Converging Trajectories: Reflections on Race, Blackness, and Liberatory Struggles in Sweden

This seminar series brings together artists, scholars, researchers and organizers from South Africa, Mexico, U.S., Iran, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, Botswana, Peru and Sweden, to share the interdisciplinary, aesthetic and transcultural nature of Black Study. 

Nana Osei-Kofi and Lena Sawyer

Join us for a thoughtful conversation as two senior Black feminist scholars discuss the nuances of academic research on Blackness in Sweden. Drawing on their individual academic journeys, alongside insights from both collaborative and individual scholarship, they will explore topics such as collaborative research practices, the challenges of studying race in the Nordic context, and emerging trends in Swedish race studies. This session boldly centers on the idea that the personal is political, promising a thought-provoking dialogue grounded in a deep commitment to criticality and self-reflexivity.

Nana Osei-Kofi is Professor Emerita of Women, Gender, & Sexuality at Oregon State University. A critical feminist scholar, her research employs two lines of inquiry centered on justice and the politics of difference. One line of inquiry focuses on the experiences and conditions faced by people of African descent in Europe generally, and Sweden specifically, which is the subject of her new book, AfroSwedish Places of Belonging (Northwestern University Press, 2024). Her second line of inquiry centers structural shifts in higher education in the service of equity and access through curriculum transformation, change leadership, and faculty development. Osei-Kofi’s latest book in this area (co-edited with Bradley Boovy and Kali Furman) is Transformative Approaches to Social Justice Education: Equity and Access in the College Classroom (Routledge, 2021).

Lena Sawyer is an associate professor of social work and received her Ph.D in cultural anthropology (2000) from University of California Santa Cruz in 2000 and since then has lived and worked in Sweden, working as a teacher and researcher in social work educational programs. Her work is interdisciplinary and often collaborative and has focused primarily on understanding (and challenging) the reproduction of inequality through engaging Black feminist, critical race and post-and decolonial perspectives and methodologies. She is interested in the politics of knowledge production and has been interested in understanding social work institutions (such as education and pedagogy) from these perspectives.
Since 2023 – she is a part of The Colombia University Center for the Study of Social Difference Working Group on Afro-Nordic Feminisms led by Monica Miller and Nana Osei-Kofi.
Another (also overlapping) project is exploring creative and revolutionary pedagogies, methodologies, and collective knowledge-making practices working together with the Afro/BlackNordic feminist collective named Kollektiv Omsorg. We are collaborating on various exploratory writing and performance projects which address the topics of Afro/Black Nordic feminisms and counter archiving as practices of care.

Seminar Resources:

AfroSwedish Places of Belonging 

New co-authored book chapters 

Counter Archiving as a Decolonial Pedagogy of Collective Care, in Decolonising Social Work in Finland: Racialisation and Practices of Care. Bristol University Press, March 2024. 
 
Antirasistisk pedagogik: Motarkivering som social omsorg, in Antirasismer och antirasister: Realistiska utopier, spänningar, och vardagserfarenheter, Kriterium, April 2024. 

Columbia: Social difference