Paula MählckSenior lecturer
About me
Ass prof, Sociology of migration and ethnicity, Paula Mählck completed her PhD dissertation on Gender in Higher education at the Department of Sociology, Umeå University, Sweden in 2003 “Mapping Gender in academic workplaces: Ways of reproducing gender inequality within the discourse of equality”. Since then she has expanded her research to also studying multidimensional patterns of exclusion/ discrimination focusing particularly on the mutual constitution of gendered and racialised structures of inequality in higher education and in research policy.
She has been a guest researcher at the African Gender Institute (AGI), University of Cape Town and a visiting PhD student at the Bob Hawke research institute, University of South Australia. She is affiliated to Remeso Institute, Linköping University and a research associate at the international associate of the Robert Owen Centre for Educational Change, Glasgow University. She is currently working as a researcher and lecturer at the Department of Education, Stockholm University in Sweden. Her teaching has mainly been within the fields of Sociology, Sociology of science and critical race studies in Education, Critical education and postcolonial and decolonial learning.
She has been involved in several international and comparative research projects on globalisation of work relations in academia and in other workplaces, transnational academic mobility and inequality in academic recruitment from the perspective of gender and race. Lately she has expanded her research to feminist labour studies and domestic worker labour migration from Kenya to the Gulf States. She has been the PI for several research council funded projects such as “Research Policy and Research practice in the global knowledge economy” (VR/UVK2011-2012), Work at any cost? An ethnographic interrogation into domestic worker Migration Industry from Kenya to the Gulf states (FORMAS 2021-00984)
Research projects
Publications
A selection from Stockholm University publication database
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Academic women with migrant background in the global knowledge economy
2013. Paula Mahlck. Women's Studies 36, 65-74
ArticleRead more about Academic women with migrant background in the global knowledge economyAcross the globe, academic work is changing in order to meet the demands of the global knowledge economy. This process of change is characterised by the dominant discourses of competition, accountability and excellence, which produce an imaginary of a seemingly disembodied researcher. Departing from a Swedish higher education and research policy landscape, the aim of this article is to explore how, in comparison with their Swedish colleagues, women academics with a migrant background make representations of the good researcher in their work practices. This involves exploring how processes of racialisation - including processes of whiteness are at work when different layers of migration are read through a white Swedish normality. The results indicate that whiteness is an attributed quality and contributes to constructing success, and that racialised researchers stand out as being particularly invisible representations within a Research Excellence framework. In this article I suggest that this visibility/invisibility paradox (Mirza 2009) can be interpreted not only as a reflection of the number of racialised researchers in Swedish higher education, but also as a general discourse of colour-blindness and Swedish white privilege.
Show all publications by Paula Mählck at Stockholm University