Katarina Giritli Nygren
Biographic Data
| ID | 158341 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Katarina Giritli Nygren |
| GIVEN NAMES | Katarina Giritli |
| FAMILY NAME | Nygren |
| SIGNATURE | NYGREN K G |
| AFFILIATIONS | Mid Sweden University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5337-3287 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 37 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 94 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 35 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2010 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Professional status as a shield
In the Swedish national context, class mobility and work are commonly framed as pathways to inclusion and belonging. Drawing on in-depth interviews, this article examines this promise by exploring how class-mobile racialized second-generation migrants in Sweden negotiate belonging in and through work, both within workplaces and in relation to the imagined national community. By integrating boundary scholarship with research on belonging and racis…
Exploring Institutional Framing of Local Labor Market Programs by Politicians and Managers in Swedish Municipalities
This study explores the governance and implementation of local labor market programs (LLMPs) in Swedish municipalities, analyzing the tension between national mandates and local policy practices. Drawing on institutional ethnography (IE), intersectionality, and emotional labor theories, we examine interviews with politicians and managers from eight municipalities. Politicians frame LLMPs as budget-driven initiatives, depoliticizing local labor ma…
Fantasmatic narratives of past and present Swedish back-to-the-land movements
Exploring the Christian Nationalism Within the Secularized Swedish Public Opinion
This article examines the interplay of religion, nationalism, and identity in contemporary Sweden, focusing on the rising phenomenon of Christian nationalism. Our analysis of editorials and opinion pieces from major Swedish newspapers reveals a significant shift towards a more pronounced Christian influence in public discourse, suggesting a renegotiation of the sacred-secular divide. This shift highlights a growing intertwining of religious narra…
Cultivating thirdspace
Over the past 15 years, there has been an increased interest in urban gardening. Queues for getting a gardening spot have grown, as many urban citizens seek a spot to cultivate vegetables, and studies have stressed how urban gardens can be one ingredient in creating more sustainable cities. Following the work of urban theorists Henry Lefebvre and Edward Soja, this study explores urban gardens as thirdspaces. Interviewing allotment gardeners and c…
Thoughts about intersectionality and risk. Interviews with key scholars
Since the early twenty first century, feminist and intersectional approaches to risk research have gained momentum, initially emerging from studies on HIV risks within health studies. Over the past decade, these approaches have expanded to other fields. As editors of this special issue, Katarina Giritli Nygren and Anna Olofsson introduce a reflection piece anchoring the issue. The reflection piece includes insights from seven influential scholars…
Years of Studies of Risk and Intersectionality
This introduction to a special issue on "Intersectional Analysis of Risk" and its contributors explores the development and current trends in intersectional risk analysis over the past two decades. Using Scopus, 778 publications between 2003 and 2022 were identified across social sciences, humanities, psychology, health, and arts. VOSviewer was employed to analyse these publications and identify trends and themes. The evolution of intersectional …
Feminism and social movements
More than ever the democratic promise of freedom and equality are under threat (Brown, 2019). This threat extends to the liberatory possibilities of the feminist project (Verloo and Patternote, 2018) as well as to the democratic underpinnings of universities (Prasad and Śliwa, 2024; Connell, 2019). Hope is not lost, however, as social movements continue to rally against oppressive and violent political currents, following the trailblazing global …
Haunting the Margins
Using the spectral as a conceptual metaphor, we explore narratives within Sweden’s welfare institutions and policy discourses surrounding vulnerable EU citizens. We aim to provide a new understanding of vulnerable EU citizens as the social ghosts of our time by exploring how the concept of the social ghost and hauntology can be used to perform ethical critique of social injustice. By excavating examples from already gathered material, we explore …
Urban gardening as a risk-reduction strategy – an intersectional analysis of top-down gardening initiatives
In cities around the world, urban gardening is increasingly used as a municipal strategy to tackle both environmental and social risks. In this study we draw on critical and intersectional studies of risk to analyse municipalities’ framing of urban gardening as a way to illuminate how it is entangled with contemporary structures of power. The material consists of strategy documents and information on the municipalities’ websites, and the texts we…
A typology of right-wing populism in Europe
