Countering Right Wing Extremism in Education: Schooling in the Racist Badland

This book investigates how schools deal with racism and extremism, focusing on everyday life, students, and the surrounding community and geographical area.

There is a lack of clarity on how racism and extremism should be managed in schools. Through extensive ethnographical data, interviews, and focus group interviews with students and school staff in mill towns and racist strongholds in Sweden, this book focuses on how racism and right-wing extremism are enacted, played out, and dealt with. It draws on theories of everyday and institutional racism as well as institutional ethnography. Formal and informal school strategies and pedagogical interventions intended to manage recurring problems in schools are discussed. The text offers a deeper insight into how racism and right-wing/neo-Nazism extremism are enacted and confronted in a rural Swedish school context and beyond.

This book will be of interest to students of Terrorism Studies, Sociology, Cultural Studies, and Security Studies.

Christer Mattsson is an associate professor at the Segerstedt Institute at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden.

Thomas Johansson is Professor of Pedagogy at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. His recent publications include Youth Studies in Transition. Culture, Generation and New Learning Processes (2019); Marginalized Masculinities. Contexts, Continuities and Change (2017); and Fatherhood in Transition. Masculinity, Identity and Everyday Life (2017).

Jesper Andreasson is a professor in Sport Science at Linnaeus University, Sweden. His recent publications include Fatherhood in Transition. Masculinity, Identity and Everyday Life (2017), co-authored with Thomas Johansson.