State-Education between Racialisation and the Possibilities of Anti-Racist Strategy

In the presence of accumulated migratory histories, the racialization of minoritized populations, the rise of populism and the radical right, educational institutions are understood to be those settings through which these processes are both being (re)produced and potentially challenged. Since the 1960s’, with the increasing moral panic over immigrant integration in the Nordic welfare-states, educational institutions have become focal points for political attention and intervention for migrant integration. It is through schooling and education that national discourses and policies for minority integration/assimilation are introduced, implemented and recontextualised. It is also through schools and educational programs that racialized subject positions are being established, such as “foreign”, “bilingual”, “troublemaker” or “Muslim” students, among others.

In this panel, we approach educational institutions as part of the formation of nation-states’ through which racialized subjectivities, identities and visions of belonging and nation are being produced. We invite presentations that discuss, for example, the following questions: What intersecting markers of differences are produced in educational institutions both historically and now? How does elementary schooling shape the lives of people with migratory histories when they arrived to the Nordic countries as children? How do social work interventions contribute to the racialization of new migrants? What are the challenges for education to practice critical racially literate pedagogies? How can education challenge reoccurring processes of racialization in Nordic countries?