Sweden Inside-Out: Suffering, Everyday Peace and Violence in Deliberation

Abstract: This thesis critically examines the role of suffering in violence, by applying a postmodern perspective to empirical examples gathered during fieldwork in Malmö in 2011.by Combing Bourdieu’s perspectives on practice with Turner’s concepts of space and liminality, Malmö takes on a new light. Through the criminalization of rejected asylum seekers, Malmö — otherwise a location of everyday peace — becomes an inside-out space defined by suffering where the clandestine asylum seekers are physically located within Swedish society, yet legally, culturally and socially located outside. Within this space bought into existence through the creation of clandestine asylum seekers new social relationships are formed — new ways of ‘being in the world’. In this thesis the clandestine asylum seekers are facilitating the altruistic and philanthropic practices of volunteers, whilst simultaneously becoming a utility for personal gain through exploitation. By examining these newly created social relations this thesis explores the experiences of suffering from an emic perspective, which provides an alternative and holistic approach to understanding the relationalities of experiences of suffering, personhood and the social field. These relationalites of suffering are exhibited through postulates of identity, performances, ways of doing and being, subjectivities and difference, as tools for viewing the social encounters taking place in a specific field.