The work presented aims to analyse the dynamics of power and inequality within the Swedish academic space, and to do so considers the growing diversity of the Swedish academic composition, in the light of increasing internationalisation and a more recent commodification of higher education (HE). Through a critical discourse analysis of official documents published by the five largest Swedish universities, concerning internationalisation-oriented strategies, documents promoting equal opportunities and guidelines governing discrimination, I reflect on the spaces reserved for concepts such as diversity, interculturality and equal opportunities. To do so, I align myself with a decolonial approach, which questions places of epistemic enunciation, revealing inherent power dynamics represented by coloniality. I intend to argue that a decolonial perspective provides me with the lenses through which to analyse the power structures that still foster a colonial attitude in Swedish academia. The increasing internationalisation of Swedish universities and the way in which this internationalisation it is presented are, in my opinion, in tension with current policies that encourage and monitor equal opportunities. While on the one hand there is a tendency to build an increasingly international, global, and diverse university, on the other hand there is a lack of attention to diversity itself, to inequalities, equal opportunities, and potential discriminations. This tension helps to produce and reproduce power dynamics within the academic context, where the potentially global university does not invest enough resources in recognising and critically naming the differences that, even when unnamed, exist between all those who occupy the physical academic space. This tendency, I intend to argue here, is to be understood in the light of Swedish twofold tendency: on the one hand, a type of hegemonic feminism based on whiteness, heteronormativity and marginalisation of the other is produced and reproduced; on the other hand, such feminism, which proposes itself as the bearer of universal equal opportunities, contributes to the exclusion of other pluriversal subjectivities, excluded because they are racialised and do not belong to the nation-state in the strict sense - to which such feminism is in its nature closely linked.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:liu-177336 |
| Date | January 2021 |
| Creators | Della Rosa, Asia |
| Publisher | Linköpings universitet, REMESO - Institutet för forskning om Migration, Etnicitet och Samhälle, Linköpings universitet, Institutionen för kultur och samhälle |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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