What happens when we think of the Nordic welfare state not only as a protector of rights and social welfare, but also as a site of dispossession? In this episode of Challenging Nordic Innocence, we talk with Sarah Philipson Isaac about her PhD dissertation Temporal dispossession: the politics of asylum and the remaking of racial capitalism in and beyond the borders of the Swedish welfare state from 2024. Sarah unpacks how Sweden’s migration bureaucracy weaponizes time—accelerating, freezing, and fragmenting asylum seekers’ lives—and in doing so exposes the racialized logics underpinning the welfare state. From the shift to temporary residence permits to the production of hyper-exploitable labor, this conversation explores the temporal violence of the asylum system in Sweden and asks what futures are foreclosed when rights become conditional?
Sarah Philipson Isaac holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Gothenburg. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Stockholm School of Economics, working on a project that investigates labour exploitation in the Swedish construction industry, with a particular focus on how an increasingly restrictive migration regime shapes work conditions.
Links to some of Sarah’s publications:
Philipson Isaac, S. (2025). The Expanding Carceral Geography of Sweden and Counter-politics of Care. South Atlantic Quarterly, 124(1), 214–221. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-11557881
Philipson Isaac, S. (2025). Unpacking State Production of Temporal Dispossession: The Intersections of Labour, Asylum and Informalization in Sweden. Critical Sociology, 51(1), 87–103. https://doi.org/10.1177/08969205241242098
Philipson Isaac, S. (2022). Temporal dispossession through migration bureaucracy: On waiting within the asylum process in Sweden. European Journal of Social Work, 25(6), 945–956. https://doi.org/10.1080/13691457.2022.2077317
Philipson Isaac, S. (2024). Temporal dispossession: The politics of asylum and the remaking of racial capitalism in and beyond the borders of the Swedish welfare state. University of Gothenburg. https://gupea.ub.gu.se/handle/2077/80383
Links to literature mentioned in the interview:
Anderson, B. (2019). New directions in migration studies: Towards methodological de-nationalism. Comparative Migration Studies, 7(1). https://doi.org/10.1186/ s40878-019-0140-8
Ansems de Vries, L., & Welander, M. (2016). Refugees, displacement, and the European ‘politics of exhaustion’. openDemocracy. https://www.opendemocracy.net/mediterranean-journeys-in-hope/leonie-ansems-de-vries-marta-welander/refugees-displacement-and-europ
Cabot, H., & Ramsay, G. (2021). Deexceptionalizing Displacement: An Introduction. Humanity, 12(3), 14.
Castles, S. (2004). Why migration policies fail. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 27(2), 205227. https://doi.org/10.1080/0141987042000177306
Danewid, I. (2023). Resisting Racial Capitalism: An Antipolitical Theory of Refusal. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009127707
Fanon, F. (1966). The wretched of the earth. Grove Press.
Fanon, F. (1967). Black skin, white masks. Grove Press.
Gilmore, R. W. (2022). Abolition geography: essays towards liberation. Verso.
Khosravi, S. (2019). What do we see if we look at the border from the other side? Social Anthropology, 27(3), 409–424. https://doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12685
Lindberg, A. (2020). Minimum rights policies targeting people seeking protection in Denmark and Sweden. In D. Abdelhady, N. Gren, & M. Joormann (Eds.), Refugees and the violence of welfare bureaucracies in Northern Europe. Manchester University Press. https://doi.org/10.7765/9781526146847.00012
Paris, W. M. (2025). Race, Time, and Utopia: Critical Theory and the Process of Emancipation (1st ed). Oxford University Press, Incorporated.
Ramsay, G. (2020). Time and the other in crisis: How anthropology makes its displaced object. Anthropological Theory, 20(4), 385–413. https://doi. org/10.1177/1463499619840464
Sager, M., & Öberg, K. (2017). Articulations of deportability: Changing migration policies in Sweden 2015/2016. Refugee Review, 3(1), 2–14.