My research interests include political geography, critical border studies, migration governance, power, space and time, labour geography and precarious work, sustainable tranformation, social justice, digital practices. 

ONGOING PROJECTS

Language and lifecourse: An exploration of the Swedish for
immigrants-program, 1990-2022. Swedish Research Council, 2024-2027.

Digital nature: Social-technical relations and practices within Sweden’s rural agriculture and harvesting industries. Swedish Research Council, 2022-2026. Visit the project webpage. 

Wild berry shifting: Sustainability transitions and diverse economies in a rural 'sparseland'. The Swedish Research Council for Sustainable Development, Formas, 2021-2026. Visit the project webpage.

PREVIOUS PROJECTS

Agents of migration: A comparative study of migration intermediaries in three labour market sectors, with Charlotta Hedberg (Umeå University), Swedish Research Council, 2018-2020.

Integration or segregation? A study of mobility and diversity in Stockholm, with Maja Lagerqvist, Thomas Wimark and Bo Malmberg (PI). Stockholm County Council, 2017-2019.

Border topologies: Labour migration management through strategies of bordering. Swedish Research Council, 2014-2017.

A selection from Stockholm University publication database

• Border timespaces: understanding the regulation of international mobility and migration

  2022. Linn Axelsson. Geografiska Annaler. Series B, Human Geography 104 (1), 59-74

  Article

  The distorted shape of many of today’s political borders has been widely noted. An increasingly sprawling body of literature in geography and beyond has explored the growing spatial ambiguity of borders which are now seen as both externalised and networked throughout society. There is some recognition that the spatial reconfiguration of borders to appear in locations that challenge conventional assumptions about the relationship between state, border and territory may involve a temporal dimension; however, the many ways in which time and space work through each other to shape what it means to move in and out of a political community have remained largely overlooked. In order to make sense of the complex temporal and spatial entanglements involved in contemporary bordering processes, I advance an understanding of borders as devices which selectively contract and expand the distance between internal and external spaces and mobilise and immobilise migrants by altering the speed and rhythm of their movements. A focus on dynamic, fragmented and ephemeral border timespaces, in my view, offers a more nuanced account of how the cross-border movements of migrants are currently regulated.

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• Re-visiting the ‘black box’ of migration: State-intermediary co-production of regulatory spaces of labour migration

  2022. Linn Axelsson (et al.). Journal of ethnic and migration studies 8 (3), 594-612

  Article

  It is now widely held that a variety of intermediary actors, including recruitment and staffing agencies, multinational corporations and local brokers, shape labour migration. This paper argues that in order to better understand the global circulation of labour it is necessary to explore the involvement of these actors in the production of the regulatory spaces through which migrant labour is brokered. Indeed, migration intermediaries do not only navigate borders on behalf of their migrant clients. Nor is ‘the state’ primarily a backdrop against which the understanding of the role of intermediaries may be developed. Instead, we argue, regulatory spaces of labour migration are made and remade through direct and indirect exchanges and interactions between intermediaries and state actors. Through an analysis of three moments of regulatory change in Sweden, the paper shows that such interaction does not take place in an even landscape but, rather, that the ability of migration intermediaries to influence the regulation of migration lies in the capacity to form close relationships or establish a powerful presence. A focus on the dynamic co-production of regulatory spaces by intermediaries and state actors, in our view, offers a more nuanced account of how labour migration currently is brokered and regulated.

