Thinking with Bevereley Skeggs - Stockholms universitet

A Feminist SustainableDevelopment: In Between Politicsof Emotion, Intersectionality andFeminist AlliancesJuan VelasquezFor more than 10 years I have been studying urban initiativesconducted in Swedish multicultural suburbs to cope withstigmatization, discrimination, segregation and racism. Duringthese years I have followed how urban policies in Sweden lacksuccess pertaining to the integration between different social andethnic groups. This is not only a Swedish, but also a Europeandilemma.Parallel to these evolutions in our cities I have followed howdiscriminatory practices are contested by underrepresentedgroups making claims and becoming mobilised in ways that,in fact, strengthen the democratic system (see Ålund & Reichel2005). But there is also a risk that the understanding of powerand that the capacity to build social alliances would not beenough for a sustainable democratic development. A politics ofemotion needs to be incorporated to prevent us from reproducingoppression. The workshops held at our centre with BeverleySkeggs during the spring of 2007 helped me to grasp this aspect.Since then I have begun to focus my work on research fields thathave substantially enriched my work.In this article I give some examples to illustrate this point fromtwo research projects. One is about the participation of womenin both the local planning and local democracy in a Swedishmulticultural suburb; the other is the study of politics of emotionamong members of the Chilean diaspora in Spain. These bothspheres of research are at the core of my perception of the role95