Stockholm university

Ryan SwitzerPhd Student

About me

Ryan is a doctoral student at the Department of Sociology, Stockholm University. He holds an MA in Political Science from the Central European University and a double BA in Political Science and International Affairs from the University of Georgia. He's worked in art history publishing and for the Federal Public Defender of North Georgia back in his hometown of Atlanta.

Teaching

Seminar Leader — Basic Sociology,  Modern Sociological Theory

Lecturer — Globalization and Power, Sociological Theory

Research

My dissertation work looks at stigma, space, and emotion in the Nordic far right social movement. How do movements with territorial identities and ideologies mobilise under the deterritorialising conditions of globalization? How are nativist concens over urban multiculturalism challenged through grassroots practices? 

My first article pairs political and urban sociological approaches to understand Wacquant's territorial stigmatization as a form of power social movements (re)produce in the pursuit of exclusion. The second article examines activists' decisions to publicize their views in public and their negotiations of stigma incurred.

All articles are based on data collected in ongoing ethnographic fieldwork on the nationalist movement.

A second strain of my work theorizes how right-wing movements challenge commonly held conceptions of violence and these challenges' ethical implications.

Publications

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

Show all publications by Ryan Switzer at Stockholm University