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• Channelling through bureaucracy: How migration intermediaries and state actors (re)shape Chinese migration to the Swedish restaurant industry

  2021. Qian Zhang, Linn Axelsson. Geoforum 123, 14-22

  Article

  The role of migration mediation in the global circulation of labour has been receiving increasing attention. Channel is a frequently used, but under-theorised, concept in such studies. Drawing on mobilities perspectives, especially migration infrastructure and three aspects of mobility (route, speed and friction), this paper fosters a framework – channelling through bureaucracy. It seeks to go beyond seeing channels as structure and mechanism to argue channelling is a productive and differentiating process whereby both state and intermediary actors actively intervene in migrants’ mobilities. Based on documentary analysis, interviews and participatory observation in Sweden and China, we demonstrate how, in the last decade, migration intermediaries and state actors channel Chinese migrants’ mobilities in relation to three major shifts in Swedish immigration bureaucracy. The empirical findings illustrate that, as a concept, channelling illustrates, specifically, how conflicts and collaborations between the regulatory and commercial dimensions of migration mediation drive new modes of operation and self-reinforcing of migration infrastructures. Additionally, the study indicates how channelling operates through these three specific aspects of mobility to include, exclude, favour, disadvantage, filter and direct different intermediary actors and migrants. Future research could draw on mobilities studies and the specific forms of interactions between state actors and migration intermediaries to deepen the understanding of migration mediation.

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• Geographies of occupational (mis)match: The case of highly educated refugees and family migrants in Sweden

  2021. Louisa Vogiazides, Henrik Bengtsson, Linn Axelsson.

  Report

  A small but growing literature on occupational (mis)match, i.e. whether the educational requirements of one’s occupation correspond to one’s level of education, shows that foreign-born individuals tend to be overeducated to a larger extent than the native-born. Although there is some comparative research across countries, little is known about the geographical variation in occupational (mis)match within countries. This paper aims to describe and explain the patterns of occupational (mis)match among refugees and family migrants in Sweden, with a particular emphasis on their geographical dimension. Applying descriptive and regression analysis to individual-level longitudinal register data, it examines the occurrence of occupational (mis)match among refugee and family migrants who gained residency in Sweden between 2001 and 2014. The results indicate a moderate significance of the regional context for migrants’ likelihood of achieving occupational match. After three years in Sweden, migrants residing in the capital region of Stockholm are the most likely to find a job in line with their qualifications, followed by migrants in Gothenburg and migrants in small city/rural regions. After eight years, however, the only statistically significant difference is between migrants in Stockholm, relative to migrants in the less prosperous region of Malmö. A plausible explanation is that highly educated migrants who achieve occupational match tend to be employed in occupations that are in demand all across the country, notably in the healthcare and education sectors. In addition, the study shows that the validation/assessment of foreign education as well as education obtained in Sweden are positively associated with occupational match.

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• Introduction “Labour market integration of highly skilled refugees in Sweden, Germany and the Netherlands”

  2021. Micheline van Riemsdijk, Linn Axelsson. International migration (Geneva. Print) 59 (4), 3-12

  Article

  This article introduces a special issue on the labour market integration of highly skilled refugees in Sweden, Germany and the Netherlands, three countries that received a large number of asylum seekers in the mid-2010s. Authorities have devised various policies that aim to speed up the labour market integration process for refugees. This article critically examines normalized assumptions about refugees and the causes for their low employment rates that inform existing labour market integration initiatives. We pay particular attention to highly skilled refugees, who generally want to work but tend to experience difficulties finding employment commensurate with their educational attainment and professional expertise. This issue warrants more attention as one in five refugees in Europe has completed a tertiary education. 

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• Spatial shifts in migration governance: Public-private alliances in Swedish immigration administration

  2021. Linn Axelsson, Nils Pettersson. Environment and Planning C 39 (7), 1529-1546

  Article

  Non-state actors are increasingly involved in enforcing immigration policies. Of late, there has been growing recognition that greater involvement of non-state actors has contributed to reconfiguring migration governance in a spatial sense. Scalar literature conceptualises the involvement of non-state actors as a move by immigration authorities to use actors beyond the state to enforce immigration policies. Network-inspired analysis, on the other hand, draws attention to attempts by non-state actors to form alliances in order to influence immigration policy. In this paper, we set out to show that other spatial shifts are at play in contemporary migration governance. In order to make sense of these spatial shifts, we advance a reading of migration governance which aims to show how efforts to manage migration are the result of, and result in, strategic attempts by state and non-state actors to enrol others, establish a sense of presence and build relationships of proximity and reach. We provide one example of this, involving an administrative alliance between a Swedish government agency and two intermediary actors in labour migration: employers in the information-technology industry and immigration service providers. By drawing attention to spatial shifts in migration governance such as this, new light can be shed on the ways in which the governance of migration recasts relationships between state and non-state actors.