This study attempts to advance our understanding of the role gender plays in populist politics by proposing a typology of gendered populism. Our argument is that populist parties' discursive construction of “the people” against “elites” and “non-people” is a gendered process, in which gender operates as a constitutive element for determining who is included in or excluded from “the people”. We also argue that the gendered construction of “the peo…
Embodied Violence and Agency in Refugee Regimes
Multiple refugee regimes govern the lives of forced migrants simultaneously but in an often conflicting way. As a mechanism of inclusion/exclusion, they tend to engender the violence they sought to dissipate. Protection and control channel agency through mechanisms of either tutelage and victimisation or criminalisation. This book contrasts multiple groups of refugees and refugee regimes, revealing the inherent coercive violence of refugee regime…
The veil as an object of right-wing populist politics
In this article, we comparatively analyse radical right-wing parties’ intervention into the veil debate in Turkey, Sweden, and France which are characterised by different understandings of legal and normative secularism. We explore the intersection of gender and religion in the dynamic formation of populist categories and how they can be mobilised differently along the vertical and the horizontal axes by the example of the veil. In all three coun…
EPA (aka A-Traktor) Girl Greasers in Sweden
This article focuses on girlhood in one of the youth subcultures of rural Sweden, EPA greasers. The EPA, a car that Swedes aged 15 and older can legally drive, is at the centre of EPA culture. In this uniquely and previously male Swedish youth greaser culture, there has been a recent increase in the number of Swedish girls driving EPAs. Previous research has shown how EPA culture and EPA girlhood are shaped through distancing from hegemonic urban…
Swedish exceptionalism, herd immunity and the welfare state
Compared to many other countries, Sweden has managed the COVID-19 pandemic with no lockdowns, less regulation and more voluntary action expected of citizens and organizations. In this article, the authors explore media representations of national preventative strategies and how they were anchored in broader discourses. The article aims to analyse the development of crisis narratives and struggles over legitimacy during the first phase of the COVI…
Committed to Integration
The overall aim of this article is to explore the ways in which refugee reception and integration work is storied in the local newspapers of two rural municipalities in northern Sweden. Our results show that the strong emphasis on integration through employment present in national policy regimes is not readily visible in local media portrayals of integration. Instead, integration work is framed as a matter of commitment of individual refugees, vo…
Contesting city safety - exploring (un)safety and objects of risk from multiple viewpoints
The aim of this article is to engage theoretically with city safety and fear by combining insights from intersectional theories of risk with poststructuralist theories of emotion. We argue that the performative feelings of fear and safety need to be disentangled from hegemonic discourses in order to illuminate who the imagined subjects are that comprise the so-called ‘everyone’ for whom safety agents intend to create safe cities. Our analysis is …
Managing the Covid-19 pandemic through individual responsibility
At the end of March 2020, international media present Swedish management of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic as soft and irresponsible. Thus, Sweden, which is usually regarded as exceptionally risk averse and cautious, has chosen an unexpected risk management approach. The aim of this article is to reflect on how the Swedish government has managed the Covid-19 pandemic until early April 2020 from two theoretical perspectives, the risk society thesis…
Om engagemang, motstånd och omsorg på den mindre orten
‘It’s about gender equality and all that stuff…’
Drawing from the experiences gained from a research project focusing on gender-based violence (GBV) in rural Sweden, this paper focuses on how government policies aimed at addressing GBV against girls and young women are enacted, translated and contested at the regional and local level. In previous studies the regional level is seldom focused on, and we know very little of the connection between the local and regional levels. The paper is based o…
Gender Equality and Beyond
The social-democratic-inspired “Nordic model”, with its agenda for gender equality, has been an important example for the development of political interventions to transform society but at the same time, it has been functioning as an emerging gender normalising and stabilising structure. The last decade it has also become focused by antigender movements and ethno-nationalistic parties both as emblematic for the Nordic nations as well as a threat …
Mapping the ruling relations of work in rural eldercare intersections of gender, digitalization and the centre–periphery divide
Challenging the myth of gender equality in Sweden
Sweden has the reputation of being one of the most gender-equal countries in the world, and it is often held up as a model for other societies but the reality is much more complicated, as this volume shows. The first book to provide a thorough analysis of the myth of Swedish gender equality, this volume shows how that dominant idea has become a form of nationalism that ultimately excludes those who fall outside the social norm.
