PoReSo - Power, Resistance and Social Change
The research group Power, Resistance and Social Change is a platform for research on the interstices of Political Ecology, Political Science, Geography, Development Studies, and Peace Studies. Our work is focused on exploring how hegemonies and forms of resistance are continuously worked out in actual practice.
About us
The research group Power, Resistance and Social Change is a platform for research on the interstices of Political Ecology, Political Science, Geography, Development Studies, and Peace Studies. We are interested in power and resistance, but we realize that these tend not to occur in pure form – they get embroiled with each other. Resistance might challenge, change, or even produce power.
Our work is therefore focused on exploring how hegemonies and forms of resistance are continuously worked out in actual practice – on the process of struggle and contestation, that is. And as such, our research seeks to scrutinize the political work vested in interpreting a particular phenomenon as power or resistance. After all, social change does not only involve a reconfiguration of power (and new forms of opposition to it), but also a change in the way this is understood.
Our work covers a broad suite of topics, ranging from feminist opposition to gendered violence; to territorial struggles and place-making in an extractive frontier (like northern Sweden); to the contested change towards a less car-dependent society (including in Gothenburg); to contested political order during an after war; to historiographical struggles over interpretations and memorialization of a violent past; to critical interventions towards agrofood systems; and to indigenous mobilization against neoliberal extractivism.
The research group is a site of learning and creatively and collectively interpreting pressing societal challenges, resistance as an engine of change, and power as both a biopolitical as well as a disciplinary, discursive and sovereign phenomenon. The members pursue many forms of concerted work and the research group provides a collaborative platform for converging, theoretical and empirical, research interests within the field.
Research projects
- Quo Vadis Europa? Polarized civil society and plural futures
Swedish Research Council
2023-2026
Stellan Vinthagen, Mikael Baaz, Mona Lilja, Michael Schulz - Legal identity under insurgencies and unrecognised states
Swedish Research Council
2021-2024
Bart Klem - VOTEF: Voting for the future
European Union Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme
2020-2022
Nicolás Acosta García - Just Fossil-free Fuels
Formas
2020-2023
Marie Widengård (main applicant), Gunnhildur Magnusdottir - Negotiating the Middle Ground: Indigenous Cosmopolitical Brokerage in Latin America
Swedish Research Council
2020-2023
Anders Burman (main applicant), Dan Rosengren, och Stefan Permanto - Education for sustainable development in an unequal world: Populations, skills and lifestyles
Swedish Research Council
2019-2022
Beniamin Knutsson (main applicant), Sofie Hellberg, Jonas Lindberg och Linus Bylund - Genocide, Gendercide, and Resistance
Swedish Research Council
2019-2022
Mikael Baaz (main applicant), Mona Lilja and Filip Strandberg Hassellind - Reduction of car use in Gothenburg: a prerequisite for combating climate change, but how?
Energimyndigheten
2019-2021
Sofie Hellberg (main applicant) Beniamin Knutsson - Resistance and its impact on the Processes of Democracy
Swedish Research Council
2018-2021
Mikael Baaz, Mona Lilja (main applicant), Michael Schulz och Stellan Vinthagen - Social sustainability and water infrastructure and the making of the South African post-apartheid state
Formas
2016-2020
Sofie Hellberg - Reconciliatory heritage – Reconstructing Heritage in a Time of Violent Fragmentations
Swedish Research Council
2017–2020
Michael Landzelius (main applicant), Mikael Baaz, Evren Uzer von Busch, Klas Grinell, Feras Hammami, Mona Lilja and Ola Sigurdson. - The Futures of Genders and Sexualities. Cultural Products, Transnational Spaces and Emerging Communities
Swedish Research Council
2015–2020
Lena Martinsson (main applicant), Anna Johansson, Linda Berg, Pia Laskar, Diana Mulinari, Cathrin Wasshede, Erika Alm, Mikela Lundahl and Mona Lilja
