Jennie Brandén

I work as an Associate professor at the department of Social Work and have a PhD in political science. My research primarily focuses on the governing of social problems such as safety, gender equality and gendered violence, from feminist, (post)colonial and Indigenous perspectives. I am also affiliated to the research group Lávvuo - focusing on research and education for Sámi health, as a guest teacher at Umeå Centre for Gender Studies and the Arctic Centre at Umeå University.

During the last two years I have been the main researcher in a research project focusing on violence against Sámi women in Sweden which is connected to the research group Lávvuo and commissioned by the Sámi parliament in Sweden. Within the project, funded by the Sámi Parliament in Sweden, we examine Sámi women's exposure to various forms of violence based on the Sámi Health on Equal Terms survey (Sámi-HLV) carried out in 2021. Through qualitative interviews, we also examine the conditions for meeting and preventing violence against Sámi women within the societal support system in Sweden.

I am also working in the Formas funded research project "Together for Safety: The role of civil society in creating safe public spaces", anchored at Umeå Center for Gender Studies and funded by Formas (2024-2027). By studying civil-society based initiatives to increase safety through media analysis, interviews and participant observations, the project aims to investigate how safety is addressed and given meaning in public space within and through civil society engagement.

In my dissertation "In the Name of Safety: power, politics and the constitutive effects of local governing practices in Sweden", I examined how (un)safety in public space is addressed and given meaning as a political problem in Swedish municipalities' local safety work. In the thesis, three different strategies for increasing safety in public space were studied; community safety walks; an international certification for safe city centres; and the use of patrolling security guards. The study shows how the municipalities' safety work rests on a perception of safety as something taken for granted, which obscures the fact that what is done in the name of safety also contributes to exclude of certain groups and perspectives on safety i public space. The study also shows how the responsibility for safety in practice is increasingly shifting towards private actors and security companies, as well as towards those living in unsafe areas and the often racialized and already marginalized groups and individuals that are defined as unsafety problems .