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• Wearing the Ghanaian border: Performing borders through the National Friday Wear programme

  2021. Linn Axelsson. Space & Polity 25 (1), 20-36

  Article

  This paper argues that cultural and political strategies that appeal to citizenship and national identity can be used to regulate flows across borders. In this process, citizen bodies may be enrolled as key agents. Drawing on the National Friday Wear programme – a Ghanaian government initiative intended to encourage white-collar workers to dress their bodies in domestically produced textiles on Fridays to reduce the consumption, and thereby also the inflow, of foreign textiles – the paper illustrates that citizen bodies are both spaces upon which borders are inscribed and geopolitical actors that perform borders on behalf of the nation-state. 

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• Changing labour standards and ‘subordinated inclusion’: Thai migrant workers in the Swedish forest berry industry

  2020. Aina Tollefsen (et al.). International Labour Migration to Europe's Rural Regions, 121-137

  Chapter

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• Border topologies: The time-spaces of labour migrant regulation

  2019. John Allen, Linn Axelsson. Political Geography 72, 116-123

  Article

  Labour migrants seeking work and employment increasingly find themselves having to negotiate an ambiguous migrant status that leaves them neither fully included, nor fully excluded, from a political community. Of late, there has been a recognition that such ambiguity arises as much from temporal as spatial border management practices. Rather than consider time and temporality as integral to the distorted spatiality of contemporary political borders, however, the tendency has been to treat the former as a supplement to the latter. In this paper, we set out to show how time and space work through one another to place migrant workers partly on the ‘inside’, partly on the ‘outside’, by selectively combining their pre-and post-entry experiences. In order to make sense of this series of temporal and spatial entanglements, we advance a particular topological reading that aims to show how complex migrant positions are produced and maintained by bringing the times before and after the border into play as part of what enables governments to include and exclude labour migrants in a more differentiated manner. Such regulated time-spaces, of which we outline two, indefinite exclusion and suspended inclusion, in our view, offer a more accurate account of the ways in which migrant workers are simultaneously included and excluded.

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• Thai berry pickers in Sweden: A migration corridor to a low-wage sector

  2019. Charlotta Hedberg, Linn Axelsson, Manolo Abella.

  Report

  Every year, around 5000 berry pickers travel from Thailand to Sweden to pick wild berries. This report describes the system and regulatory framework that surrounds the berry pickers, and analyses their costs and earnings. The report has a comparative approach, and compares the Thai berry pickers with other types of international labour migration and with their alternative earnings in Thailand. It also describes the workers demographic background and their use of the earnings from berry picking. The report is uniquely based on 165 standardized interviews with Thai berry pickers, which were performed in Thailand on behalf of this study. 

  The main conclusion is that the costs surrounding berry picking are relatively high, as seen against the background of the short berry picking season and the time that the workers are spending in Sweden. On average, a berry picker pays around 4000 USD to work in Sweden for a period of 70 days. This means that, for the average worker, it takes 1,6 months to earn enough money to cover these costs, and thereafter remains only a limited time window to earn enough money to bring back to Thailand. Around 50 percent of the costs incurred are paid to Thai staffing agencies, and the other half is paid to Swedish berry companies as a daily fee for accommodation, food and access to a car. After the deduction of all costs, the average berry picker returns to Thailand with around 2000 USD from one season in Sweden. This figure is roughly three times that of what the average worker would normally earn in Thailand during the same amount of time. The worker with the highest net earnings from berry picking in Sweden, however, could make as much as 12 times more than what he or she would make in Thailand. The report also shows that the berry pickers, who often are men working as farmers in north-eastern Thailand where they also have their families, are travelling to Sweden repeatedly. A majority of the workers in the study had travelled to Sweden seven times or more, whereas the most frequent worker had travelled as much as 26 times. According to the study, there is no positive relationship between the frequency of work in Sweden and the size of the earnings. The earnings from berry picking are being used for daily consumption and investments in farming, housing and children’s’ education. 

