Suchergebnisse

[Title in English:Crowd-pulling names or energetic activists? – On symbolic capital as a power resource in the local organizational work within the global justice movement] The article explores the global emergence of local Social Forums by means of an ethnographic study of the organization of the Stockholm Social Forum. In international academic debate, the forums are often discussed as a "globalization from below" and a new deliberative democratic process. However, empirical research on the organizational process, and its power relations, has been very limited. The theoretical concept symbolic capital (Bourdieu) and concepts from conversation analysis (CA) are used to analyze how power in terms of priority of interpretation is constructed in conversations between activists with differing political backgrounds. A detailed empirical analysis is based on the case of an internal discussion about inviting keynote speakers to the local forum. The results show how transnational networks and specific knowledge about the global social forum process became symbolic capital in the organizational process. Holders of this specific form of symbolic capital gained priority of interpretation in the internal discussions. This had an impact on the practical outcome of the organizational process in terms of the symbolic framing of the Social Forum. It is argued that the social forum process produces specific forms of cultural distinctions, social hierarchies and patterns of exclusion.

Although elected representatives play an imperative role for the functioning of a formal democracy, educational research has so far not given much attention to the education and training offered to this group of people. A democratic dilemma may arise in the design and organisation of this education that relate to local governance and policy processes. This paper investigates introductory education that Swedish municipalities offer to municipal councillors and explore the reasons behind its design. The study draws on a comprehensive set of empirical material, consisting of educational programmes from 261 Swedish municipalities and interviews with municipal representatives. The results suggest three different lines of reasoning, denoted system-oriented, relationship-oriented, and market-oriented lines, behind the design of this education. The importance of these results can be considered in relation to previous findings that a strained relation exist between elected representatives and local administrations in Sweden. ; Funding agencies: Vetenskapsrådet [grant number 2016-05330].

Political parties are essential for the functioning of parliamentary democracy, yet parties have not received much attention in contemporary research on popular education. The aim of this article is to analyse the contemporary role of party-political education as a form of popular education in two labour movement parties in Sweden. The study is based on semi-structured interviews focusing on the reasoning behind the organisation of education in political parties. The interviews were conducted with ten interviewees who represented ABF (the Swedish workers' educational association), the Left Party, and the Social Democratic Party. The thematic analysis resulted in four categories of roles ascribed to education in political parties: ideological training, training skilled members and leaders, training for a social infrastructure, and training for internal positioning and distinction. The first two categories correspond to knowledge-oriented roles, while the two last represent relationship-oriented roles. Findings show that party-political popular education still plays a significant role in contemporary Sweden. The shrinking member base of political parties creates challenges when new members and prospective representatives cannot be expected to have as extensive popular movement experience as previous representatives. In this situation, study activities are, to some extent, attributed more significance than previously. ; Partiskolningnens didaktik

The aim of this study is to explore the contemporary role of the folk highschool as an educational pathway for Swedish MPs. Statistics from the folkhigh school register at Statistics Sweden are analysed. In summary, thereare still quite a large number of former folk high school participants inthe Swedish parliament (27%, 2014). The MPs' folk high schoolparticipation mainly took the form of short courses. Over time, the folkhigh schools have increasingly come to be used by members of partieson the left of the political spectrum. The folk high schools arecommonly used as meeting places during the MPs' political career, andthus not only as an educational pathway to power, as emphasised inearlier research. ; Utbildningsvägar till makten

Over the years, there have been several attempts to spread the "Swedish model" of popular education, i.e. study circles and folk high schools, to countries in other parts of the world. In this article, we analyze the large-scale project of establishing Folk Development Colleges (FDCs) in Tanzania in the 1970s and 1980s, by emphasizing the ways in which Swedish popular educators have described the FDC project. Theoretically, the article is based on a postcolonial framework, highlighting the continuing importance of the legacies of colonialism in today's society. One of the main conclusions in the article is that in the process of "exporting" the idea of popular education to other parts of the world, there is an on-going formation of national selfimages in contrast to images of the Other, where there is a constant risk of reproducing ideas from a colonial past. ; Accepted March 29, 2010Original Publication:Magnus Dahlstedt and Henrik Nordvall, Paradoxes of Solidarity: Democracy and Colonial Legacies in Swedish Popular Education, 2011, Adult Education Quarterly, (61), 3, 244-261.http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0741713610380445Copyright: Aaace -- American Assoc for Continuing Educationhttp://www.uk.sagepub.com/