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The aim of this article is to analyse how Swedish mothers, regularly outsourcing cleaning, make use of different discursive resources and negotiate conflicting norms about domestic work when they discuss the role of cleaning in the socialisation of their children. Domestic work is often seen as boring yet character-building, socialising independence, self-esteem, responsibility and work ethic. However, time pressures have led more Swedish families to outsource domestic work, supported by tax deductions for services such as cleaning. Yet, we know little about what this outsourcing means for everyday family life. The study is based on interviews with 12 working mothers, with children aged from 9 months to 15 years, from different parts of Sweden who regularly outsource cleaning. Data was analysed with the critical discursive psychology framework. The analysis shows that mothers value both sons and daughters learning to care for the home, but children's actual participation seemed limited, often restricted to decluttering before the cleaners arrive. Outsourcing cleaning was mainly seen as a strategy to reduce stress, prevent conflicts and maximise family/quality time. Mothers expressed a dilemma between wanting their children to learn domestic skills and outsourcing cleaning to preserve family/quality time. Some stressed the importance of teaching their children to respect the cleaners and their work, while also problematising how cleaning was performed by lower-class, racialised workers. Overall, the study suggests that outsourcing is part of a renegotiation of the socialisation processes in the family, where domestic work is downplayed, while norms of career commitment, paid work, and family/quality time are reinforced, shaping children's orientations towards future citizenship.

Outsourcing domestic work is an established global phenomenon increasingly common in Sweden, especially since introducing the RUT reform offering tax deductions for domestic services. Little is known about Swedish families using domestic services. This article investigates the narratives of 12 Swedish women living in families using domestic services and what this means for their everyday family life. The results show that outsourcing in part is regarded as a solution to a gender equality problem as it relieves women from unpaid household work. However, the women’s narratives also reveal that even when domestic work is outsourced, the women continue to have the main responsibility for everyday family life. The article thus contributes insights into how gender equality in everyday family practices is negotiated when domestic work is outsourced.

This article contributes to the discussion on intercultural doctoral supervision through a reflexive analysis of one supervisor’s practices during a joint Laotian/Swedish capacity-building project in 2005–2011. My practices were guided by postcolonial/feminist aspirations to shift power relations and to disrupt knowledge-production practices to allow what Singh (2011, p. 358) calls “pedagogies of intellectual equality”. These ideals, however, were challenged by the formal structure of the PhD programme and my socialisation into a Swedish/Western rationality about what a ‘good’ doctorate is. Using the conceptsof time, place, and knowledge (Manathunga, 2014), I reflect here upon my own practices and actions during supervision of four doctoral students from Lao People’s Democratic Republic. This supervision took place in what Pratt (2017/1990) calls the ‘contact zone’, the space where intercultural meetings take place. Manathunga (2014) argues that time, place, and knowledge are crucial to understanding intercultural supervision. I analyse the opportunities and challenges I met as a supervisor, and critically reflect upon how postcolonial theory and concepts of time, place,and knowledge can contribute to discussion on disrupting hegemonic patterns of knowledge production in doctoral training. The analysis shows how supervision in the contact zone may support assimilation at the expense of transculturation, the blending of knowledge from different contexts to create new knowledge (Manathunga, 2014, p. 4). The analysis also points to a third path, accommodation, towards the needs and strategies of doctoral students and supervisors affecting and changing training in unexpected ways.

Den här artikeln är ett bidrag till diskussionen om interkulturell forskarhandledning. I artikeln presenteras en forskarhandledares reflexiva analys av hur forskarhandledning tog sig uttryck i ett biståndsstött forskarutbildningsprojekt i samarbete mellan Laos och Sverige 2005-2011. I min handledningspraktik strävade jag efter att, med inspiration från postkoloniala och feministiska teoribildningar, utmana maktrelationer och strukturer för kunskapsproduktion för att skapa utrymme för det Singh (2011, p. 358) kallar ’pedagogiska strategier för intellektuell jämlikhet’. Trots dessa ambitioner blev det tydligt att forskarutbildningens formella struktur och min egen förståelse för vad en framgångsrik doktorand är, var djupt rotade i en svensk/västerländsk logik som utmanade mina postkoloniala och feministiska ambitioner. Jag reflekterar därför i denna artikel, med hjälp av Manathungas begrepp (2014) tid,plats och kunskap, över min egen roll som handledare för fyra doktorander från Laos. Handledningen ägde rum i det Pratt (2017/1990) benämner ’kontaktzonen”, det vill säga den plats där interkulturella möten äger rum. Manathunga (2014) hävdar att det är avgörande att förstå hur tid, plats och kunskap är formade av de koloniala strukturer som i vår samtid fortsätter att prägla relationer mellan det globala nord och det globala syd. Jag kommer analysera de utmaningar och möjligheter jag mötte i min handledningspraktik för att kritiskt granska hur postkolonial teoribildning och begreppen tid, plats och kunskap kan bidra med en bredare diskussion om hur hegemoniska mönster för kunskapsproduktion inom forskarutbildning kan utmanas. Analysen visar att handledning i kontaktzonen riskerar att stötta assimilation, det vill säga att doktorander ensidigt anpassar sig till systemet, på bekostnad av transkulturation,den process genom vilken kunskap från olika kontexter vävs samman för att skapa ny kunskap. Analysen visar också på en tredje strategi, ackommodation, där doktoranders behov och deras och handledares strategier för att möta dessa har potential att förändra forskarutbildningspraktiker.