Challenging the myth of gender equality in Sweden
Sweden ranks as one of the world's most gender-egalitarian countries, based on a firm belief that men and women should share power and influence equally. An extensive welfare system makes it easier for both sexes to balance work and family life. However, the Government recognises that there is still room for improvement in many areas. (Sweden.se, Official source for facts about Sweden)
Challenging the Myth of Gender Equality in Sweden
Managing the Covid-19 pandemic through individual responsibility
At the end of March 2020, international media present Swedish management of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic as soft and irresponsible. Thus, Sweden, which is usually regarded as exceptionally risk averse and cautious, has chosen an unexpected risk management approach. The aim of this article is to reflect on how the Swedish government has managed the Covid-19 pandemic until early April 2020 from two theoretical perspectives, the risk society thesis…
Doing’ risk, ‘doing’ difference
In this article, we propose a perspective on risk that stresses its moral character and normalising functions. By focusing on the ‘doing’ of risk, we explore the ways that risk discourses are entangled with the ‘doing’ of class and gender, opening up an analysis of the power dimension in risk. Taking the example of food risk as a starting point, we argue that, while previous research has shown that what we eat is a way of positioning ourselves in…
Doing and undoing risk
This paper develops the concepts of ‘doing’ and ‘undoing’ risk, a new approach to risk research that echoes the ‘doing gender’ of gender studies. In this way, we combine intersectional and risk theory and apply the new perspective to empirical material. To better explore the doing and undoing, or the performance, of risk, we will refer to practices that simultaneously (re)produce and hide socio-political norms and positions, played out in contemp…
Swedish exceptionalism, herd immunity and the welfare state
Compared to many other countries, Sweden has managed the COVID-19 pandemic with no lockdowns, less regulation and more voluntary action expected of citizens and organizations. In this article, the authors explore media representations of national preventative strategies and how they were anchored in broader discourses. The article aims to analyse the development of crisis narratives and struggles over legitimacy during the first phase of the COVI…
An intersectional risk approach for environmental sociology
The objective of this article is to further develop intersectional perspectives and feminist knowledge in environmental sociology. Environmental sociology has developed a critical theoretical frame with which to describe the social construction of risk, and this article further develops the understanding of the complex multidimensionality of the social relations that shape the lived experience of risk. An analytical and integrating discourse that…
The (un)intended consequences of crisis communication in news media
This article takes as its departure point the questions ‘Which discourses figure in the news media’s coverage of natural disasters?’ and ‘What are the possible unintended consequences of this type of crisis communication?’ The overall aim is to elucidate the development of risk discourses, struggles over discursive legitimacy, and shifts in argumentation to legitimate or delegitimate certain actors and actions in relation to a widespread and deva…
Narratives of ICT and Organizational Change in Public Administration
In the last decade the implementation of computerized technology and advanced information systems in public administration has gathered speed. The purpose of this article is to explore the ways in which these changes might be gendered by analysing different narratives of digitalization and organizational change in public administration. The empirical findings indicate that resistance to information and communication technology is explained away b…
Contesting city safety - exploring (un)safety and objects of risk from multiple viewpoints
The aim of this article is to engage theoretically with city safety and fear by combining insights from intersectional theories of risk with poststructuralist theories of emotion. We argue that the performative feelings of fear and safety need to be disentangled from hegemonic discourses in order to illuminate who the imagined subjects are that comprise the so-called ‘everyone’ for whom safety agents intend to create safe cities. Our analysis is …
Gender Equality and Beyond
The social-democratic-inspired “Nordic model”, with its agenda for gender equality, has been an important example for the development of political interventions to transform society but at the same time, it has been functioning as an emerging gender normalising and stabilising structure. The last decade it has also become focused by antigender movements and ethno-nationalistic parties both as emblematic for the Nordic nations as well as a threat …
