Stockholms universitet

Susanna AreschougForskare

Om mig

Susanna Areschoug disputerade i april 2022 med en avhandling om ungdomars kulturer, identitetsskapande och politiska subjektiviteter på svensk landsbygd. Materialet bygger på ett tio månader långt etnografiskt fältarbete tillsammans med 14-16 åringar på en mindre ort i Mellansverige. I studien undersöks platsskapande, genusrelationer och identitetspraktiker med hjälp av feministisk postmarxistisk teori. Ett särskilt fokus riktas mot maktrelationen mellan stad och land och ungdomarnas förhandlingar och (subkulturella) motstånd mot de stereotypa föreställningar riktade mot landsbygden som ofta reproduceras i media, politik och den allmänna debatten.

Hon genomför för närvarande en uppföljande studie med de ungdomar som deltog avhandlingen och undersöker deras resonemang kring arbete, karriär och stanna-flytta-frågan, liksom deras (sub)kulturella och politiska subjektiviteter ur ett longitunellt perspektiv.

Innan dess arbetade Susanna i ett forskningsprojekt om unga hetero-killars sexuella hälsa finansierat av Folkhälsomyndigheten. Här undersöktes frågor om sexuell njutning, kommunikation och samtycke genom intervjuer med unga män 

Susanna har en masterexamen i genusvetenskap från Uppsala universitet och skrev sin uppsats om självbiografiska klassreseromaner. Hon sitter i styrelsen för föreningen Forum för feministisk forskning.

Undervisning

Susanna undervisar främst på Grundlärarprogrammet med inriktning mot arbete i fritidshem och på Masterprogrammet i barn- och ungdomsvetenskap men också på kurser i andra grundlärarprogram.

  • Introduktion till barn- och ungdomsvetenskap 7,5 hp (avancerad nivå)
  • Teorier inom barn- och ungdomsvetenskap 7,5 hp (avancerad nivå)
  • Fritidshemspedagogik 1 15 hp
  • Sociala relationer i skolan, 7,5 hp
  • Handledning självständiga uppsatser

Forskningsprojekt

Publikationer

I urval från Stockholms universitets publikationsdatabas

  • Rural Failures

    2019. Susanna Areschoug. Boyhood Studies 12 (1), 76-96

    Artikel

    Critical boyhood scholars have consistently problematized the moral panic directed at boys' educational achievements, for instance, by illustrating how the issue is intersected by power hierarchies such as class and race, but have often not been as attentive to the spatialized dimensions of this discourse. In the Swedish debate, boys in (post)industrial towns in rural regions - affected by decades of deindustrialization - are often pointed out as at risk of becoming unemployed societal liabilities. Documenting the lives, aspirations, and future trajectories of young and rural working-class boys, the television series The School Boys (Skolpojkarna) analyzed in this article reproduces this trope and connects anxieties regarding "redundant" masculinities with rural spaces. Using feminist and post-structural approaches to gender and space, I show how this media production, supplied for educational purposes, mediates normative understandings of young rural masculinities.

    Läs mer om Rural Failures
  • Rural youth, education, and citizenship in Sweden

    2019. Susanna Areschoug, Lucas Gottzén. The Palgrave Handbook of Citizenship and Education, 1-16

    Kapitel

    When young people are studied in relation to citizenship and education, geographical location is not always considered. When the emplacement of youth is addressed, a disproportional focus on schools and civic youth practices in city settings further mirrors an unreflected urban norm within the field. There is however a burgeoning literature that examines youth, education, and citizenship in rural settings that speaks to issues of the inclusion and participation of young people in society. The current chapter reviews Swedish literature on rural youth and tracks its theoretical and political underpinnings. The areas covered move from stereotypical representations of rurality to rural youths’ experiences and participation in formal and nonformal education to the ways in which neoliberal market logic results in an uneven distribution of educational and employment possibilities for young people on the countryside. The chapter argues that a divided empirical and analytical focus in previous research results in inconclusive arguments regarding the remedies suggested for overcoming geographic inequality. It is posited that a call for the cultural recognition of rural youth’s experiences of marginalization as a remedy for justice needs to be complemented with an argument for economic redistribution.

