The aim of this study was to investigate the experiences of inclusion and exclusion in academia, with a primary focus on ethnicization/racialization within a local University in Sweden. The discussion about structural discrimination in the Swedish labour market has been going on in the public discourse for several decades. The main focus has been on the inequality between women and men in working life (see, for example, SOU 1993:7; SOU, 1998:6; SOU, 2014:81, but discrimination against non-Swedes and/or non-whites has also been noted, albeit to a somewhat lesser degree (see e.g. Mählck, 2013; Osman, 2021; de los Reyes, 2008; SOU 2005:56; SOU 2006:59). The question of how gender interacts with other categorisations, such as ethnicity and/or ‘race’ have been shown even less interest. Nor has discrimination in higher education attracted much attention, and Swedish as well as European academia is relatively little researched from critical perspectives on power, inclusion, and exclusion. However, the fact that academia, like other educational institutions, always includes aspects of power is nothing new (Ahmed, 2012; Bethoui & Leivestad, 2019; Hübinette & Mählck, 2016). To investigate these issues, the following four questions were in focus: 

1) To what extent do employees perceive themselves included or excluded in relation to ethnicity/’race, class, gender/gender identity, religion, age, sexuality and disability.  

2) What experiences and understandings of inclusion and exclusion processes do employees express?

3) In what contexts do employees perceive that inclusion/exclusion occurs? 

4) How is ethnification/racialization perceived to interact with other social categorizations in relation to inclusion/exclusion? 

Although ethnicity/’race’ has been the focus of the study, we also asked how these categorizations were perceived to interact with gender, age, class, religion and to some extent sexuality and disability. The employees we interviewed have also spontaneously highlighted the importance of how gender, age and class are perceived to affect such things as collegial treatment and career conditions.

As research has pointed out, these are complex processes of demarcation and exclusion that rarely allow themselves to be understood with the help of a social category belonging alone (see, for example, de los Reyes, 2007). Although there are experiences of exclusion that are perceived to have a clear basis in the person's ethnic origin or skin color, such orders cannot be said to be stable and unambiguous (cf. Lundström, 2017).Since norms and notions of ethnicity/'race' are mutually constituted by other power relations, and since social positioning is always context-dependent, we saw it as an analytical necessity to apply an intersectional perspective on the processes of ethnicization and racialization that we investigated. (cf. Mählck, 2012 p. 31). The concept of intersectionality can be traced to the work by black feminist researchers concerned with how oppressive power is embedded in societal structures and systems The intersectional theory concerns primarily how the exercise of power, through intersecting domination and oppression, affects individuals who face multiple social inequities, with consequent multiple marginalisations (Collins, 2019). This criticl social theory gave a lens to analyse understand inclusion and exclusion within a local university context. 

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