Paradoxes of Anti‐austerity Protest
This article analyses an episode of collective resignation. Carried out mainly by specialist nurses, this is a proliferating form of worker protest in Sweden that poses a challenge to austerity policy and emerges in a specific industrial‐relations context. Mobilizing for collective resignation, activist nurses navigate terrains of neoliberal governance, marketization and flexible labour‐market dynamics. The collective resignation is also a form o…
Feminism and social movements
More than ever the democratic promise of freedom and equality are under threat (Brown, 2019). This threat extends to the liberatory possibilities of the feminist project (Verloo and Patternote, 2018) as well as to the democratic underpinnings of universities (Prasad and Śliwa, 2024; Connell, 2019). Hope is not lost, however, as social movements continue to rally against oppressive and violent political currents, following the trailblazing global …
A typology of right-wing populism in Europe
This study attempts to advance our understanding of the role gender plays in populist politics by proposing a typology of gendered populism. Our argument is that populist parties' discursive construction of “the people” against “elites” and “non-people” is a gendered process, in which gender operates as a constitutive element for determining who is included in or excluded from “the people”. We also argue that the gendered construction of “the peo…
EPA (aka A-Traktor) Girl Greasers in Sweden
This article focuses on girlhood in one of the youth subcultures of rural Sweden, EPA greasers. The EPA, a car that Swedes aged 15 and older can legally drive, is at the centre of EPA culture. In this uniquely and previously male Swedish youth greaser culture, there has been a recent increase in the number of Swedish girls driving EPAs. Previous research has shown how EPA culture and EPA girlhood are shaped through distancing from hegemonic urban…
(Re)assembling the 'normal' in neoliberalpolicy discourses
The purpose of this article is to explore through a reading of an official Swedish policy document what questions and challenges such a document poses for feminist theory by the way the ‘normal’ is (re)assembled in accordance with what others have called the risk politics of advanced liberalism. The intensified focus on risk in neoliberalism has seen responsibility move from the state to individuals, and old divisions between society and market a…
Haunting the Margins
Using the spectral as a conceptual metaphor, we explore narratives within Sweden’s welfare institutions and policy discourses surrounding vulnerable EU citizens. We aim to provide a new understanding of vulnerable EU citizens as the social ghosts of our time by exploring how the concept of the social ghost and hauntology can be used to perform ethical critique of social injustice. By excavating examples from already gathered material, we explore …
Urban gardening as a risk-reduction strategy – an intersectional analysis of top-down gardening initiatives
In cities around the world, urban gardening is increasingly used as a municipal strategy to tackle both environmental and social risks. In this study we draw on critical and intersectional studies of risk to analyse municipalities’ framing of urban gardening as a way to illuminate how it is entangled with contemporary structures of power. The material consists of strategy documents and information on the municipalities’ websites, and the texts we…
Mapping the ruling relations of work in rural eldercare intersections of gender, digitalization and the centre–periphery divide
Narratives of ICT and Organizational Change in Public Administration
In the last decade the implementation of computerized technology and advanced information systems in public administration has gathered speed. The purpose of this article is to explore the ways in which these changes might be gendered by analysing different narratives of digitalization and organizational change in public administration. The empirical findings indicate that resistance to information and communication technology is explained away b…
The Pastoral Power of Technology. Rethinking Alienation in Digital Culture
The purpose of this paper is to bring Foucault’s elaboration on ‘the pastoral modalities of power’ into play in order to rethink alienation in digital culture. Pastoral power is not displacing other conceptions of power, but provides another level of analysis involved in the forging of reasonable responsible subjects willing and able to sustain other conceptions of power. We will draw particularly on the early writings of Marx and the more recent…
The mutual constitution of risk and inequalities
In this article, we examine the conceptual importance of integrating risk and intersectionality theory for the study of how risk and various forms of inequality intersect and are mutually constitutive. We argue that an intersectional perspective can advance risk research by incorporating more effectively the role of such social categories as gender and race into the analysis of ‘risk’ as an empirical phenomenon. In doing so, the intersectional pe…
