The Making of Problems and Possibilities Within Educational Integration Projects in Swedish Nature

• In Event: Paradoxes of Inclusion in STEM Education: Making Up Cultural Others Through “Natural” and “Neutral” Spaces

Abstract

What does it mean that knowledge about nature and activities in nature have become closely attached to inclusion to Swedish society? Several projects by state and non-governmental organizations (e.g., NGOs) aim to include domestic “Others” through nature. Being in nature is discursively attached to culturally elevated ideas —e.g., recreation and health, positive emotions and mindfulness, and knowledge of sustainability and the Right of Public Access (Frykman & Löfgren, 1979). Efforts for inclusion through nature are not a new phenomenon. For example, around the turn of the 20th century, summer holiday colonies directed toward urban working-class children intended to foster bourgeois social manners and values through nature (Münger, 2000). This paper explores the epistemological foundations of educational efforts to use outdoor recreation to promote the inclusion of adults and children who have migrated to Sweden. By analyzing public texts from five NGO projects websites, it examines narratives that localize targeted populations and what makes these projects of inclusion possible, highlighting how difference is presented as a problem and nature as a means to transform societal inequalities.

Methodologically inspired by Bacchi’s (2009) approach of asking, “What’s the problem represented to be?” this article traces representations of problems and possibilities in public discourse. That is, I consider each project’s description of the problems it seeks to address, as well as the intended possibilities for reform. Starting from the premise that the project aims intersect with wider narratives of integration and nature, and drawing on a Foucauldian view of power as a productive force with material effects, I consider how notions of ‘Swedish nature’ or ‘immigrants’ do not ontologically pre-exist but are made. This means that the projects constitute nature as an imagined community of Sweden (Anderson, 2006/1983) with certain expectations of which bodies and practices belong there, and also which become out of place (Puwar, 2004).

There has been limited critique of nature-based social integration projects, often represented as joyful activities and as a win-win situation for immigrants and broader society. By analyzing five projects, I find a recurring narrative of differences ascribed to migration that reproduce boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them,’ differentiating certain urban areas, ethnic or religious backgrounds, as well as ‘the Swedish.’ Integration becomes a matter of individual learning about nature in order to gain access to recreation and health, and by those, to society. As such, questions of social integration are made into problems of instilling individualized responsibility rather than political and mutual concerns. Here, nature is treated as a neutral place and subject of knowledge for potential inclusion to the Swedish society. Certain epistemologies of nature become privileged and naturalized. In this way, the integration projects are a double gesture of inclusion and exclusion (Popkewitz, 2008), as they simultaneously invite integration as well as condition some people as problematic and in need of change.

Author

• Camilla Safrankova, Malmö University