  In the report we discuss the motives behind the perpetuation of the migration system despite the relatively high costs. One explanation could be that the workers are being paid on a piece rate, meaning that they are aspiring, and believing that they can achieve, the same high earnings as the most successful workers. However, the payment system also implies that the workers are at high risk, since almost 50 percent note that they have earned less than the guaranteed wage that they are entitled to according to Swedish collective agreements. Another reason why berry pickers travel to Sweden repeatedly could be that it’s associated with relatively low social costs. The berry season in Sweden occurs at a suitable time in the Thai growing season, and the berry pickers are spending a relatively short time away from their families.

  The system surrounding berry picking can be seen both as it’s solution and it’s problem. On the one hand, Thai staffing agencies and Swedish berry companies are providing the infrastructure that sustains the system across time, thus enabling the workers to invest in their children’s futures, etc. On the other hand, the report shows a lack of transparency in relation to the costs, which might be excessive, while the costs and risks are put on the individual worker. The practice of using staffing agencies has been enacted as a way to avoid taxes and social responsibility in Sweden. As an alternative, it is possible that experienced berry pickers could use their own social networks to travel to Sweden, while starting up a cooperative and in that way, reduce the costs.

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• Emerging topologies of transnational employment: ‘Posting’ Thai workers in Sweden’s wild berry industry beyond regulatory reach

  2018. Linn Axelsson, Charlotta Hedberg. Geoforum 89, 1-10

  Article

  This paper suggests a need to pay closer attention to the fact that employment is increasingly stretched across several regulatory regimes. This may help explain why governments, which rely on national legislative frameworks, struggle to protect the interests of transnationally mobile low-skilled workers. By adopting a topological approach to state regulation and authority, the paper demonstrates how powerful actors have reconfigured employment in Sweden’s wild berry industry in a spatial sense by engaging transnational subcontractors. It argues that transnational subcontracting inserts distance into employment relationships, thereby creating precarious migrant workers whose simultaneous absence and presence in several regulatory regimes places them partly beyond the regulatory reach of any one nation-state or nationally based trade union. The paper also argues that the Swedish government’s response to precarious working conditions in the wild berry industry can be understood as a series of attempts aimed at bringing transnational employment relationships within its regulatory reach. Drawing on topological spatial vocabulary, it shows how these attempts are less about the movement of state infrastructure into transnational space than about the stretching and folding of space itself, in an attempt to establish a powerful Swedish presence across distance. On the other hand, the paper concludes that transnational subcontracting opens up a space which enables wild berry actors to circumvent regulations and, as such, it remains very difficult for the Swedish government to reach into employment relationships in this industry.

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• Om väntan: IT-företags och dataspecialisters erfarenheter av svensk migrationspolitik och praktik

  2018. Linn Axelsson. Högutbildade migranter i Sverige, 71-85

  Chapter

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• Living within temporally thick borders: IT professionals’ experiences of Swedish immigration policy and practice

  2017. Linn Axelsson. Journal of ethnic and migration studies 43 (6), 974-990

  Article

  This paper challenges the claim that highly skilled professionals are offered almost seamless mobility and a comprehensive set of rights. Focusing on highly skilled professionals in Sweden’s information technology industry, it argues that just like the lower skilled, the highly skilled may experience a range of insecurities to do with their immigration status. It explores these insecurities by conceptualising border crossing as a temporal process that begins with the submission of a work permit application and ends with permanent status (or migrant departure) and which, consequently, spans several years. More pointedly, the paper demonstrates that some highly skilled migrants experience several moments of waiting in relation to their admission, labour market access and settlement. These moments of waiting have spatial and temporal consequences in terms of temporary losses of mobility rights, elongated pathways to citizenship, insecurity of presence and feelings of living in limbo. Importantly, the paper shows that the practices of government institutions are every bit as important as legal frameworks in producing these moments of waiting and that it is therefore necessary to extend the analysis of migration management beyond policy analysis in order to more fully appreciate the situation of the highly skilled.

