Schooling in the racist badlands: health team professionals’ understanding of the problem of racist opinions and practices among students

ABSTRACT

This study aimed to analyse how school health team professionals in geographical areas with a long tradition of neo-Nazi activism discursively conceptualise the problem of racism. The participants do not consider racism or neo-Nazi mobilisation to be a central problem at their schools. At the same time, they cited several examples of obvious expressions of neo-Nazi convictions among students. This discrepancy is explained in different capacities. Firstly, as the students are understood to have a mill-town mentality, certain behaviours are expected and excused. Secondly, to be seen as a problem, racist expression is also expected to be visual. A third factor is that the problem is individualised, focusing on one incident at a time.

KEYWORDS:

• Racism
• school professionals
• pedagogy
• democracy
• Neo-Nazism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Vetenskapsrådet: [grant no 2020-03111].