Maja Sager

PhD, Associate senior lecturer

My research interests are citizenship, nation, globalisation, migration and asylum rights from an intersectional feminist perspective. I understand the issue of migration and migrants’ rights as a key point where issues of global inequalities, neoliberalism and militarism meet issues of nationalism/nativism, racism and sexism in the local and national contexts. I am especially interested in the ways in which restrictive European migration policies produce spaces of irregularity and deportability – and how those spaces are experienced and contested by migrants and activist networks. I also focus on the gendered experiences of the processes of exclusion and resistance. Empirically my focus lies in the area of migration rights as articulated in advocacy and activist movements/networks, as well as the experiences of migrants active in those networks and their experiences of national and European migration politics of control and categorisation. Epistemologically I explore the forms of knowledge produced through the practices and experiences of these movements and mobilisations for social change. My research interests also include antiracist feminism, nationalism, post-colonial theory, critical welfare studies and feminist methodological issues.

My thesis Everyday Clandestinity: Experiences on the Margins of Citizenship and Migration Policies (2011) is based upon an ethnographic study with irregular migrants and migration rights activists and discusses how national belonging, citizenship and social organising are practiced and represented in the Swedish welfare state. The thesis shows how irregular migrants’ experiences are marked by exclusion from social rights, from resident permit/citizenship and from recognition as political subjects. I analyse the interplay of these factors with the threat of deportation which shape subject positions in the labour market, in civil society, in family life and parenthood.

Most recently, I have been working together with Marta Kolankiewicz on the project The court as an emerging arena for struggles against and about racism (2017-2022) that is funded by the Swedish Research Council within their special call for research on racism. The project intends to explore courts as an emerging arena on which political and social contestations over racism take place in Sweden. This is done through an in-depth analysis of several cases in which political struggles against and about racism have moved into courts. The purpose of the project is to understand what kind of space courts provide for protection from and debate about racism, and how different forms of activism involving anti-racism, but also racism, are mobilised.

The project Contested Boundaries. An ethnographic study of activist practices for the inclusion of excluded migrants in Sweden, Denmark and the UKwas funded by FORTE Marie Curie International Postdoc Programme, COFAS, and was conducted at the Sociology Department, Lancaster University, UK (2012-2014) and at the Centre for Gender Studies, Lund University, Sweden (2014-2015). The study aims to further explore how irregularity and exclusion from social and political rights are challenged and partly shaped by migrants and other actors in civil society through protests and campaigning but also through everyday community building and the creative construction of alternative forms of belonging and routes to social welfare services. Through an ethnographic fieldwork that explores practices of solidarity, support and political organising by and for irregular migrants in Manchester, UK, Malmö, Sweden and Copenhagen, Denmark the study aims to contextualise these practices in the national as well as the local contexts in terms of approaches to integration and processes of inclusion/exclusion. How are social and political rights, belonging and community directly or indirectly conceptualised through these practices? How can we understand the similarities and the specificities of these practices in the three research sites in relation to the local, national and EU contexts of policies and attitudes surrounding migration, citizenship rights, integration and (racialised) notions of family and gender?

Teaching Interests
My teaching experience includes post-colonial feminist theory, migration and globalisation studies; welfare studies; citizenship theory; feminist methodology and epistemological debates; as well as general introductions to feminist theory and gender studies. I also supervise undergraduate dissertations.