    Läs mer om Rural youth, education, and citizenship in Sweden
  • Backward Youth?: Racist Trolling and Political (In)Correctness among Young People in Rural Sweden

    2022. Susanna Areschoug. Youth Beyond the City, 215-234

    Kapitel

    This chapter explores and challenges widespread notions of rural racism and backwardness by engaging with the use of irony and satire among Swedish rural youth. Rather than viewing racism as individualized traits or opinions, ethnographic data is used to show how explicitly expressed racism can be understood as discursive positions in a matrix of moral intelligibility, a position that is ‘humorously’ inhabited or rejected differently with regards to gender, class and emplacement. While Swedish educational policies enforce ‘norm critical pedagogy’ as a way to ‘educate’ youth on tolerance and antiracism, the chapter shows how this reproduces ideas of rural moral inferiority. Analysing instead the (satirical) embodiment of the ‘politically incorrect rural racist’ as ‘trolling practices’ which require youth to be well-informed of contemporary cultural politics, the chapter argues that racist trolling is a way of critiquing national imaginaries of urban progressiveness and rural Otherness.

    Läs mer om Backward Youth?
  • I den moraliska periferin: Ungdomskultur, värden och politisk subjektivitet i rurala rumsligheter

    2022. Susanna Areschoug.

    Avhandling (Dok)

    This dissertation is centered on the everyday spatial practices, identity work and political subjectivities of Swedish rural youth. It explores and challenges widespread notions of rural backwardness and moral inferiority by studying youth’s navigations and negotiations on a classed, gendered, spatialized and economically produced moral field. The material that the study builds on was produced during a ten month long ethnographic fieldwork with 14-16-year-old youth in their small community in western Sweden. The main method for data collection was participant observations in the local school and in two confirmation groups organized by the Swedish church in the community. In addition, I conducted approximately 70 qualitative interviews with youth and a few adults with insight in the youth’s lives.

    In the study, a point of departure is the state of ‘depolitization’ that political theorist Wendy Brown (2006a) has argued characterizes contemporary Western societies. Depolitization entails a displacing of a societal phenomenon or conflict from its political origins, and a placing of the solutions to these problems on individuals. This tendency is visible both in the reoccurring Othering of the rural as responsible for increased right wing populism in Sweden, and in the way in which the Swedish state deals with this issue by implementing educational projects directed at raising knowledge and tolerance in (individualized) youth. Making use of neomarxist perspectives on the production of space (Lefebvre, 1974/1991; Harvey, 2009), and postmarxist understandings of subject formation, I explore the interplay between space, identification and political subjectivities (Butler, 1997; Hall, 2011) among youth most often understood as situated in the geographical, economic and moral periphery. 

    In the study, I show how certain political positions where made intelligible on different ideological arenas (Althusser, 1970), and through ideas associated with urbanity and rurality, which in turn affected the youths’ tendencies to identify with them. I explore these political identifications or disidentifications as a form of ‘moral work’ (Uhnoo, 2011) closely tied to the historically produced spatialities in which they occurred. Rather than viewing problematic expressions of racism, sexism or homophobia as individualized traits or opinions of youth, I illustrate how they can be understood as positionings in a matrix of moral intelligibility, positions that are (humorously) inhabited or rejected differently with regards to gender, class and emplacement. While Swedish educational policies enforce norm critical pedagogy as a way to educate youth on tolerance and antiracism, the dissertation shows how this reproduces ideas of rural moral inferiority. By engaging with the reoccurring use of irony and parody among the youth, analyzing the (satirical) embodiment of the politically incorrect rural racist as trolling practices which require youth to be well-informed of contemporary cultural politics, the dissertation argues that racist trolling is a way of critiquing national imaginaries of urban progressiveness and rural Otherness. Theoretically, the study concludes that rural youth politics need to politicize rural identity, experience and marginalization – rather than arguing for a recognition of the same – as well as the economic-material histories of different (rural) spatialities.

    Läs mer om I den moraliska periferin

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