Intersectional Approaches in Health‐Risk Research
The overall aim of this article is to explore how the intersectional approach is used in health‐risk research. The concept has been recognized in health‐risk research since the early 2000s, but not as much as in the broader field of health‐inequality studies. However, in the past 5 years, Social Science and Medicine has published a series of review articles that argue for the necessity of bringing intersectional perspectives to the field of healt…
Doing’ risk, ‘doing’ difference
In this article, we propose a perspective on risk that stresses its moral character and normalising functions. By focusing on the ‘doing’ of risk, we explore the ways that risk discourses are entangled with the ‘doing’ of class and gender, opening up an analysis of the power dimension in risk. Taking the example of food risk as a starting point, we argue that, while previous research has shown that what we eat is a way of positioning ourselves in…
(Re)assembling the ‘normal’ in neoliberal policy discourses
The purpose of this article is to explore through a reading of an official Swedish policy document what questions and challenges such a document poses for feminist theory by the way the 'normal' is (re)assembled in accordance with what others have called the risk politics of advanced liberalism. The intensified focus on risk in neoliberalism has seen responsibility move from the state to individuals, and old divisions between society and market a…
Doing and undoing risk
This paper develops the concepts of ‘doing’ and ‘undoing’ risk, a new approach to risk research that echoes the ‘doing gender’ of gender studies. In this way, we combine intersectional and risk theory and apply the new perspective to empirical material. To better explore the doing and undoing, or the performance, of risk, we will refer to practices that simultaneously (re)produce and hide socio-political norms and positions, played out in contemp…
(Re)assembling the 'normal' in neoliberalpolicy discourses
The purpose of this article is to explore through a reading of an official Swedish policy document what questions and challenges such a document poses for feminist theory by the way the ‘normal’ is (re)assembled in accordance with what others have called the risk politics of advanced liberalism. The intensified focus on risk in neoliberalism has seen responsibility move from the state to individuals, and old divisions between society and market a…
Challenging the myth of gender equality in Sweden
Sweden has the reputation of being one of the most gender-equal countries in the world, and it is often held up as a model for other societies but the reality is much more complicated, as this volume shows. The first book to provide a thorough analysis of the myth of Swedish gender equality, this volume shows how that dominant idea has become a form of nationalism that ultimately excludes those who fall outside the social norm.
Challenging the myth of gender equality in Sweden
Sweden ranks as one of the world's most gender-egalitarian countries, based on a firm belief that men and women should share power and influence equally. An extensive welfare system makes it easier for both sexes to balance work and family life. However, the Government recognises that there is still room for improvement in many areas. (Sweden.se, Official source for facts about Sweden)
Challenging the Myth of Gender Equality in Sweden
Everyday places, heterosexist spaces and risk in contemporary Sweden
Subjective feelings of risk are a central feature of everyday life, and evidence shows that people who do not conform to contemporary normative notions are often more exposed to everyday risks than others. Despite this, normative notions are rarely acknowledged as risk objects. By drawing on the theory of 'doing' and 'undoing' risk, which combines intersectional and risk theory, this study contributes new perspectives on the everyday risks in con…
An intersectional risk approach for environmental sociology
The objective of this article is to further develop intersectional perspectives and feminist knowledge in environmental sociology. Environmental sociology has developed a critical theoretical frame with which to describe the social construction of risk, and this article further develops the understanding of the complex multidimensionality of the social relations that shape the lived experience of risk. An analytical and integrating discourse that…
The (un)intended consequences of crisis communication in news media
This article takes as its departure point the questions ‘Which discourses figure in the news media’s coverage of natural disasters?’ and ‘What are the possible unintended consequences of this type of crisis communication?’ The overall aim is to elucidate the development of risk discourses, struggles over discursive legitimacy, and shifts in argumentation to legitimate or delegitimate certain actors and actions in relation to a widespread and deva…
