Gabriella Elgenius
About Gabriella Elgenius
About Gabriella Elgenius
Gabriella Elgenius is Professor of Sociology at the University of Gothenburg, Director of the Centre on Global Migration (CGM), and Co-Director of the Swedish Research Council’s Graduate School on Migration and Integration. She also serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Comparative Migration Studies and is member of the Steering Committee for the Centre for the Study of Nationalism at the University of Copenhagen. Before joining the University of Gothenburg, she held positions at the University of London and the University of Oxford and was awarded a Marie Curie Fellowship at the London School of Economics and Political Science and a British Academy Fellowship at the Department of Sociology and Nuffield College, Oxford.
Her research is situated within political sociology and is comparative, interdisciplinary, and multi-method in orientation. Her work focuses on civil society, migration, diversity, inequality, and integration, as well as nationalism, nostalgia, and the radical right. She has conducted extensive research on ethnic nationalism, political symbolism, racialised logics, diaspora, Brexit, and the changing political landscape in Europe She has also published widely on nation-building, national identity, and political rituals and symbols. Her work has appeared in journals including British Journal of Sociology, Ethnic and Racial Studies, European Societies, Sociological Forum, Social Semiotics, Voluntas, Voluntary Sector Review, and Frontiers in Political Science. Books include Symbols of Nations and Nationalism: Celebrating Nationhood (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011/2018); National Museums and Nation-building in Europe 1750–2010: Mobilization and Legitimacy, Continuity and Change (with Peter Aronsson, Routledge, 2015); and Expressions of Nationhood: National Symbols & Ceremonies in Europe (LSE Press, 2005).
Gabriella is project lead for Localities, a project civil society and employment in areas facing socioeconomic challenges in Sweden and the UK (FORTE); Rethinking integration i(VR); and Empowering cities of migration on socio-spatial integration and local participation in Sweden, Germany, and the UK (JPI HORIZON/FORMAS). She is also co-applicant on the VR-funded project on the Populist Radical Right? led by Jens Rydgren at Stockholm University, and The Challenges of Polarization on the Swedish Labour Market (FORTE), led by Tomas Berglund at the University of Gothenburg.
Gabriella teaches and supervises on topics related migration and integration, civil society, nationalism, radical right movements, and ethnic and gender stratification in organisations. She teaches advanced qualitative research methods and theory, theoretical analyses and coding at PhD levels.
She is Visiting Scholar at the UCL, Associate Member at the Department of Sociology at the University of Oxford, Fellow of the RSA (Royal Society of Arts) in London.
Ongoing Research Projects:
Rethinking Integration: a comparative mixed methods study of civil society action in superdiverse neighbourhoods in Sweden (funded by Swedish Research Council, VR): This project builds on a multi-dimensional approach to integration and inclusion and aim for a detailed picture of civil society’s role in aiding integration, to develop theory around integration and social capital while contributing to long-standing debates about civil society, integration and diversity. The project fills a gap in current scholarship by approaching civil society responses to integration across multiple domains in Sweden’s so called ‘vulnerable areas’, linking these to the local context of vulnerability, to superdiversity, to formal and informal variants of civil society and variants of social capital:
The role of civil society in supporting employability in diverse areas in Sweden and the United Kingdom (funded by FORTE):
This project explores the role of civil society in supporting employability and access to the labour market in diverse neighbourhoods in Sweden and the UK. The local context is especially relevant since civil society is increasingly recognised in supporting residents accessing local labour markets. More specifically, our aim is to investigate under what conditions and by which mechanisms civil society initiatives supports employability in diverse neighbourhoods in Sweden and the UK. We compare these two countries, both diverse and with different welfare systems that impact the environments within which civil society operates. Both Sweden and the UK are also experiencing a transition towards welfare pluralism in recent years.The little work undertaken on civil society and its role in supporting access to employment, has mainly focused on registered formal organisations (CSOs). Yet, formal organisations constitute only one part of a larger civil society. Thus, our comparative focus includes both formal organisations and informal initiatives in Sweden and the UK, research that will help to capture how different types of CSO support labour market participation and how their modes of operation are shaped by national regulatory frameworks and local contexts. https://localitiesproject.home.blog/
EMPOWER: Empowering Cities of Migration: new methods for citizen involvement and socio-spatial integration (Joint Programme Initiative on Urban Migration, funded by FORMAS, the ESRC, and the German Research Council): This is a collaboration between universities, research institutes, local authorities, urban and housing planners and civil society organisations in Sweden (Gothenburg), England (Birmingham) and Germany (Bochum). The aim is to establish an International Community of Practice and a Theory of Change to more effectively engage and empower citizens in cities and neighbourhoods experiencing population change, socio-spatial segregation and housing challenges. We build on previous research and networks, a mixed methods design, to co-design new gender-aware approaches for housing and integration in urban areas. A key part is to upskill, train and work together with Community Researchers (in Swedish Medborgarforskare): https://www.gu.se/en/research/empowering-cities-of-migration-new-methods-for-citizen-involvement-and-socio-spatial-integration-empower
Why Do Working Class Voters Support the Populist Radical Right?" (funded by the Swedish Research Council, VR) led by Jens Rydgren, SU. The project "Why Do Working Class Voters Support the Populist Radical Right? A Mixed-Methods Study of a Changing Political Landscape in Sweden" explores the relationship between class politics and support for the populist radical right. The projects' overall aim of answering questions about why and how the Sweden Democrats has gained electoral support among the working class in Sweden. We address the theoretical puzzle of realignment processes in which working class voters has increasingly started to move from center-left to the populist radical right. This is an important societal change that has significant consequences for governance and policy making. Since populist radical right parties tend to side with center-right parties in parliament, working class voters’ increased support for the populist radical right have contributed to shifting policies toward the right. https://www.su.se/english/research/research-projects/why-do-working-class-voters-support-the-populist-radical-right
Migration and Polarization: patterns, mechanisms and experiences or workpackage 3, lead by Gabriella Elgenius, of Fortes research programme on Challenges of Polarization on the Swedish Labour Market lead by Tomas Berglund, addresses the integration of migrants and minorities into the Swedish labour market by assessing distribution across the occupational structure. https://www.gu.se/en/research/the-challenges-of-polarization-on-swedish-labour-market
Diaspora, Civil Society and BREXIT: Polish civil society and migration in the UK. This project investigates processes of social solidarity and division within diaspora civil societies that keep them together but also divides them, taking the Polish civil society abroad as the case in point. The aim is to contribute towards explanations as to how and why diaspora civil societies develop the way they do. Previous projects include Gabriella Elgenius PI, funded by the British Academy, John Fell and Kerstin Jacobson, PI, funded by Swedish Research Council. https://www.ucl.ac.uk/institute-of-advanced-studies/dr-gabriella-elgenius