy documents specify certain goals of education, which are paradoxicallv caught between the ideals of a traditional understanding of modem ity and consequences of migration and globalisation.

Schools and education in general, have a pivotal mle in Swedish society, not merely as mediators of knowledge, but also as (re)producers of systems of values and norms. These values and norms constitute what is acceptable in society. The scope for 'othemess' is restricted but also negotiable and changeable. Va lues and norms in the context of schools are often considered to be self-evident and are therefore not up for discussions or debates in everyday work ofteachers and principals. Some ofthese vaJues are so weil integrated in a 'common sense', that they be come invisibleand unconscious, The ambition of the dissertation is to make them visible - to formulate and analyse them - to make a further discussion possible.

The study concJudes that the concept of critical multiculturalism could be useable for highlighting ideological aspecls andparadoxes of the school in Sweden today, The mle ofeducation should be discussed in the light ofrelations between individuals and groups in society, and with self-understanding as weil as, self-criticism as key aspects.

In Sweden and among Swedish popular movements there has long been a great willingness to share experiences from establishing the “Swedish model” of welfare and democracy to countries in other parts of the world. In this sharing of experience popular adult education has had an important role. Over the years, there have also been several attempts to spread the “Swedish model” of popular adult education, i.e. study circles and folk high schools. In this article, we analyze the large-scale project of establishing Folk Development Colleges (FDC:s) in Tanzania in the 1970s and 1980s,by emphasizing the ways in which Swedish popular adult educators have described the FDC project. Theoretically, the article is based on a postcolonial framework, highlighting the continuing importance of the legacies of colonialism in today’s society. One of the main conclusions in the article is that in the process of “exporting” the idea of popular adult education to other parts of the world, there is an on-going formation of national self-images in contrast to images of “the Other”, where there is a constant risk of reproducing ideas from a colonial past.

This dissertation explores what happens with ethnic and national identifications buiit on the same ethnocultural grounds, but under different socio-economic circumstances. Territorial and nonterritorial minorities have traditionally been considered non-comparable because it was assumed that groups organized on different grounds were distinctively separate phenomena. In this study, the comparative method is used to throw new light on how ethnic and national identifications are constructed, negotiated, and re-constructed in territorial and non-territorial minority contexts. The author investigates whether the ethnic and national identification and articulation processes of Hungarians in Slovakia and Hungarians in Sweden constitute different types of Hungarianness. Drawing on extensive interview material the empirical focus is on the interaction of self-narratives and public narratives. The author aims to challenge the notion that national minorities and diaspora communities are fundamentally different in their understanding of nationhood and their relationship to an externai national homeland.

This paper discusses migration and social citizenship in the light of new forms of social exclusion of new ethnic minorities in Europe. The author claims that Europe risks developing multiculturalism that is separate from social citizenship . This is related to a kind of cultural backlash and the re-emergence of an interest in cultural “deviancy” that is supposed to mark new ethnic minorities, particularly in terms of value systems and gender. Diversity is thus represented as differences between “foreign cultures” and “our” society, something that is expressed in popular, political and even academic rhetoric. This kind of culturalism in research and politics veils essential social problems and jeopardises efforts being made to extend inclusive social citizenship to immigrants and their children. The author makes links between emerging problems of cultural reductionism and contemporary neoliberal politics and the weakening of the welfare state. The empirical arguments are confined to conditions in Sweden, which are then compared to conditions in the other Nordic countries and the EU.