Gendered class mobility and paradoxes of solidarity in transnational folk high school courses on global development

Abstract

Nordic popular education (folkbildning) has a history of emancipatory endeavours. At the same time it has also been involved in, and reproducing, different structures of power. By studying participants on a Folk High School course on global development, where intersectional power orders are critically challenged while also permeating and enabling the course, this article addresses this paradox. Interviews are analysed with tools from critical and cultural sociological theory. The purpose of the study is to deepen the understanding of the conditions and significance of critical popular education. The stories depict how the courses become alternatives to more male-dominated elite courses at the Folk High School; how class is mirrored as the course becomes a tool for either upward class mobility or (middle) class reproduction; and how a moral subjectivity is created through a relation to, and distancing from, discourses of tourism and traditional aid.