This paper presents analysis of the power dynamics and issues related to (in)equalities within academic Swedish academic spaces. It aims to highlight the role of language in equity-related initiatives within higher education (HE). Engaging with concepts such as “normal-diversity”, the political drive for “widening participation” and increasing “internationalization” in contemporary Swedish academia, we trouble the meanings of “international” (in comparison to societal diversity linked to migration) within HE and terms like “race” [Swedish: ras] (and other identity markers such as functional disabilities) in scholarly endeavours and the popular imagination in the nation-state of Sweden.

Employing a post-methodological lens, we critically analyze HE web pages and official documents related to increasing diversity and internationalization-oriented strategies, the promotion of equal opportunities and guidelines related to discrimination, that frame the work of four universities. Aligning with the Second Wave of Southern Perspectives (SWaSP) framework, this study highlights the persistent hegemonic colonial order of things and its normalization in these spaces.

The findings raise important questions about the efficacy of current antidiscrimination policies within these educational spaces, inviting us to reflect whether these types of documents effectively monitor discrimination among students and staff, or if they represent tools that (re)produce inequities. Our work highlights the need for unpacking issues related to whose gaze that is privileged and who is subjected to such a gaze when discrimination is monitored; and, how discourses of equity within HE become framed in relation to how concepts themselves curtail/support issues related to marginalization processes.

The article analyses the new law decree on regularisation introduced in Italy during the Covid-19 crisis, which subsumes human rights protections for sans papiers to the economic imperatives of labour market needs. The new law decree in fact seems to be in line with a more utilitarian logic, oriented towards the preservation of productive sectors at risk. Apparently, those who up until now have been invisible, neglected, and forgotten have suddenly become essential, at least in the numbers necessary to provide for the needs of the labour market. The work presented here examines the Italian context before, during and after the application of the amnesty, which saw the regularization of a limited number of migrants working in the agricultural sector. We intend to argue here that the regularization put into practice by the Italian government must be critically challenged, both in the premises and in the effects produced.

How does one write about a storm when one is swept by the wind and an impending thunder overhead, and lighting?

We’re writing whilst standing on moving tectonic plates; what we conclude today might be rendered obsolete by the discovery of a vaccine, or new outbreak on a so far, little-affected region. However, we can at least hope that writing from within the phenomenon of the Coronavirus pandemic we can construct a unique time capsule in what (we hope) will be a passing, though indelible, phase in history.

These reflections and observations of the present will be perhaps premature in gauging the situation or in making conclusions, but they will nevertheless be a record of a period that will be discussed and reconsidered for decades if not centuries to come. Therefore the texts that follow herein are a mixture of subjective reflections, popular scientific analyses and journalistic reports.

Ultimately, regarding the pandemic’s effects on the economy, migration policy, healthcare, social ties within and between societies, on the family and the quality of our friendships, our capacities for compassion and support, only time will tell.