Seminar Leader — Basic Sociology,  Modern Sociological Theory

Lecturer — Globalization and Power, Sociological Theory

I am a scholar of social movements and cultural studies with a commitment to ethnographic methods. Based on visual analysis and sustained observations of far right movement spaces in Sweden, my dissertation asks how and why far right social movements mobilize emotional relationships to place. 

My peer-reviewed work has been published in Ethnic and Racial Studies, Mobilization Quarterly, and a recent edited volume on Critical Approaches on Methods for Studying the Far Right, out on Manchester University Press. 

I have held visiting fellowships at the University of Amsterdam and the Center for Research on Extremism at the University of Oslo.

A selection from Stockholm University publication database

• Embodied nativism in Denmark: rethinking violence and the far right

  2022. Ryan Switzer, Adrien Beauduin. Ethnic and Racial Studies

  Article

  Since 2017, the Danish far right party Stram Kurs has staged hundreds of Islamophobic demonstrations in neighbourhoods known for their ethnic minority and Muslim communities. Confrontational counterprotesters are filmed by far right activists who widely diffuse the footage on social media. These scenes of “native” bodies under duress from racialized others serve the far right as evidence of an incompatibility between racialized foreigners and the Danish ethnically defined nation. When far right activists subject their bodies to potential violence they are embodying nativism; dramatizing the threat of ethnic impurity to the nation. Embodied nativism denotes how actors imbue bodies with – and physically perform – values linked to essentialized ethnic categories to advance exclusionary claims. We develop this concept through visual analysis, utilizing images to show how scenes of embodied nativism exploit liberal frameworks of free speech, violence, and nonviolence; framing counterprotesters as racialized aggressors on the national body politic. 

  Read more about Embodied nativism in Denmark

• “IT’S NOT SWEDEN ANYMORE”: THE FAR RIGHT’S MOBILIZATION OF TERRITORIAL STIGMATIZATION

  2024. Ryan Switzer. Mobilization 28 (4), 471-489

  Article

  The far-right social movement in Sweden is mobilizing against the purported threat to national order posed by the “badlands” of the nation. These are neighborhoods known for their diversity, crime, and poverty. “Badlands” also provide the far right with sites to criticize immigration and multiculturalism. Crucially, they also serve as a new kind of space that the far right uses to organize against what it believes to be a crisis of the state’s loss of the monopoly on violence and fears of the “replacement” of the ethnic majority. Through interviews with movement activists and ethnographic observations of private and public movement events, I show that the nostalgic “homelands and heartlands” frames, coupled with fears of the “badlands,” motivate far-right activists to participate in collective action. I find Sweden’s far-right relies on the interaction between nativism and territorial stigmatization to signify these urban spaces with crime, Islam, and minoritization.

  Read more about “IT’S NOT SWEDEN ANYMORE”

Show all publications by Ryan Switzer at Stockholm University