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• On waiting, work-time and imagined futures: Theorizing temporal precariousness among Chinese chefs in Sweden’s restaurant industry

  2017. Linn Axelsson, Bo Malmberg, Qian Zhang. Geoforum 78, 169-178

  Article

  This paper explores the precarious working conditions in the Chinese restaurant industry in Sweden – a country considered to have one of Europe’s most liberal labour immigration policies. Drawing upon a theoretical framework inspired by scholarship on precarious work and time geography, the paper argues that precarious work performed by migrant labour can be usefully understood through three interrelated temporal processes that, when they work together, produce and maintain precarious work-life situations. They are: (1) work-time arrangements: that is, actual working hours per day and over the annual cycle, the pace and intensity of work and the flexibility demanded of migrant workers in terms of when work is carried out, (2) the spatio-temporal ‘waiting zones’ indirectly produced by immigration policies that delay full access to labour markets and in which precarious work-time arrangements consequently arise, and (3) migrant workers’ imagined futures, which motivate them to accept precarious work-time arrangements during a transitory period. The paper thus also illuminates that the Chinese chefs in Sweden’s restaurant industry are not just passive victims of exploitative work-time arrangements. Rather, waiting – for a return to China or settlement in Sweden – may be part of migrants’ strategies to achieve certain life course trajectories. 

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• Invandringens effekter på Sveriges ekonomiska utveckling

  2016. Bo Malmberg (et al.).

  Report

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• Chinese restaurant workers in Sweden: policies, patterns and social consequences

  2013. Linn Axelsson (et al.).

  Report

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• Temporalizing the border

  2013. Linn Axelsson. Dialogues in Human Geography 3, 324-326

  Article

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• Making Borders: Engaging the threat of Chinese textiles in Ghana

  2012. Linn Axelsson.

  Thesis (Doc)

  The borders of the twenty-first century come in many forms and are performed by an increasing number of actors in a broad variety of places, both within and beyond the territories of nation-states. This thesis sets out a detailed political geography of how borders operate to reconcile the often conflicting demands of open markets and security. Focusing on Ghana, where there is a widespread fear that the inflow of Chinese versions of African prints will lead to the collapse of the local textile industry, the study explores where and when borders are enforced, who performs them and what kinds of borders are enacted in order to maintain and protect the Ghanaian nation and market without compromising the country’s status as a liberal economy. It combines interviews and documentary sources with analysis drawn from border, security and migration studies to explore three sets of spatial strategies that have defined the Ghanaian approach to the perceived threat of Chinese African prints. They are the institution of a single corridor for African print imports, the anti-counterfeiting raids carried out in Ghana’s marketplaces, and the promotion of garments made from locally produced textiles as office wear through the National Friday Wear and Everyday Wear programmes. These strategies stretch, disperse and embody the borders of the state or nation to control trade in ways that resolve the fears of both open flows and closed borders. This thesis thus seeks to show how a geographical analysis can clarify the specificities of how borders now work to control mobility. In doing so, it not only unsettles conventional assumptions about what borders are and where they are supposed to be located, but also the idea that borders primarily are used to constrain the mobility of certain people while facilitating economic flows. Furthermore, this thesis adds to the understanding of the variety of responses to the inflow of Chinese consumer products to the African continent.

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• Navigating Chinese textile networks: Women traders in Accra and Lomé

  2010. Linn Axelsson, Nina Sylvanus. The rise of China and India in Africa, 132-141

  Chapter

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Show all publications by Linn Axelsson at Stockholm University