Telephone: +46 (0)8 16 21 44
E-mail: mark.graham@socant.su.se
Room: B694

Research

Mark Graham’s research interests traverse the field of gender and sexuality, refugee studies, material culture and consumption, organisational studies and most recently sustainable urban development and planning.

His work on refugee studies examines return migration, the Internet and diasporas, the labour market with a particular focus on ethnic and racial discrimination, and discourses surrounding diversity within public sector organisations. In the project Diversity and Anti-discrimination Policies: A comparative research project on diversity and, anti-discrimination policies in working life he compares how EU policy directives are incorporated into the domestic legislation in Sweden, the UK, and the Netherlands and how diversity is mainstreamed in the work of public-sector authorities. The book manuscript ‘Bureaucratic Muslims: integration and suspicion in the welfare state’ examines the place of Muslims in Swedish society. In particular, it points to the problematic homologies between integration policy and theory, bureaucratic practices, and cultural representations of Muslims that work in tandem to construct Muslims as threatening others. In  Anthropological explorations in queer theory he applies queer theory to a range of anthropological concerns including, materiality, the body and the senses, gifts and commodities, diversity discourses, intersectionality, biologisms and popular ‘mythology’. The book extends queer theory beyond obviously sexual phenomena to include areas that have hitherto been neglected in much queer theoretical writing.

He has conducted fieldwork in Sweden, the UK, the Netherlands and Australia. Mark Graham is Editor in Chief of Ethnos (together with Nils Bubandt Århus University).

Ongoing Projects
Queer Consumption, material culture sexuality and gender in Sydney. This project is based on fieldwork in Sydney in 2001, 2004 and 2006, and 2009. It contributes to broadening the focus of material culture studies through detailed ethnographic attention to the sexual dimensions of things and advances our understanding of how goods, services and consumption practices are assigned sexuality. The theoretical framework draws on commodity chain analysis, actor network theory, and the new ontology in anthropological and feminist materialism. The study is one of very few that is based on ethnographic approach to consumption in which sexuality, rather than gender, is a prime focus. The book also explores representational strategies in writing about materiality, including how to write from the ‘perspective’ of objects. The title of the book manuscript is If Things Could Talk: Sexuality and Material Culture in Sydney.

Diversity and Anti-discrimination Policies: A comparative research project on diversity and, anti-discrimination policies in working life. It compares the way EU policy directives are incorporated into the domestic legislation of Sweden, the UK, and the Netherlands from anthropological and political science perspectives. It examines the differences in national understandings of such key terms as diversity, empowerment, discrimination and civil society and the ways in which the different equality strands are understood, either separately or in combination. In short, it examines how diversity mainstreaming is gradually being made part of the work of public sector authorities in Sweden and the UK, and how best this ought to be theorised. The project contributes to the anthropology of the European Union, and is also of interest for policy makers.

State Authorities: Integrating Integration (2007-) examines the implementation of Integration Policy by state authorities in Sweden. The conditions for the successful mainstreaming of the policy, and diversity policies are investigated through separate studies: qualitative in-depth case studies, the discursive environment in authorities, and the policy context of efficiency and cost-effectiveness. The project contextualises the diversity policies of state authorities within wider discourses surrounding diversity management in Sweden, the UK and USA.

Model City: community and sustainability in Hammarby Sjöstad (2007-) explores through detailed ethnography how definitions of community assumed and prescribed in discourses and policies for sustainable cities adequately describe and are compatible with the forms of community that are actually present and developing in major sustainable urban developments. It examines the social and cultural diversity present in Hammarby Sjöstad, citizen participation, and the receptiveness of local people to the kind of environmental pedagogy employed there. The project contributions include highlighting the relationship between community forms and the impact of discourses of sustainability, providing a detailed account of local understandings of sustainable development and its different dimensions – environmental, economic and social – and how official discourses and information are received interpreted or rejected. The project provides a critical evaluation of the rhetorical and normative way in which the community concept is used within discourses of sustainable development and explores the class, gender and ethnic dimensions of these discourses and their local effects. Other contributions include attention to environmental virtues and affect, the creation of environmental citizens, national self-image and environmental awareness, and the development of anthropological approaches to urban planning.

Selected publications

2014

  • Anthropological explorations in queer theory. Aldershot: Ashgate.

2010

  • Method Matters: Ethnography and Materiality, in Queer Methodologies, Kath Browne & Catherine J. Nash (eds,) Aldershot: Ashgate.
  • Things in the Field: Ethnographic research into objects and sexuality, Lamda Nordica, 3-4 vol. 15, 65-89.

2009

  • LGBT Rights in the European Union, a Queer Affair? in Out in Public: Reinventing Lesbian/Gay Anthropology in a Globalizing World. Ellen Lewin & William Leap (eds.). New York: Wiley-Blackwell.

2008

  • Gender and Environmental Virtues: A Union Made in Sweden, Sustaining Cultures, online proceeding, CSAA, 2007.

2007

  • ‘Abjects compared’, review of Symptoms of Modernity: Jews and Queers in Late-Twentieth Century Vienna, by Matti Bunzl. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007, Current Anthropology vol. 48 (1): 179-180.
  • Homoeroticism, in Routledge International Encyclopaedia of Men and Masculinities, Michael Flood, Judith Gardiner, Bob Pease, Keith Pringle (eds.), London & New York: Routledge.
  • Homosexuality, in Routledge International Encyclopaedia of Men and Masculinities, Michael Flood, Judith Gardiner, Bob Pease, Keith Pringle (eds.), London & New York: Routledge.
  • Gay Masculinities, in Routledge International Encyclopaedia of Men and Masculinities, Michael Flood, Judith Gardiner, Bob Pease, Keith Pringle (eds.), London & New York: Routledge.

2006

  • Queer Smells: Fragrances of Late-Capitalism or Scents of Subversion?’ in The Smell Culture Reader, Jon Drobnick (ed.). Oxford: Berg.

2005

  • The heterosexual tragedy: on myths and heterosexual failure in the mass media (in Swedish) Queer i Sverige, Don Kulick (ed.), Stockholm: Natur och Kultur.
  • Chaos, in Fat: The anthropology of an obsession, Don Kulick and Anne Meneley (eds.) New York: Tarcher/Penguin.