Konstruktionen av en "invandrare" - I mötet mellan tillskrivandet och behovet av en kollektiv identitet
ImmigrantCategorization'Discourse analysis''Social constructivism'IntersectionalitySocial sciencesSamhällsvetenskaperPolitical and administrative sciencesStatsvetenskapFörvaltningskunskapLaw and Political ScienceSocial Sciences
The way society categorize different people into groups is problematic in the sense that the categorization can seem stigmatizing and have social consequences for those being categorized. Immigrants are one of those problematic categories.The following essay studies this categorization of ?immigrants? based on a governmental investigation of structural discrimination that took place in 2002-2008. The aim is to study the use of the category ?immigrant? and the consequences that follows such a categorization. This is done by a case-study in which the view on how the category ?immigrant? is constructed and reproduced in the magazine Invandrarkvinnan. The purpose is to examine how the people classified to this collective identity relate to the category. A theoretical framework characterized by social constructivism and intersectionality combined with a discourse analysis has been used in order to analyze the construction of ?immigrants? in Invandrarkvinnan.My results show that there is a distance in the understanding of the categorization between the research community and the ones labeled as ?immigrants?. The research community focuses on the consequences of categorization and the ascription of a collective identity, while the need to belong to a collective identity is visible in the construction of ?immigrants? in Invandrarkvinnan.