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Intersectionality is commonly used as an analytical tool to bring to light how various social divisions merge to produce a cohesive set of subordination practices, but not as often how the concept can be used in the study of agency. Discussing politics of belonging through cases of urban justice movement in Sweden, the article focuses on intersectionality as a perspective interlinking different dimensions of power with agency; thus the aim is to highlight analytically the interconnection of agency with subordinating power dimensions, creating a basis for resistance. This is illustrated with examples on movements for social justice, opposing racism, sexism, and class oppression. The article discusses their collective mobilization and claims for public voice. Using one activists narrative about how the subjectivity denied to citizens can be recaptured, the author demonstrates how reflexive self-awareness becomes connected to politics of belonging, expressing how the personal becomes political. ; Funding Agencies|250-2013-1547, Swedish Research Council Formas; 721-2013-885, Swedish Research Council Formas

Based on her book titled "Multikultiungdom" (Multi Cultural Youth) the author examines processes of integration, ethnic and gender identity formation among young paople of immigrant background in Sweden. Those processes, the author maintains, tend often to be reduced to stereotypical images of cultural differences. Immigrant youth may share similar social conditions characterised by cultural marginalisation and social exclusion. However, their individual careers are based on personal experiences. Using the example of two young girls, two cousins with similar social background, the paper discusses differences in their individual careers. The analysis points to the importance on class, ethnicity and gender, but also to the meaning of personal social networks, family relations and family history.

Women who have immigrated, as well as teh questions of ethnicity and multiculturalism have been invisible in mainstream feminist research in Sweden. In the context of the international feminist debate, however, these issues are gaining high priority. For some time now the importance of pursuing politics of recognition of cultural differences hu been on the agenda. But now the debate is turning towards a critical examination of inherent traps. The article examines the problematic of cultural essentialism - a discursive terrain shared by Feminism and Multiculturalism. Multicultural policies and politics of recognition risk reducing social inequalities to cultural differences and thereby promoting the social exclusion of ethnic minorities. If "recognition" is of an oppositional "other", and if it fails to acknowledge that identities are hybrid and composite, it risks lapsing into cultural essentialism. In order to counter culturalism. feminists need, it is maintained, to develop a conception of social citizenship which links citizenship to issues of social rights as well as the exigenc'es of a transethnic dialogue and politics of solidarity.

Departing from the notion of 'the stranger' in classical sociological literature (Alfred Schutz and Georg Simmel), the paper discusses the significance of two paradigmatic approaches, one of which has discursively branched off into modernity. In a world where the search for roots has become widespread - from the new social movements to the building of new nation-state, from identity politics to national identities - the multiple expression of exclusion has spread. A new kind of European citizen, a 'stranger', is being constructed. I argue that scientific discourses related to the intellectual heritage of Alfred Schutz have helped to create the 'stranger' and the 'non-stranger'. It is further argued that Simmel's approach is an alternative well worth highlighting.

New cosmopolitan local communities, in Stockholms multi‐ethnic suburb's as in other European cities, harbour the preconditions for the transgression of narrow social and cultural borders. Here, in a dynamic interplay and articulation of tradition and modernity, the antagonisms and struggles of the past are connected with the present dilemmas and ordeals of the immigrant experience, producing new amalgamated forms of cultural expression and political alternatives.

This book is about the new possibilities that emerge at the conjunction of the cultural trajectories of the present. Through different journeys in the European, and particularly the Scandinavian and the British present, the authors of this collection of essays discuss the interrelations of culture, race, gender, ethnicity and identity. They elucidate how identies are negotiated and cultures processed. The passages of culture addressed here open for a deeper understanding of the varieties of ethnicity and in particular of those of the borderlands with their potential for intercultural and transnational conversation

This article discusses dilemmas of global civic activism from a neo-Gramscian
perspective as both subordinated and a potential challenge to hegemonic
neoliberal order. With the investigational focus on the People's Global Action
on Migration, Development and Human Rights (PGA) event, the space for
civic activism relating to the intergovernmental Global Forum on Migration
and Development (GFMD) and its associated Civil Society Days and Common
Space is analysed. The article asks how the future of PGA activism may be
influenced by its formalized representation within the GFMD. It posits that
the PGA has landed at a crossroad between becoming a global activist
counterhegemonic movement to a dominant neoliberal migration policy and
being captured in a tokenist subordinated inclusion within a truncated
'invited space' for interchange. This ambiguous position jeopardizes its
impact on global migration governance, discussed with reference to theories
of transversal politics and issues of counterhegemonic alliance-building.

The article explores movements for social transformation in precarious times of austerity, dispossessed commons, and narrow nationalism. The authors contribute to social theory by linking questions by critics of "post-politics" to precarity studies on changing conditions of citizenship, labour and livelihoods. They discuss an ambiguous constitution of precariat movements in the borderlands between "civil" and "uncivil" society and "invited" and "invented" spaces for civic agency, and posit that contending movements of today are drawing intellectual energy from past movements for democracy, recognition and the common. The paper discusses the issue of an urban justice movement in Sweden emerging from the precariat in this formerly exceptionalist welfare state's most disadvantaged urban areas. With its vision of reconstructing commons with roots in the working class movement, it has put forward claims for an egalitarian and non-racial democracy while confronting politically grounded frames of institutional conditionality.

This article discusses dilemmas of global civic activism from a neo-Gramscian perspective as both subordinated and a potential challenge to hegemonic neoliberal order. With the investigational focus on the People's Global Action on Migration, Development and Human Rights (PGA) event, the space for civic activism relating to the intergovernmental Global Forum on Migration and Development (GFMD) and its associated Civil Society Days and Common Space is analysed. The article asks how the future of PGA activism may be influenced by its formalized representation within the GFMD. It posits that the PGA has landed at a crossroad between becoming a global activist counterhegemonic movement to a dominant neoliberal migration policy and being captured in a tokenist subordinated inclusion within a truncated 'invited space' for interchange. This ambiguous position jeopardizes its impact on global migration governance, discussed with reference to theories of transversal politics and issues of counterhegemonic alliance-building.