This article explores possibilities and constraints for the inclusion of femaleand ethnic minority students in Lao education in order to provide educationfor all. Females and ethnic minorities have traditionally been disadvantagedin Lao education and reforms for the inclusion of these groups are therefore welcome. The article provides rich information about how teachers and students in four teacher training institutions in Lao PDR experience inclusionary reform. The results show that inclusion strategies benefit both female and ethnic minority students, but in different ways. Female students from the majority ethnic group generally benefitted from the allowance for individual learning, since this provided space for them to act outside of gendered expectations. Ethnic minority students, however, benefitted more from the opportunity to work in smaller group settings, since they could receive support from other students, especially in language, which often proved to be a constraint for students with a different first language from the language of instruction. Although there are positive developments regarding the inclusion of females and ethnic minorities, there is still need to further develop and strengthen these efforts in order to support the continued inclusion of disadvantaged groups in Lao society.

In this article, we explore the narratives of 10 doctoral alumni from Lao People's Democratic Republic (PDR) who underwent graduate training in Sweden. The narratives identify challenges encountered by the alumni but more importantly reveal the agency by which these challenges were overcome. The most important strategy was that of collaborative learning, actively enlisting the help of other doctoral students and supervisors, thus challenging the prevalent discourse about doctoral studies as an individual endeavour. Inspired by post-colonial perspectives, the article reveals juxtapositions between Lao colonial experiences and Swedish ignorance of their ramifications. The article argues that programmes in Sweden should work more actively towards a collaborative and inclusive learning process. This strategy becomes especially important when doctoral endeavours involve participants from both the global south and the global north, and it could be an important step in challenging the hegemonic position of the global north in processes of knowledge production.

Action research offers promising ways of changing educational practice, policy and philosophy at its core. Despite this, action research is too often used as a technical rationality used for evaluating small scale classroom practices. In this article, we discuss a new model for thinking about and doing action research which we argue addresses the full potential of action research for educational change. The model is developed based on experiences from teacher education in the Lao PDR with inspiration from teacher education reform in post-apartheid Namibia. We propose to use action research as the starting point from which to combine cross-cultural dialogue with a critical pedagogy of place as a means to productively tie together global educational discussions and debates with local knowledge and needs. By doing this we find aways to challenge current global and local power relations and promote teachers to be critical inquirers in charge of producing knowledge for local, national and global purposes.

The main purpose of this study is to explore constructions of family and parenthood in Swedish contemporary parent support initiatives. We focus on government policy; municipal support initiatives; media representations of parenthood; parents’ narratives, and online activities. A discourse analytical perspective will guide the study. We draw on notions of how discourses form actions and boundaries in government’s parent support initiatives and in narratives of parents. The governmentality concept will be used to analyse processes of governance at state and individual levels (Foucault 1991). For policy analysis a “What’s the problem represented to be” approach (2009) will be used addressing how problems are constructed in policy, and how representations of problems bring about effects. Since issues of parenthood are saturated by ideas of e.g. gender, sexual orientation and dis-/ability, the study will be informed by theories of social categorizations (Butler 1990/1999; Connell 2009; Young 1997) and how these categories intersect (Crenshaw 1994; Yuval-Davies 2006). Research states Swedish parent support mainly addresses women/mothers (Bremberg,  004). There also seems to be a bias where “parents” are mainly represented by ethnic Swedish, well educated, urban, heterosexual nuclear families (Sarkadi 2009). Since parent education primarily has been studied from a medical perspective, there certainly is a need for educational researchers to study these programs and those involved, from a pedagogical and psychological perspective.

This article reflects on gender mainstreaming policies post Beijing and their impact on development cooperation and relations between the Global North and Global South. The analysis is based on an examination of gender equality politics in Sweden, their connection with an interpretation of gender mainstreaming and the application of this approach in work on education change and development cooperation in the Lao People's Democratic Republic. Interviews with Lao government officials at ministry and university levels are used to exemplify how gender mainstreaming can present both possibilities and problems in a local context. The article argues that gender mainstreaming as a political strategy requires a strong focus on contextual circumstances in order to become a vehicle for social transformation.