Paradoxes of Anti‐austerity Protest
This article analyses an episode of collective resignation. Carried out mainly by specialist nurses, this is a proliferating form of worker protest in Sweden that poses a challenge to austerity policy and emerges in a specific industrial‐relations context. Mobilizing for collective resignation, activist nurses navigate terrains of neoliberal governance, marketization and flexible labour‐market dynamics. The collective resignation is also a form o…
Mapping the ruling relations of work in rural eldercare intersections of gender, digitalization and the centre–periphery divide
Gender Equality and Beyond
The social-democratic-inspired “Nordic model”, with its agenda for gender equality, has been an important example for the development of political interventions to transform society but at the same time, it has been functioning as an emerging gender normalising and stabilising structure. The last decade it has also become focused by antigender movements and ethno-nationalistic parties both as emblematic for the Nordic nations as well as a threat …
‘It’s about gender equality and all that stuff…’
Drawing from the experiences gained from a research project focusing on gender-based violence (GBV) in rural Sweden, this paper focuses on how government policies aimed at addressing GBV against girls and young women are enacted, translated and contested at the regional and local level. In previous studies the regional level is seldom focused on, and we know very little of the connection between the local and regional levels. The paper is based o…
Committed to Integration
The overall aim of this article is to explore the ways in which refugee reception and integration work is storied in the local newspapers of two rural municipalities in northern Sweden. Our results show that the strong emphasis on integration through employment present in national policy regimes is not readily visible in local media portrayals of integration. Instead, integration work is framed as a matter of commitment of individual refugees, vo…
Contesting city safety - exploring (un)safety and objects of risk from multiple viewpoints
The aim of this article is to engage theoretically with city safety and fear by combining insights from intersectional theories of risk with poststructuralist theories of emotion. We argue that the performative feelings of fear and safety need to be disentangled from hegemonic discourses in order to illuminate who the imagined subjects are that comprise the so-called ‘everyone’ for whom safety agents intend to create safe cities. Our analysis is …
Managing the Covid-19 pandemic through individual responsibility
At the end of March 2020, international media present Swedish management of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic as soft and irresponsible. Thus, Sweden, which is usually regarded as exceptionally risk averse and cautious, has chosen an unexpected risk management approach. The aim of this article is to reflect on how the Swedish government has managed the Covid-19 pandemic until early April 2020 from two theoretical perspectives, the risk society thesis…
Om engagemang, motstånd och omsorg på den mindre orten
Swedish exceptionalism, herd immunity and the welfare state
Compared to many other countries, Sweden has managed the COVID-19 pandemic with no lockdowns, less regulation and more voluntary action expected of citizens and organizations. In this article, the authors explore media representations of national preventative strategies and how they were anchored in broader discourses. The article aims to analyse the development of crisis narratives and struggles over legitimacy during the first phase of the COVI…
Embodied Violence and Agency in Refugee Regimes
Multiple refugee regimes govern the lives of forced migrants simultaneously but in an often conflicting way. As a mechanism of inclusion/exclusion, they tend to engender the violence they sought to dissipate. Protection and control channel agency through mechanisms of either tutelage and victimisation or criminalisation. This book contrasts multiple groups of refugees and refugee regimes, revealing the inherent coercive violence of refugee regime…
The veil as an object of right-wing populist politics
In this article, we comparatively analyse radical right-wing parties’ intervention into the veil debate in Turkey, Sweden, and France which are characterised by different understandings of legal and normative secularism. We explore the intersection of gender and religion in the dynamic formation of populist categories and how they can be mobilised differently along the vertical and the horizontal axes by the example of the veil. In all three coun…
Sociology (34 works) · Political science (27 works) · Gender Studies (21 works) · Law (19 works) · Gender Studies (13 works) · Politics (13 works) · Psychology (11 works) · Law (10 works) · Economics (8 works) · Social Policy and Reform Studies (7 works)